curated AGENDA

Join Dominic and John for a look at modern communication and messaging channels - including RCS - and how to ensure that brands can balance their customers’ stated preferences and needs with your own revenue and engagement goals. We'll review some of the ways 7-Eleven makes ongoing communication a pleasurable and engagement-enhancing experience for its many customers, and explore what channels like RCS now mean for the future of retail ordering, loyalty and servicing.

This session explores how retailers can guide customers through meaningful brand journeys by tapping into emotional loyalty. Ann Taylor/Loft and Kobie will present high‑level learnings from consumer research, highlighting how emotional motivations shape customer behavior in ways traditional data cannot capture. As privacy expectations shift and cookies deprecate, emotional loyalty signals offer retailers a durable, future‑resilient way to personalize experiences across fragmented channels. Attendees will learn how emotional data transforms the “what” of customer actions into the more powerful “why,” enabling empathetic and adaptive personalization in real time. The session will show how emotional loyalty metrics complement behavioral data to reveal customer sentiment, intention, and unmet needs. Speakers will also share real‑world examples demonstrating how emotionally defined segments behave differently and how brands can act on this insight immediately. Finally, the session will outline practical ways retailers can scale emotionally driven experiences, ensuring relevance even as customer contexts and expectations continue to evolve.

Most loyalty programs behave like bad relationships: a warm welcome, a birthday message once a year, and long stretches of silence in between. At Home realized it had fallen into that same pattern — operating a CRM program disguised as loyalty and expecting customers to feel connected. To rebuild trust, the team took the unusual step of deeply listening to customers, not about taglines or what they like about us, but about their real experiences, needs, and frustrations. What followed was a foundational reset of how At Home thinks about loyalty, recognition, and communication. This session reveals how At Home rebuilt its loyalty vision by treating customers like real people, not data points — creating a relationship based on intention, recognition, and continuous dialogue. Beyond overhauling the value proposition and modernizing data through new partnerships, At Home also reimagined its community management approach, establishing active two-way conversations on social and digital channels to keep the conversation going long after its pilot. Through humor, candor, and real insights, attendees will learn how At Home turned customer conversations into fuel for program evolution, emotional loyalty, and ongoing engagement. Participants will walk away with frameworks, lessons learned, and a challenge: if your brand only “checks in” with customers on their birthday, it’s time for a reset — and we are happy to bring the matches.

Building a guest engagement strategy that works across the entire customer lifecycle -- from the first touchpoint through win-back -- requires more than great technology. It requires the right partners, the right architecture, and hard-won experience navigating the real-world complexity of enterprise retail. In this session, you'll hear from two brands at very different stages of that journey. Chipotle has spent years refining a sophisticated engagement ecosystem, using strategic technology partnerships to drive personalization, loyalty, and measurable revenue at massive scale. Nothing Bundt Cakes is earlier in that evolution -- bringing a clear vision and the ambition to build something exceptional from the ground up. Together, Jason Scoggins and Jenn McMillen offer a rare dual perspective: what it looks like when the strategy is fully mature, and what it looks like when the most important decisions are still being made. Whether you're just getting started or looking to take your program to the next level, this conversation will give you a candid, practical look at what it actually takes to win.

With Subscription Loyalty programs on the rise, alongside the desire for exclusivity among shoppers in general, now may be the time for your brand to explore or update an existing program. Join Andrew, a passionate proponent of this growing area in loyalty, to learn more about Cinemark’s Movie Club, launched in 2017. Following a timeline of successes as well as lessons learned along the way, this session will share takeaways that you can apply to your own company. You will learn the key benefits (and trade-offs) of a subscription loyalty program; how to evaluate whether this type of program is a good fit for your organization; and if so, best practices for designing and launching. For those already exploring or with an existing subscription loyalty program, Andrew will share how Cinemark drives continued success through consistent improvements that address their customer base as well as attracting new customers.

For too long, CRM has been treated solely as a performance channel. Disney chose to treat it as a brand experience. In this session, Emma and James reveal how Disney has reimagined CRM – a channel often dominated by functional, performance-led thinking – into a powerful engine of fandom, engagement and long-term value. By fusing first-party data, deep customer insight and marketing technology with Disney’s storytelling heritage, the team transformed email into distinctive, entertaining and deeply engaging customer experiences – from immersive Marvel and Star Wars moments to unexpected interactions that reward curiosity on open. The result: measurable increases in retention, conversion and long-term customer value, proving experience-led CRM can outperform promotion-led approaches. Attendees will learn how creativity and interactivity can become a core strategic ingredient in building differentiated, high-performing CRM programmes that drive sustained commercial impact. Join this session to discover what happens when data science meets imagination – and why the future of CRM belongs to brands that choose wonder over noise.

Fullspan Health has long helped consumers find answers to their health questions across Healthline Media and Healthgrades. But as customer expectations evolve across the consumer management industry , the opportunity for all marketers is no longer just to inform. It is to engage each person with the right next step in their journey. With hundreds of thousands of users visiting Fullspan Health properties daily and more than 10 million known users in its portfolio, Fullspan Health saw a clear need to move beyond a one-size-fits-all lifecycle strategy. This is a challenge many marketers face today. To meet this need, Fullspan Health reimagined how they turn information into action. By using AI to uncover user intent, segment audiences across thousands of content experiences, and rapidly activate personalized email journeys based on on-site behavior, the team is delivering more timely and relevant experiences at scale. These same principles can be applied by marketing teams across industries to better connect data, personalize engagement, and drive action.

Earning customer loyalty is hard work. Earning it across four brands, each built for a different customer at a different chapter of life, is an entirely different challenge. When Encore launched in February 2026, something notable happened. A program built to unify over forty million members across Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta did not just arrive to the market. Encore signaled the beginning of a movement.

It was one of those rare moments when an apparel brand transcended retail and entered the cultural conversation at scale. Whether one is lucky and experienced enough to create unique cultural moments of their own, or one is agile and aware enough to ride the broader cultural conversation waves that ebb and flow with a fickle consumer, it pays to be prepared philosophically, operationally, and technologically.

Express access at Coachella. Members-only experiences with Disney, NBCUniversal, and AMC Theatres. A rotating Encore Market delivering cultural access and member value that no transactional rewards alone could rival. This is Fashiontainment at work - and it does not happen without a strong partnership across teams leveraging a unified platform built to operate at enterprise scale and run at culture speed.

In this session, Kevin Meiners, Head of Loyalty and Payments at Gap Inc., and Emil Sarkissian, CEO of Loyalty Methods, walk through what it actually took to build Encore; the multi-brand logic, the integrations, and the engine that powers Encore's unique value proposition and drives customer-centric innovation into an exciting future. They will share what it took to migrate over forty million members with zero downtime while building toward something unique in the loyalty space.

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Milestone events create rare cultural moments—but their true business value is unlocked when emotion is translated into action. The centennial celebration of the Grand Ole Opry, Opry 100, was leveraged as a strategic growth engine to expand and deepen a customer database through intentional engagement and conversion design. The Opry 100 strategy reframed a point in time milestone into a year-long plus journey. High profile engagement moments were used to accelerate first-party data acquisition and strengthen customer relationships. Customer journeys were optimized to move audiences from engagement to conversion, delivering measurable lifts in downstream revenue. The approach demonstrates how milestone-driven storytelling, paired with performance measurement and customer-centric design, can turn iconic cultural moments into scalable, long-term growth opportunities.

In a category where the average customer has a natural reason to lapse — their child outgrows your size range, their baby phase ends — retention isn't passive. You have to earn the next purchase deliberately. This is a data story about what drives second and third purchases, and how CRM and loyalty are being deployed together to close the gap.

Customer loyalty is not an accident—it’s the result of harnessing customer data to deliver personalized, seamless experiences across every touchpoint. In this case study, Hibbett will showcase how brands can leverage customer analytics to strengthen loyalty, improve retention, and drive long-term growth. The session will highlight how creating a single customer view and integrating engagement data across omnichannel touchpoints allows brands to better understand and anticipate customer needs. Using Hibbetts’ customer-first approach as a real-world example, we’ll explore how data-driven insights can inform strategy, deliver measurable ROI, and ultimately “drive customers to new horizons.” Key takeaways include How to use customer data to personalize experiences across acquisition, loyalty, and retention. Real case studies showing how Hibbett leverages insights to boost repeat purchases and engagement; A framework for connecting KPIs like CLV and redemption engagement to actionable strategies that enhance the customer journey; and practical methods for evaluating and forecasting campaign success to align loyalty goals with broader brand performance.

Join this session to learn from Ruth Crowley how brand purpose and a framework built around customer focus, digital strategies, and Brand Strategy are integral to the success of any brand and required to retain and acquire customers while keeping a brand relevant in the changing landscape of retail.  Ruth will share examples from companies like Harley- Davidson, Nickelodeon, Universal Studios, M&M Mars and Hudson Group, the largest travel retail Company in the world.

The market is saturated with loyalty programs, but instead of creating more loyal customers, it’s made them harder to impress. Today’s leaders aren’t winning on benefits alone. They’re winning by delivering their brand core values more consistently, with smarter communication, more intentional engagement, and experiences that feel connected, not collected. This session makes the case for ‘Innovation by Inches,’ an 80/20 approach where focus on foundational value does the heavy lifting, and continuous operational evolution does the differentiating. The brands that pull ahead won’t be the ones who reinvent everything. They’ll be the ones who make the basics feel unmistakably better than everyone else.

For Live Nation VIP, the challenge was maintaining a premium experience during the long gap between a ticket purchase and the night of the show. Traditional CRM methods were often too static and transactional to capture the high-energy pulse of live music. To foster deep emotional loyalty with a new generation of fans, Live Nation had to solve a complex puzzle. They needed to deliver high-touch, personalized communication at a global scale while keeping the experience human and exciting. This session provides a transparent look at Live Nation’s strategic pivot toward guiding fans through a tailored, data-driven narrative. We will explore the internal hurdles of bridging the gap between massive data sets and creative execution. Leaders from Live Nation and Blings will share how they implemented real-time rendering to transform static touchpoints into interactive journeys. Attendees will leave with relatable takeaways on how this shift to dynamic content redefined their retention strategy and drove significant wins in fan sentiment by meeting fans exactly where they are in the moment. Join this session to get a transparent look at how Live Nation addressed the challenges of implementing real-time rendering at scale, and how the strategic wins were achieved.

Lowe’s is on a journey to transform how it connects with customers by putting their needs, behaviors, and aspirations at the center of every interaction. Guided by our mission to solve problems and fulfill dreams for the home, we have built an audience-first, data-driven marketing approach that enables more meaningful and relevant customer journeys at scale. In this session, we will share how Lowe’s translates high-level customer segments into actionable go-to-market audiences and uses unified customer data to power personalized experiences across owned and paid channels. By leveraging our CDP and integrated MarTech ecosystem, we are able to move from siloed, manual activation to real-time, signal-based engagement that adapts to each customer’s unique needs. We will walk through how we connect lifecycle, loyalty, and behavioral data to proactively guide customers through their home improvement journey, from inspiration to project completion and beyond. This approach not only drives acquisition and share of wallet, but also builds deeper emotional loyalty by showing up in moments that matter. Attendees will gain a practical framework for turning customer signals into omni-channel journeys that both solve real customer problems and unlock new growth opportunities. We will also share key learnings, challenges, and how we are continuing to evolve our capabilities to meet the future of customer engagement.

Michaels has evolved its loyalty strategy from transactional rewards to deeper customer engagement. In 2019, it launched an email capture program, followed by a loyalty program in 2020, offering spend-and-earn rewards to drive repeat purchases.

To improve transparency, Michaels introduced a 3% and 6% rewards structure in 2022, making incentives clearer and increasing repeat purchases. Now, the focus shifts to fostering emotional loyalty to further influence customers consideration towards Micheals.

Using a test-and-learn approach, Michaels is evaluating new benefits to enhance long-term engagement. This session will explore the programs evolution, key insights, and strategies for building deeper customer loyalty.

Most marketing teams focus on conversion. MyHeritage asked a different question: what if every user could be shown exactly what they needed to do next on the platform... in their language, at their stage, with no friction between the email and the action? In this session, Asaf and Moshe share how MyHeritage built a personalized video engagement program that treats every user as a segment of one, calculated daily, delivered weekly, and executed entirely by the marketing team without R&D involvement. A key was working with Optimove’s unified platform and services offering removes the friction of fragmented agencies and multi-vendor stacks.

LaVella will show the audience how Patagonia designs lifecycle programs that prioritize customer experience through examples like Worn Wear trade‑in flows, post‑purchase education, and customer surprise‑and‑delight moments. She will also share strategies for building frameworks that map customer journeys and adapt to evolving customer needs.

Retailers are under pressure to grow e-commerce revenue without relying on margin-eroding promotions. For Staples, that challenge was amplified by a broad, cross-category business and a high volume of anonymous traffic spanning both business and consumer purchase needs. In this session, Staples reveals how they moved past mass discounting—using an Offer Agent powered by AI and real-time behavioral signals to decide exactly when and how to engage each shopper. The focus: convert new visitors and re-engage lapsed shoppers, including anonymous sessions, by delivering the right incentive at the right moment while maintaining a disciplined approach to margin. Starting with a targeted test, the team proved incremental impact and scaled a repeatable model that improved conversion, lifted AOV, and reduced reliance on broad promotions. Attendees will learn how to: (1) Identify where real-time, in-session engagement drives incremental value, (2) Convert anonymous traffic more profitably without relying on one-size-fits-all promotions, (3) Balance customer experience with margin protection and (4) Scale from initial test to broader adoption.

Fuel and convenience loyalty faces a loyalty paradox, where extremely high visit frequency does not translate into meaningful brand preference or engagement. Petro-Canada is addressing this through digital product evolution focused on reducing friction and enabling real-time value across fuel and convenience missions.

This session highlights how Petro-Canada simplified loyalty interactions, modernized digital capabilities, and increased customer activity and value through intuitive, real-time engagement. Attendees will learn actionable approaches to improving loyalty experiences by removing friction rather than relying solely on traditional incentive mechanics.

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Wireless loyalty was broken - a simple insight that fuel disruption. T-Mobile’s meteoric rise to industry leader wasn’t fueled by points, but by a commitment to putting customers first through the Un-Carrier strategy. Central to this success is a total redefinition of the brand-customer relationship: shifting from 'brand loyalty' to 'customer appreciation' and now 'membership.' In this session, John and Doug reveal the insights behind T-Mobile Tuesdays and the brand’s evolution into a lifestyle powerhouse. Learn how to maintain a disruptor’s edge, leverage strategic partnerships to drive value, and create a culture of appreciation that turns customers into lifelong members.

For Torrid, a plus size fashion retailer, marketing needs to be as unique and original as their customers. That’s why optimizing their loyalty program, they turn to customer data. Their data-driven approach emboldens a tailored loyalty strategy that keeps customers engaged—and attracts new ones—in meaningful, personalized ways.

In this session, hear Nate and Shmaba as they discuss how loyalty data is critical to understanding customers more deeply and driving strategies designed to fit real people.