The company’s 2026 Smart Loyalty Guide finds traditional loyalty programs are failing as brands shift toward advocacy-driven growth
AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Brevo today releases its 2026 Smart Loyalty Guide, written in collaboration with Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec, examining why traditional, discount-led loyalty programs are struggling to deliver meaningful retention or return on investment, while customer advocacy is becoming a primary driver of trust and growth.
As conventional loyalty programs hit a wall, rising acquisition costs, declining trust in brand advertising and saturated paid channels are exposing the limits of points-and-discount models. Brevo’s guide argues that loyalty must evolve from a purely transactional program into a participation engine, one that rewards reviews, referrals, user-generated content, and community engagement alongside purchases.
The guide also underscores the growing premium on authentic, human connection alongside AI and automation. As AI automates more and more of the customer experience, from chat bots to personalized recommendations, smart loyalty leans in and uses AI to build authentic relationships that make competitors irrelevant. The report goes one step further, detailing a realistic progression for maturity and readying brands for architecture that supports loyalty in the age of AI.
“In traditional loyalty programs, customers buy, earn points, and wait for a coupon. Margins shrink, and very little true loyalty is created. Meanwhile, the most powerful drivers of growth today — UGC, social proof, and word-of-mouth — are happening outside of those programs,” said Channing Ferrer, Americas CEO at Brevo. “Smart loyalty flips that model, and loyalty becomes a participation engine, not just a points ledger. Most brands already have their most powerful marketing asset: their customers. The problem is they just don’t see or reward those contributions, nor do they connect them to their CRM.“
Key Findings and Supporting Statistics:
1. Traditional loyalty programs are underperforming and widely disliked
- Brevo’s research showed that 90% of consumers have a negative perception of loyalty programs
- 54% of loyalty memberships become inactive (Capgemini)
- 28% of consumers abandon loyalty programs without redeeming a single reward (Capgemini)
2. Trust has shifted from brands to people
- Reviews, UGC, and referrals are leading indicators of LTV (Long Term Value) and revenue
- 65% of young Americans rely on UGC (User Generated Content) when making purchase decisions (Bazaarvoice)
- 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know more than any other form of advertising (Nielsen)
- 66% of consumers say they trust opinions posted online (Nielsen)
- Social media platforms are where consumers interact with family and friends, who serve as their most trusted resources (McKinsey & Company)
3. User-generated content and reviews directly drive and dramatically lift conversion
- Loyalty is no longer “earn when you buy,” it’s “earn status when you participate”
- Shoppers who interact with UGC convert at 102.4% higher rates than average (PowerReviews)
- Interacting with ratings and reviews drives a 108.6% lift in conversion (PowerReviews)
- Nearly half of consumers say reviews on retailer sites are the most influential content when researching products (Bazaarvoice)
4. Advocacy outperforms paid acquisition
- Free advocacy from existing customers is under leveraged
- Referred customers spend 25% more and are 27% more likely to stay (Prefinery)
- Referral programs convert 3–5× higher than other marketing channels (SEO Sandwich)
- UGC-based ads achieve 4× higher click-through rates and a 50% lower cost per click compared to average ads (Amra and Elma LLC)
5. The infrastructure gap is blocking “smart loyalty”
- Loyalty, reviews, UGC, referrals, email, and automation typically live in separate tools
- Fragmentation prevents brands from:
- Seeing advocacy behaviors in one customer profile
- Rewarding advocacy in real time
- Triggering automated journeys based on contribution, not just spend
- Embracing AI’s role in loyalty with architecture that enables real value
“Simply rewarding transactions does two things: It treats customers like piggybanks, and it shortens customer lifecycles,” Ferrer adds. “Loyalty can either be a cost center (discounts) or a growth engine (advocacy), and smart loyalty chooses growth. Our guide shows that the most influential touch points in your customer journey are created by customers, not your marketing team.“
In tandem, the guide introduces a smart loyalty scorecard and framework that defines business value and performance vitality metrics; outlining how advocacy best becomes measurable when integrated across CRM, messaging, and automation tools. In this way, Brevo positions loyalty as an operational challenge as much as a strategic one, requiring a consolidated technology stack that connects customer data, automation, and engagement.
“Smart loyalty needs a unified platform that can see, measure and reward loyalty across channels,” shared Seraphie De Tracy, Brevo’s Head of Loyalty. “At scale, you’ll need a system that can listen, decide, and act on behaviors in one place.”
“Most martech stacks treat loyalty as an afterthought,” adds Brinker. “The framework we’ve developed inverts that assumption by positioning the loyalty engine at the center of the orchestration layer. We recognize that loyalty is uniquely required to integrate with customer data, journey orchestration, governance, automation, and AI decisioning simultaneously; making it a natural integration hub rather than an isolated point solution. Brevo is that smart stack for mid-market brands: a consolidated growth platform where smart loyalty becomes actionable, measurable, and profitable.“
Read the full guide here. To watch Brevo’s “Smart Loyalty” webinar, visit https://app.livestorm.co/brevo/smart-loyalty-chiefmartec
About Brevo
Brevo offers the most approachable customer platform to deliver sustainable growth to all businesses and non-profit organizations. With Brevo, businesses benefit from a unified view of the customer journey with a Marketing and Sales Platform, Marketing Campaigns over Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Chat, and much more. Today, over 600,000 businesses – including eBay, H&M, Sodexo, Louis Vuitton, Carrefour, and Michelin – trust Brevo’s reliable technology to deepen their relationships with customers. Brevo reached the coveted Centaur status with $179M ARR in 2024, and has over 1000 employees globally. Its global operations are headquartered in Paris.
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SOURCE Brevo