Introduction to Shareholder Loyalty Programs
Mark Fasken: So Jeff, I thought that the best way to kick this off would be to set the stage with an explanation on what a shareholder loyalty program is. A lot of our listeners are probably part of some customer loyalty program. It's an airline or hotel or something like that. Maybe we could start with you explaining the concept of a shareholder loyalty program from an investor relations perspective.
Jeff Lambert: Yeah, great, Mark, thanks for having me. To start off with just, it’s a joy to get an opportunity to talk, retail investor relations and engagement and loyalty, which has never been part of the nomenclature as it relates to retail shareholders, but everyone's familiar with loyalty programs.
So your Marriott Bonvoy, or your Delta or American Airlines ,pick the brand that you're connected to, and the average American is part of 10 loyalty rewards programs. And yet, being an owner, in a stock, is not rewarded. And I think that really is the foundation of this is what's more loyal than an owner.
And that's really the opportunity that we at TiiCKER see, and I think others are starting to really open up to this concept that, look, this is the most loyal audience. Every retail investor is a consumer, and they are supportive of management and tend to be long-term. So we think it's the biggest unlocked audience in investor relations that exists.
Mark Fasken: That's great. And, I think a lot of, IROs (it varies depending on the size of the company) and like you said, a lot of IROs maybe don't spend as much time thinking about retail and how do you engage retail.
The Importance of Retail Investor Engagement
Mark Fasken: And so why should IROs prioritize retail investor engagement? What's the benefit to them?
Jeff Lambert: Well, I think a lot of the folks listening either on the CFO side or IRO, were like me. I spent 25, 30 years doing investor relations, and essentially was trained to ignore retail. It's inefficient, you're talking about one person, you know, one share at a time in some cases. And so, it really wasn't anything that we spent any time on.
As the retail audience has got larger, it's over 30 percent of trading volume last year, and continues to be a large chunk of public company ownership, it's important to engage this audience for a few reasons. One is because of their size. As a group, they have the ability to influence things like votes.
And so, while a small percentage of them vote, a large percentage of them could, and they represent a really nice piece. Second, everyone is a consumer. And so if you're a retail brand, if you're a house of brands, if you have a corporate brand, this is an audience that is already a fan of your product, most likely, but is very loyal and will tell their friends. So they're all influencers.
And I think that the final piece is if you look at the retail investor, they are the most long term historically. So you take the meme stock hype out of the equation, they historically are the longest term investor. They buy what they're familiar with, and so prioritizing them, there really is no downside to it. And I think that's the reason is, they become larger, votes are more important. Governance has become critical, and if you can efficiently reach them, why wouldn't you?
Mark Fasken: Good timing on the meme stock comment with everything happening with, AMC and Game Stop and whatnot. Those are really great reasons to engage retail and, you know, one topic, or sort of, I would say, question that comes up a lot when we think about retail and, you know, at Irwin we talk to IROs about sort of their retail ownership fairly often, is that large cap companies seem to sort of push back and say like, we're really focused on institutions. We don't really focus on retail. It's not a big part of our, ownership base.
Strategies for Small Cap vs. Large Cap Companies
Mark Fasken: So, I have my question for you should small cap and large cap companies approach building relationships with retail investors differently?
And if so, what would some of those differences be in your view?
Jeff Lambert: Yeah, the answer is absolutely yes, and the small-cap can look at this audience as, you know, call it a small mutual fund or a small family office investor. So small-cap should look at it as these retail investors, based off trading volume, could be significant targets to be a shareholder.
On the large-cap side, you're talking more about them as a voting block, or them as a consumer block. And to ignore them, I think, is at your own peril. Take the recent example of Disney. So they reportedly spent somewhere between 20 and 30 million dollars in getting out the vote in their dissident shareholder issue.
They won, but with 30 plus percent retail, you better believe they spent significant dollars in getting that retail. So if you ignore retail until you need them, there's a major risk. The other piece that, there's been a lot of companies that aren't even getting a quorum.
And so the cost to redo a very, or to have to go spend the money to get that even a majority support for your proxy issue for large-cap companies, is hugely expensive when they want to be engaged. And I think that's the misnomer is that, they're out there and they don't care.
They do care. They just don't know that the public company doesn't have information. It's never invited them into a relationship. So I think there are different strategies, and a small-cap should be looking at it as the opportunity to get more retail investors and who support the company.
Again, eight in ten retail investors vote with management. and for large-capit's really the combo platter of governance, vote, quorum, and as a consumer.
Mark Fasken: We talked about this on our call, I don't know if you can name names, but as you think, and not even specifically TiiCKER clients, but as you think about the companies that you know who are running these sort of retail engagement programs, these investor loyalty programs, what would you say is the split between sort of large and mega cap and small mid cap?
Do you find that it's more small mid cap versus large cap? what would the split be?
Jeff Lambert: Yeah, I think it really is depending on the entry point. Who's the advocate? So universally, the biggest champion for a shareholder loyalty program or retail engagement is the CEO. The CEO has two things they think about every day, the stock price and growth or revenue. So they're trying to grow both, and who do you grow both with a retail investor who by definition is also a consumer. If the CEO is the champion, these things move pretty quickly. And the IRO, again, IRO, CFO, I put in the same bucket, which is they have finite budgets.
What do I, you know, what am I going to focus on? I'm going to focus on Institutional roadshows and ignore retail. And again, it's because you haven't traditionally been able to aggregate that audience, and what people are missing is what if you had invited them into a relationship, and that's where loyalty programs or perks come in is you're actually asking them, come, opt-in and by opting in, we have a relationship with you.
And then the other audience really is the CMO, who has no idea, that there are a hundred thousand, or a million, multi-million retail investors in their stock today that they spend every day thinking about how do I find new customer audiences? How do I sell more product to my existing loyalty categories? First-party data. The retail investor wants to be connected. They assume that they are, and the fact is, is they're all held in street name. So they want to opt-in They want to give you their information because they're owners. And so that really is the key, the unlocking the CMO side, which is both awareness play, but also a budget play, because again, they're spending, oftentimes millions of dollars, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to reach consumers, and ignoring the millions of retail investors in their own stock.
Mark Fasken: I think those are some great points, and some that I think we'll, we may loop back to in a question a little bit further on in the podcast, as we get into talking about budget and buy-in and ROI.
Misconceptions About Retail Investors
Mark Fasken: I also wanted to talk about misconceptions, because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about retail investors, you know, we talked about why, why spend the time, maybe I should just focus on institutions. What are some of the assumptions that are commonly made about retail and sort of these engagement strategies that in your view are incorrect?
Jeff Lambert: I think there's a handful of them, first is that retail investors don't care about voting. While you would extrapolate based off their voting record that that's true, and it really isn't. There's no reason to vote because, just like voting in a general election, they don't feel like it matters. It does matter, but the company's never told them that. They, from an IRO perspective, the misconception is they aren't worth the trouble and again, because you can't aggregate them or haven't been able to aggregate them in the past, they're not significant enough to matter. Well, retail investor trading and ownership is at an all-time high and continues to accelerate, and it was important long before the meme stock trend happened, and remains important. And again, these are loyal, your most loyal audience, and remembering that this misconception that they're only a shareholder, but they are also a consumer. They respond to opportunity. They respond to brand loyalty and connection and engagement. The misconception, and I think the biggest one, is that there's no downside to ignoring them. And yet the technology exists to be able to build more relationships directly with this audience. Ignore retail investors at your own peril.
Mark Fasken: That's a good quote. Good quote to go in the summary, ignore at your peril. So let's talk about the CEO, CFO engagement. You made some good points. Let’s say that as an IRO, this is something that I believe is something that I should do, right?
We've identified that creating a retail engagement strategy is a priority. And I've convinced, you know, CFO, CEO, that it's something that we should do. What are some of the business results?
Measuring the Impact of Loyalty Programs
Mark Fasken: So the value that the companies should expect, or, you know, KPIs that companies should be tracking to better understand the impact or ROI of a loyalty program.
Jeff Lambert: I think that's the biggest change in what you would call retail investor engagement, is for the first time, it can be measured. And, you know, in, in the past you could do online advertising, or go to an investor conference or, you know, back in the day it was better investing. You literally have a booth, and hand out chachkis trying to get people to buy your stock.
And it was no measurability, versus an institution where you've got surveillance, or you've got 13 F at a minimum and your ability to see: had a meeting, bought the stock, kept the stock over a period of time. And so, because of really the FinTech category and the information that you can get, and we at TiiCKER can actually look into individual retail investors account into their brokerage account through the APIs and the digital data and say, Hey, Mark owns AMC and he also owns Nike and he also owns Disney and by being able to do that to see, Hey, we never had a loyalty program or did any retail engagement.
And then we started, and our numbers went from X to Y, and what are those numbers? Well, we can now tell an IRO or a CFO or CEO, you had 22 percent retail and your average shareholder owned $5,000 of stock, and that has increased, by number of shares, longer hold period, retained the stock and took a perk or some kind of a loyalty reward.
And that information now you're equipped with, we are connected to 10, 20, 30 percent of our retail investor audience directly. And so, if we want to market to them, if we want to connect on a proxy issue, if we want to host a CEO chat, we have a direct relationship and a direct pipeline to this audience.
And so think the biggest change is it's measurable, and that's when you get to, well, why would we do this? Well, what if I can measure the outcome? What if I can prove to you that we can connect these investors, and we can see if they're increasing their ownership, increasing their stake, retaining the stock, and we see.
So again, TiiCKER is a perks and shareholder loyalty platform, and our campaigns that we offer, we first offer a perk. What we find is that retail investors, 95 percent of them take the perk and keep the stock. So you might think I'm gonna take the perk and sell the stock. Well, no, because they're already an investor. This is a reward of being an investor, not a reason for being an investor. And that's really important.
And then you add as the gravy on top is, we can actually track retail buying or purchases. So again, if a, let's use Fubo or Lionsgate, or, some of our clients, Smuckers, Beachbody, these clients have discounts off of their products, or their subscriptions, that you can tie back to a conquested consumer, a new consumer spend tied to their retail audience. That's where it gets really interesting for really that any audience inside the company is to say it's measurable as a retail investor. Also, I can measure their spend.
This is direct ROI that I can, that I can point to. And where can I get more?
Mark Fasken: So I love that idea of looking at the ROI from the perspective of sort of the shareholders themselves, right? Like, okay, they took a perk and they held or they bought. And then also there's this idea of, we have these shareholders, we're marketing to them, whether it's through some sort of a discount code or whatever, and they're purchasing our products, not our stock, they're purchasing our products and continuing to be purchasers.
And so, so one question that I had for you, and we, we talked a little bit about this, in a previous conversation around misconceptions, because you just shared a couple of company names that are, you know, they're retail, like they're consumer products, right? Movie theatres, and, jam, and whatever, so the products people buy all the time. I feel as though one misconception may be, you know, I'm a company that doesn't have a consumer product. I don't know, I'm an oil and gas producer, something along those lines.
Examples of Successful and Unsuccessful Programs
Mark Fasken: Do you have any examples of companies where, you know, maybe it's not the typical company that you would think of to have a loyalty program and they've actually seen some good success that you can share?
Jeff Lambert: Yeah. A couple of examples.
One is Shift Group. So Shift is a manufacturer of specialty vehicles, it's all B2B, not at all B2C, but they make specialty vehicles for Amazon and FedEx and and UPS. And so this idea around their perks is really at making the connection to who it is we make make products for.
And so their entire objective with their loyalty program really was aimed at more retail investor engagement, and to bring more people into the stock. And so, that would be, a quick example. Another would be, there's a gaming company that really does more B2B software and builds fan engagement platforms, but they don't sell it anything to consumers, they do it B2B. They looked at it as an opportunity to again, bring more investors in their small cap stock, and did it with, they're doing some work with, it's called Game On, and they're doing work with the UFC and doing work with some bigger sports and entertainment brands.
And so that ability to connect to a retail investor as the goal. But also, to modify the relationship with those publicly traded customers. So my first example, FedEx is publicly traded, UPS is publicly traded, obviously Amazon is publicly traded. But this opportunity to, so in the case of Shift, they gave an Amazon gift card as their perk.
Again, anybody and everybody can use that. But really, this was about building awareness to who are our customers and who do we make products for? And that gets to the outcome or the measurability is how many retail investors do we connect to? Did it increase? Are people staying in the stock, and then are they voting?
And, we, I think we talked about this previously, but, we talked about the number of pieces of mail or email that go out every proxy season. It's 2 billion, 2 billion pieces. And none of that has any marketing, and that's insane. And so this opportunity to use that.
Whether you're a B2B or a B2C, the retail investor in an oil and gas company is probably 30 or 40% of the stock. And you might tell an ESG message, you might plant a tree. We look at perks that are ESG related. And it's the opportunity to show a commitment and communicate to your retail audience, just like you're communicating to your institutional audience, of why are we a good investment?
Why are we a good corporate partner? Why are we a good community partner? And we have actually seen proxy perks. If you vote your proxy, we'll make a donation to an environmental group, or a small business startup group. But that opportunity to connect with community.
So I really think that is an important misconception that needs to be corrected, which is shareholder loyalty should be for every type of company. And I think that's the opportunity.
Practical Steps for IROs to Start Loyalty Programs
Mark Fasken: Awesome. And so we want to talk about a couple, sort of practical steps that IROs can take. You know, I'm thinking about, again, an IRO who's listening to this and thinking, okay, we don't have any retail engagement strategies,, or we don't have, you know, a loyalty program. What are some of the initial steps you would suggest an IRO take to, to begin that journey? Like, what are some of the things that they should think about? Some of the questions that they should maybe start asking themselves or, or asking their team?
Jeff Lambert: I think it begins with benchmarking your company and your peers. So are we underweighted on retail or overweighted? Where are we today and where do we want to go? You need to make the case for the CEO, CFO, CMO.
You go to the CMO to get the rewards or perks. Or, in the case of some of our clients, to launch a new product. To open up a new audience, what are their priorities, and how can your shareholder audience really help set the target? So, hey, we're going to start small, but this is what we think we can accomplish.
You build the plan to execute it, and then start to communicate it. And that's really the key thing is, let's say you join TiiCKER, and you get on our platform, and we've got a billion, dollars of linked brokerage accounts on the TiiCKER platform today. So we certainly have an interested audience who are interested in perks and loyalty.
But, there's also the hundreds of thousands of current retail investors, use your annual report, your proxy, use your conference call to talk about, we value our retail investors and would love to connect to you by coming to a CEO chat. We're doing one with the IRO of Lionsgate later in May.
And it really is to engage retail and give them access, just like institutions, but again, the key thing here that has changed is the ability to verify ownership. So the most popular perk on our platform for the first year and a half, when it existed was Disney had a commemorative stock certificate that retail investors who owned one share or more could buy for $50.
And it was our number one perk. So they had to buy it, it cost full price, and, we redeemed that every single day. And that is the connection people have to the companies. They are an owner. And again, as an owner, if you shop it, if you support it, if you tell your friends to buy it, Those are all things that people do when they're owners.
And so I think that you know, in a successful campaign, you're going to want to get buy-in, a design for what you're trying to achieve, and then measure the outcome, to hopefully say this worked, let's do more.
Best Practices and Common Mistakes
Mark Fasken: It's a good segue into my next question. And so you think about, sort of, designing it and launching it. I want to talk about where these programs can go really well, what does a good program look like? What are some of the hallmark qualities of programs that you've seen be very successful and, what are some of the programs that sort of failed or what are some things to watch, watch out for? So maybe we could start cause everybody always likes the things that go wrong. It's always the interesting part of it, but what are some of the qualities about a program that you see make them successful?
Jeff Lambert: So I think that the successful ones are measurable, verified, so they actually are through a perks platform like TiiCKER, which is to say, I give you this perk for being a shareholder. The most successful ones of those, are those that have, we call them graduated perks, or different levels of loyalty.
And so just like you become a silver member, a gold member in your hotel or your miles, your retailer, it also works the same with shareholder loyalty and perks. And so, we've seen the most success when you have an entry level perk, call it a mid level perk, and then a really premium perk.
And that has spanned, again, access to a movie premiere for Lionsgate, to sit courtside with the CEO of Game On, to get essentially free frozen food and varieties in the mail from Real Good Foods. And what you find then is people will want to be in that next level. And that's a simple solution, which is to be a larger shareholder. And so it's important in the messaging that you can't incentivize someone to buy more stock, but you can reward someone for being a more loyal investor. And so that's really where we've seen the best ones are where these that good, better, best, or an opportunity to reward the most loyal.
Just like in every other area of business and loyalty, your most loyal, your largest investors should get the most access and the most opportunity. I think that the follow-up question, how about a poorly executed one or what's not working? Well, I think to start with the, you know, we didn't invent shareholder perks.
They've been around for 40 or 50 years, but we invented verified perks. And the difference is verified, you could offer something more premium than if it's not. And so I would actually use Tesla as an example of not a good perk because of the timing of when they launched it. So Tesla did a one-off perk. It was so you could get on the list for a cyber truck. And they did it after the cyber truck was launched. They did it with a one-year hold period and verified by sending in your stock certificate, or your brokerage statement, which couldn't be easier to doctor, and couldn't be more difficult to validate.
They never communicated or talked about it outside of a single post, deep on the IR page. So I think that's an example of, somebody thought, oh, shoot, this would be a fun thing to try, and there wasn't a well-coordinated effort around it. And so, you know, I don't know as to the success of it suddenly spiked Cybertruck by the fact that they never talked about it again. My guess is it didn't. I'll give you another example of one that I think is, it's not only in the news and a hot stock, but they were very early on the loyalty category, AMC, and so AMC launched right after the kind of meme stock run-up.
It was a shareholder rewards program for AMC shareholders, but zero verification. So they have reported 800,000 people signed onto that, but they don't know if a single one of them is actually an investor. Because was three years ago, and to say that you're an investor, they didn't say how many shares they simply said, click yes, and you got free popcorn. So I think it was the absolute right strategy with lack of execution, so I think I love the test, I love the idea and you know AMC is nearly 80 percent retail ownership and AMC if you're listening, would love to work with you on how we increase ticket sales and you're doing pretty good with the stock price right now, but how do we keep it at that level?
So, I think those are examples of good, the bad the ugly.
Mark Fasken: How do AMC not give away popcorn for free, I think is the solution. Cause then there's a couple of things that I would summarize out of a few of your answers that sound like what I would call best practices.
One of the ones that you've mentioned a few times is ensuring that you have cross-functional buy-in. This is an investor relations project; there's marketing involved, communications are involved. There's a branding exercise to your point. You know, sort of communicating the program across multiple channels, and in multiple places is important, like what's the point in launching a loyalty program if nobody knows about it.
So those seem to be best practices. That idea of sort of the graduated perks is a great one. And then it sounds to me as though, you know, the down, some of the mistakes is not being able to verify, so to your point, sort of giving away perks without being able to verify whether somebody is, in fact, a shareholder, and also, again, on the flip side of what I just said, which is poor communication, sort of only sending it out once, or only communicating the program in a single place.
So those seem to me to be some of the common threads throughout this entire conversation. Anything I missed there?
Jeff Lambert: To use AMC as the example, I think they were your early adapter to this, and so they should be celebrated for that. They just didn't go to the next level, which was to integrate marketing. So what they want, is a retail investor to choose an AMC theatre to see the next big film over Cinemark, let's say, and so why would they choose that? Well, as an investor is logical and natural to think, well, every time I go to AMC, I'm helping the stock. And that's how people have invested for the history of the stock market is, they buy what they know. And then they, they choose that brand if given locale or given the option, if I can go to two different theaters, I'm going to choose AMC because I'm a shareholder. And so that's the link that's missing, which is by creating a verified perk, and something more valuable than a free popcorn or refill, which by the way, you can also get in their stubs program.
So the opportunity would be, hey, we're going to do a movie premiere you get in a drawing or access to, or we're going to give you, every time you come to an AMC theatre, you get to go on a separate line for shareholders only. And that's, I think the future of this is, you know, I think about when you get called for your seat to board a plane.
What if they said Delta shareholders, please feel free to board. American Airlines shareholders, please feel free to board. AMC shareholders, you get the first selection of seats. That kind of differentiation, people love to feel special and as an owner you should. And so I think that, you know, I don't think AMC is doing it wrong, I think they're just not going far enough, which is to connect the retail investor strategy with the consumer strategy.
Mark Fasken: Yeah. That's really interesting. I mean. It'd be kind of nice if you could get a first class seat just for being a shareholder. That'd be great. Sure. That's a graduated perk. It's got the top level perk. Drive the plane.
Jeff Lambert: Absolutely. Get something. You know, you could maybe you go out and you do an experience and you get to get in their simulator. I mean, those types of things are experiential and they're offering those to their highest users as miles, or for their credit card, they're doing those types of things. And this is just an audience that, by the way, is putting money behind the company and investing long term seems logical to me.
Mark Fasken: Securing Budget for Retail Engagement
Mark Fasken: Yeah, agreed. And so that gets us to our last question. It's a topic that is talked about constantly in the IR space, which is budget. IR teams are, often under-resourced, and so I'm sure a lot of people listening to this sort of immediately go to the place of how am I going to get budget for this?
Right? It's not something I've budgeted for historically. You've covered it in a, in a few different ways of thinking cross-functionally, thinking about the marketing team, et cetera. But you know, what would your recommendation be to an IRO who is trying to secure budget and get some additional attention for a program like this?
Jeff Lambert: Yeah. I mean, I think the fastest way is to look at other people's budgets, and in particularly marketing. So, you know, the marketing budget is 20 times the average IR budget. However, they're not aware that this audience even exists. So that could be a tough sell even internally. So I, what I would look at is to say, okay, can we measure it?
And so carve off a small piece, but right now the institutional efforts are measurable. The analyst efforts are measurable. The retail audience is perceived to not be measurable. But if it is, then it's a simple, it's a simple decision. So I think that to start with is to say, okay, if I can measure it, what is, what's my goal and what am I willing to spend for that?
And that's the measurability piece is what's really been unlocked. Then I guess the second piece is, okay, so what are we already doing that costs me no incremental money, to connect with retail investors? So, put a direct URL in your annual report. Create an investor page that actually allows a retail investor to link their brokerage account.
So, again, you can go to any public company and TiiCKER.Com, TiiCKER with two I's, slash sjm for smuckers, or TiiCKER.Com slash b o d i for Beachbody. And, you could link your brokerage account and the company can see I now have a relationship with this person who has 127 shares of stock and here's information about them ,and their lifestyle and what else they like, and so I build a relationship, and right now there's, again, billions of pieces of mail and email going out, with not a single marketing message that costs you nothing to put a direct URL, or for more information, or connect with our CEO or whatever. And so I think that's really what the future holds, is you get budget by leveraging the current investment that you're making, maybe converting some of that governance spend that you have to do to get your proxy voted on or approved.
And say, what if we already knew where 10 or 20 percent of these investors were, and that eight in 10 of them are going to vote with us? What if we put those dollars toward a proxy outcome versus simply a cost? And so I think that's, that's where I would find it. But certainly, it's not in the P&L today.
The first place I would start is if any company listening has a direct stock purchase program. And yes, hundreds of them still exist, even though it is free to purchase shares online. I don't know if you've heard, but you write a check, a company writes a check for $25-$50,000 to offer direct stock purchase program.
Start there. So if your treasurer or your general counsel is still writing that check, don't do that. Put it into perk so you can build a relationship. Start there. Otherwise, kind of look around and say, where, where are we not getting measurable ROI for our IR campaign. And we can, we can put the money there.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Mark Fasken: Jeff, this has been awesome. So many great examples and stories that you shared. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Jeff Lambert: Thank you. Great to be on.
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