Communities are essential for brands to build strong relationships with their customers. In the age of the omnichannel consumer, building a robust community is one of the best ways to keep customers engaged.
Communities also provide a platform for customers to share feedback and ideas. Brands can use valuable insights from this open dialogue to improve their product or service and better tailor it to meet customer needs. Studies show that tailored experiences can increase customer spending by over 500%.
But communities aren’t built in a day. Brands must monitor and adjust their strategies to keep their consumers engaged. Unfortunately, most brands give up before they can reap the rewards of a strong, loyal community because traditional methods of community building can be time-consuming and expensive.
This is where token-gated communities and blockchain snapshots come in.
Both are powerful tools that not only help brands engage customers securely in a private space, but also accelerate the typically lengthy and laborious task of building an engaged community.
Exclusivity: the key to loyalty
When building a community, it's essential to ensure members feel a sense of exclusivity and belonging.
Personalization and exclusivity go hand in hand. One survey indicated that 97% of consumers are ready to switch to a competitor brand if offered incentives like cash back or loyalty points. Another revealed that 75% of consumers are ready to switch to a competitor when offered a slightly better loyalty program.
Unlocking customer retention with token gating
Token gating is a blockchain-based approach that uses digital tokens to gate access to resources. It’s the next frontier for delivering member-exclusive experiences that instill a sense of exclusivity and belonging.
Tokenization allows brands to reward customers for their loyalty, participation, and feedback. NFTs can act as tickets to exclusive events, discounts for products and services, and even loyalty points redeemable at any point of sale.
But it’s not just the customer who benefits–the transparency of blockchain’s distributed ledger empowers brands to examine customer behavior and actions at a granular level, thereby providing valuable insights into their preferences.
Brands can create and launch NFTs that the customers can mint, buy, or acquire (e.g. through a free airdrop), while brands only have to keep track of the public address holding each NFT.
For example, imagine your brand wanted to reward customers who entered your loyalty program early with a unique NFT art piece. Naturally, some of these customers would have transferred or sold their NFT. So, how would you reward them?
You can take a snapshot of who owns an NFT at a specific time and date. From there, you could create an access list of the public addresses eligible to claim their NFT reward.
Token gating with HyperMint Authenticate
Blockchains are “state” machines, meaning the current state of the blockchain is determined by all prior actions that occurred on it. A snapshot capture’s the state. It’s simply a predetermined point in time where all the data on the blockchain is saved to a single file.
Snapshots are valuable for blockchain users in a number of ways. Brands trying to improve customer experience can use snapshots to track interactions and store relevant data in a secure, tamper-proof environment.
There are different ways to take a snapshot. The remote procedure call (RPC) method is what is used conventionally.
RPC method
The RPC method sends a request to one of the blockchain nodes to fetch details to be included in the snapshot. This conventional approach looks something like this:
Connect to RPC endpoint
Run command to take a snapshot
Retrieve snapshot ID
Subscribe to event
Get subscription ID
Confirm state
After all these steps, the snapshot can finally be used by brands to authenticate members.
HyperMint simplifies this
With HyperMint Authenticate, however, developers can quickly and securely authenticate users. The product feature works by verifying a user's possession of a token in their wallet or checking if they are included on an authorized list of addresses. (See how HyperMint Authenticate was used, for example, to help decentralized design studio Deep Objects facilitate voting for their digital sneaker designs).
With nearly zero coding required, developers can take snapshots and use HyperMint's Access Lists feature to issue access tokens and token-gated events. This eliminates the need to manually save and manage user data, reducing the risk of error and documentation time.
HyperMint therefore not only helps brands reward customers with exclusive experiences and opportunities, it does the heavy lifting of community building with speed and efficiency.
Want to get HyperMinted?
Go beyond complex web3 APIs that take days to set up and weeks for your team to understand. HyperMint enables brands to start token gating their communities right away and provide a better experience for their customers.
Register your interest for a HyperMint account today.
