Share with your CMO
A Forrester study commissioned by Zeta Global, covering 310 loyalty and marketing professionals, finds that loyalty data collection and activation is badly broken across the industry. Thirty percent of brands rate their programs as only somewhat effective at best, 38% collect no zero-party preference data at all, and every single respondent reported at least one barrier to using loyalty data effectively. The top blocker is data quality and completeness, cited by 61%, ahead of poor integration at 57% and organizational silos at 48%.
What this means for your business
The brands most exposed here are the ones running loyalty programs as margin-giveaway engines rather than data assets. If your program collects points redemptions but not behavioral signals or explicit preferences, you are funding customer retention without actually understanding it. The decisive trait is whether your loyalty platform feeds a central customer data system at all. Twenty-three percent of brands have minimal or no integration there, which means roughly one in four is operating a walled garden that can’t inform any other marketing channel.
The article’s most useful framing, written by a Zeta Global executive whose company sells directly into the AI personalization stack this study recommends, is the split between zero-party and first-party data. Zero-party data is what customers explicitly tell you they want, their favorite sports team, their holiday gift intent, their clothing preferences. First-party data is what their behavior reveals. The argument that zero-party data should be collected in two buckets, long-term preferences early in a relationship and short-term intent on a rolling basis, is genuinely sound and doesn’t require buying anything to execute. The conflict-of-interest tilt shows up in the investment priorities section, where AI-driven personalization appears as a top recommended spend, but the diagnostic before it holds regardless of vendor.
The second-order problem is one the article names but doesn’t fully press. Collecting data you don’t act on is worse than not collecting it. Asking a customer their favorite hobby and then sending them generic email sets a broken contract. The 37% of respondents who said they were only somewhat confident in extracting actionable insights from loyalty data are the group most at risk of that failure mode, not because their technology is wrong, but because no analytics layer can save a team that hasn’t defined what question it is trying to answer before asking members to fill out a preference form.
Loyalty programs have been absent from the channel-desiloing conversation for years, and that absence is now a budget question, not a strategy question. If your 2026 planning cycle includes a CDP (customer data platform, the centralized hub that stitches together data from all channels) refresh or an AI personalization investment, the renewal decision most worth pressure-testing is whether your loyalty platform vendor has a credible, documented integration story into that stack, or whether you are funding a second data island.
Concept deep-dive: Zero-party data
Zero-party data is information a customer intentionally and proactively shares, a quiz answer, a stated preference, a declared interest. It exists because behavioral inference, watching what someone clicks, gets noisy and slow. A customer who just bought running shoes for a gift looks like a runner to your algorithm. Zero-party data short-circuits that inference. The business value is speed to relevance, but the contract is implicit: customers share it expecting you to use it, and ignoring it damages trust faster than never asking.
Based on reporting from The No. 1 Thing Holding Back Loyalty Programs, originally published 2026-08-05 20:56:00.
