Brevo Releases Guide on "Smart Loyalty" for the AI and Automation Age

New report outlines how brands can leverage customer advocacy to drive growth and overcome limitations of traditional loyalty programs.

Published on Feb. 10, 2026

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Brevo has released its 2026 Smart Loyalty Guide, written in collaboration with Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec. The guide examines 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. The report argues that loyalty must evolve from a purely transactional program into a participation engine that rewards reviews, referrals, user-generated content, and community engagement alongside purchases.

Why it matters

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. The guide underscores the growing premium on authentic, human connection alongside AI and automation, with smart loyalty using AI to build genuine relationships that make competitors irrelevant.

The details

The guide details a realistic progression for maturity and readying brands for architecture that supports loyalty in the age of AI. It finds that traditional loyalty programs are underperforming and widely disliked, with 90% of consumers having a negative perception. Meanwhile, trust has shifted from brands to people, with reviews, user-generated content, and referrals becoming leading indicators of long-term value and revenue. The report also highlights how advocacy outperforms paid acquisition, with referred customers spending 25% more and being 27% more likely to stay.

  • Brevo released its 2026 Smart Loyalty Guide on February 10, 2026.

The players

Brevo

A customer platform company that offers a unified view of the customer journey with marketing and sales tools. Brevo reached Centaur status with $179M ARR in 2024 and has over 1,000 employees globally.

Scott Brinker

The co-author of Brevo's 2026 Smart Loyalty Guide and the editor of the Chiefmartec blog.

Channing Ferrer

The Americas CEO at Brevo, who commented on how traditional loyalty programs are failing and how smart loyalty can become a growth engine for brands.

Seraphie De Tracy

Brevo's Head of Loyalty, who discussed the need for a unified platform that can see, measure, and reward loyalty across channels.

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What they’re saying

“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.”

— Channing Ferrer, Americas CEO at Brevo (PRNewswire)

“Simply rewarding transactions does two things: It treats customers like piggybanks, and it shortens customer lifecycles. Loyalty can either be a cost center (discounts) or a growth engine (advocacy), and smart loyalty chooses growth.”

— Channing Ferrer, Americas CEO at Brevo (PRNewswire)

“Smart loyalty needs a unified platform that can see, measure and reward loyalty across channels. At scale, you'll need a system that can listen, decide, and act on behaviors in one place.”

— Seraphie De Tracy, Head of Loyalty at Brevo (PRNewswire)

“Most martech stacks treat loyalty as an afterthought. The framework we've developed inverts that assumption by positioning the loyalty engine at the center of the orchestration layer.”

— Scott Brinker, Editor of Chiefmartec (PRNewswire)

What’s next

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.

The takeaway

This report highlights the shift from traditional loyalty programs focused on transactions to a new model of "smart loyalty" that leverages customer advocacy, user-generated content, and authentic relationships to drive sustainable growth for brands in the age of AI and automation.