Bestowed with the power to impact turnover directly and indirectly, customer is undoubtedly the most critical stakeholder for any business. Every ‘for profit’ organization in the world is single mindedly focused on attracting more and more customers to partake in their products and service. However, studies have often indicated that gaining a new customer is 25 percent more expensive than making a sale with an existing customer, which winches customer loyalty to be one of the prerequisites for keeping the turnover figures high. Unfortunately, in today’s digital era, where competition between brands has intensified and consumers have access to a plethora of options to pick from, customer stickiness is dwindling by the day. As a consequence, companies invest billions of dollars on diverse loyalty programs in order to boost customer loyalty; but not all of them hit the bull’s eye in terms of impacting a consumer’s loyalty towards a brand.

Akash Joshi, Founder & Director, IMAST, a relationship marketing solutions provider, believes that there is a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to influencing a consumer’s buying decisions. “Understanding the nature of customer needs, whether latent or basic, is the core to devise the most appealing marketing and promotional strategies to influence buying decisions,” he explains. With a unique outlook towards devising loyalty programs for brands, the Indore headquartered organization first studies customer demographics indepth through thorough market research and data backed analysis. As a consequence, IMAST designs, delivers and implements a host of superlative customer loyalty programs for brands that efficaciously drive engagement, build brand trust, gain customer loyalty and maximize marketing RoI.

Founded in 2016, IMAST builds strategic relationship marketing solutions that enable brands to thrive among competition. Founded by Akash Joshi in collaboration with Ankur Pathak(Founder & Director) and Subodh Shrivastava(Director), the young firm provides clients with loyalty marketing, feet on street, market research, reward redemption, gifting management and digital transformation services across diverse industries. Rendering impact on all stakeholders,including customers, vendors, employees and influencers, IMAST has built a strong presence across India in a short span of time and functions from its offices in Indore, Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. Boasting of a 100 percent client retention rate and all deliverables creating a successful case study, IMAST has worked with the likes of Raymond, Trident Group, JAMNA Auto Industries, Virgo, Sayaji Group of Hotels Gupta Power, Varuna Pumps, KKCL, Lawman, and Integrity to name a few. Moving ahead with contagious vigor, the firm has embraced technology enabled procedures and offers solutions that are backed by a dedicated workforce and think tank.

Diverse Avenues to Boost Customer Loyalty
“Often times, clients approach us looking to boost revenues, but they do not possess a customer database and lack knowledge about consumer’s purchase pattern,” says Akash. Unlike various other organizations, IMAST does not provide any standard solution to clients to overcome this challenge, since every market and product has its own customer category, influences and sale pattern. The team studies the market to understand clients, their operations, sales hierarchy and sales pattern, and then designs a specific loyalty program. One of them is the old and trusted customer reward program which has evolved to be more personalized in rewarding experiences than just transactional incentives. Keeping-up with the trend, IMAST deploys program solutions for every stage of client’s business, including strategic consulting, planning, designing, operations, implementation, communications, marketing, promotions, call management, data management, research, analytics, metric measurement and MIS. Laying emphasis on every aspect of the process, the company ensures that the reward program drives improved sales conversions through returning customers.

IMAST also specializes in designing affinity programs that are focused on enhancing brand loyalty and increasing brand awareness of customers. “Congruent yet noncompetitive affinity program offering ideas has helped us in delivering excellent customer experience, making customer journeys delightful,” adds Akash. Whether you are a group, sports teams, charity, nonprofit organization, union, or a company, IMAST’s demography specific programs work across all sectors.

Hybrid Program & Effective Communication Strategies
Customer loyalty is never static and is often influenced by the constantly growing and revolutionizing market trends. In such an unpredictable setting, it is critical to stay

updated and informed about getting consistent returning customers, who are committed to staying regular and active in product or service consumption and suggesting your brand and products to other buyers’ indecision. In order to do so, IMAST has a vast suite of offerings to reward customers with transactional and emotional rewards. Lifestyle based value adding programs and strategies have been successful in creating long lasting effective customer relationship marketing strategies for brands.

Understanding the nature of customer needs, whether Latent or basic, is the core to devise the most appealing marketing and promotional strategies to influence buying decisions

In conjunction to this, IMAST understands that customer loyalty is synonymous to how connected consumers feel with the brand and thus encompasses impactful and multichannel communication strategies for effective and consistent communication. The firm designs customer communication strategies which build an instant relationship, make them feel heard, and focus on resolving disputes quickly. IMAST’s proven strategies include a multichannel approach such as using SMS, calls, newsletters, emails, surveys, and social media platforms, thus enabling clients to facilitate long lasting delighted customers. These strategies help brands manage customer relationships, building positive word of mouth, keeping loyal customers, seeking customer feedback, and minimizing & handling customer complaints effectively. IMAST also understands that relationship marketing is highly communication driven & direct, and one on one communication appeals more to customers. The firm thus offers interactive and intuitive designs for digital, print, social media, direct marketing and point-of-sales.

Utilizing Technology to take Loyalty Programs across India
IMAST empowers its clients to move beyond the larger cities and has developed loyalty programs that have been across Tier-IV, Tier-VI cities and rural parts of India as well. While working with a leading automobile player, the firm designed and executed a loyalty program that covered a universe of over one lakh potential customers. The program has been in place for more than two years now and has registered a growth and additional revenue for the client. “With the help of our loyalty program, the client was able to expand its reach to the remotest parts of the country and insure sales,” adds Akash. Replicating such success stories for each of its clients, IMAST’s loyalty programs help gain customer insights, increase spend frequency, acquire new customers, design targeted marketing strategies, and appeal even the rural segment with effortlessness.

Technology has always played a crucial role in enabling IMAST to offer its innovative solutions to clients. All of the firm’s loyalty programs are highly data & analytics driven, and its engagement strategies make every program agile and engaging. There is technology driven customer data check process which is applied as per the program strategy, but IMAST validates the data on the basis of KYC of customers which is collected by various ways, and the data is audited to make it 100 percent accurate. Not only dependent on mobile apps, the loyalty programs are designed using various other technology driven strategies depending upon the presence of customer.

A Diverse Band of Enthusiastic Professionals
The IMAST team comprises of over 250 diverse employees hailing from fields such as marketing, branding, channel sales, conceptualists, writers, designers, planners, consummate taste makers, developers, data analysts, implementers, testers, auditors and many more professionals & think tank experts. With a healthy mix of fresh out of college professionals to people with over 30 years of experience, the company’s competent team brings to the board expertise from various industry segments such as IT, textile, automobile, pumps, cables, hardware, IT, BPO/KPO, hospitality, supply chain, marketing agencies, digital marketing, SEO and SMO.

Akash and IMAST’s competent management team has inculcated a culture where every client gets the utmost attention and every project has a dedicated team. Clients’ trust has been developed owing to regular audits and the firm’s solid number crunchers, think tanks, enthusiastic technologists, techies,creatives, strategists, quality controllers, communication experts, and many more. “We include early risers and night owls too. While some of us are spotlight focused, many choose to stay behind the scene, yet excel outstandingly. For every box-checking taskmaster, there’s a go with the flow free spirit,” explains Akash. With the blend of like minded and differently driven people in the team, IMAST designs marketing strategies for the desired outcome as per the client’s expectations easily and accurately. Not blindly focused on increasing revenues, the company is working to gain new clients, retain existing clients, and project success.

Key Management:
Subodh Shrivastav, Director
Having spent 30 years in the corporate world in various leadership positions, Subodh has ensured profitable growth by developing brand strategies, including business plan & sales strategy,advising new business structures,drafting policies, and structuring commercial transactions. He strongly advocates the Theory of Constraint, provides solution strategies to companies for understanding the bottleneck shifts, and factors hindering the growth of the company.

Ankur Pathak, Founder & Director
Ankur has worked at MNCs for more than a decade, and currently takes care of IT, Strategy and Finances at IMAST. He has proven abilities to quickly assess, analyze and evaluate by effective measurement of the constraints in any processor system, thus enabling revitalizing change in business, processes and financial system.

Akash Joshi, Founder & Director
With his bespoken abilities, Akash has powered many brands in recognizing the brand trust and fostering everlasting relationships. He is highly intrigued by jargons like Ownership, Team, Think Tank and Technology, which also define the core values of IMAST. He brings in his experience of MarCom and possesses expertise in loyalty marketing and secondary & tertiary channel management.

Abhishek Das, Head - Operations
Abhishek is one of the key pillars of the organization and comes from a background of Retail and Industrial product sales. He is expert in handling operations, be it on field or off field.

Ashvin Yadav, CTO
Ashvin carries a vast hands-on corporate and entrepreneurial experience from IT industry. With his very sharp brain and calm nature, he leads IT team for IMAST.

Offerings: Loyalty Marketing,Feet On Street, Market Research, Reward Redemption, Gifting Management and Digital Transformation Services.

Offices: Indore, Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi.