Elisabeth Keller · Loyalty & Customer Engagement
Strategy built to last.
Built for real.
Senior advisory for brands that need someone who will design the program, connect the teams, and stay until it works.
$68M
Incremental revenue generated
For a single loyalty CRM program through offer architecture redesign
254%
Margin on tech implementation
The only number that matters at the end of a technology engagement
20+
Years across agency, SaaS, and enterprise
The only perspective that sees all three sides of the ecosystem
What I Believe
I have sat in a lot of rooms where someone presented a very good loyalty strategy.
I have sat in far fewer rooms where that strategy became a program that changed a customer's behavior, retained a market segment, or showed up on a CFO's revenue line.
The gap between those two rooms is not a failure of thinking. It is a failure of execution continuity — of having the same person in both rooms, accountable to both outcomes, able to translate one into the other.
I built programs at Brierley for fourteen years. I watched platform implementations from the vendor side for two more. I have seen $68 million in revenue identified and captured. I have seen a 254% margin on a technology implementation that everyone said would be a cost center. I have also seen excellent strategy handed off to teams that were not resourced to execute it, and watched it die quietly in a slide deck.
What I know — and what I built my firm around — is this: the strategy is only as good as the person who will still be in the room when it gets hard.
I stay in the room. That is the entire difference.
Elisabeth Keller
Founder, Keller Standard
The market problem
The loyalty consulting market has two rooms.
Almost no one has been in both.
The Big Firm Problem
Big firms charge $200K–$500K per month, deliver the deck, and leave when the engagement ends. The partner who sold it shows up for kickoff. The 27-year-old associate does the work. You get excellent strategy and no path to execution.
The Independent Problem
Most senior-level independent consultants have built their career on one side of the ecosystem: either agency strategy or platform operations. They know how to advise on the thing they did. They haven't lived the other side.
The Boutique Problem
Loyalty boutiques are often attached to a platform they're selling you. Their advice is influenced by their revenue model. The conflict of interest is never fully disclosed, but the CMO who has been around the industry knows it's there.
The Keller Standard
14 years at Brierley — agency strategy, program design, $25M client portfolio. 2 years at Capillary — inside a SaaS loyalty platform, watching what clients actually implement. Both sides. Full picture. No platform to sell you.
why it’s different
The only senior loyalty operator who has worked both sides of the table — and will stay through the build.
Elisabeth Keller spent 14 years at Brierley diagnosing why loyalty programs fail and building the systems that fix them. Then she spent two years at Capillary Technologies on the inside of a SaaS loyalty platform, watching which client organizations actually implemented what they were sold — and which ones didn't, and why.
Almost no one at her level of seniority has done both. That dual vantage point means she walks into an engagement knowing exactly what the consulting firm you hired before her missed, and exactly where your platform vendor's incentives diverge from yours.
She doesn't design programs and hand them off. She builds them. And she stays until the build works.
Reason to Believe 01
She has delivered outcomes that can be named and numbered.
A $68 million incremental revenue result. A 254% margin on a technology implementation. These are not estimated attribution figures. These are results from programs she ran, with teams she managed, inside organizations where she was accountable for the outcome.
Reason to Believe 02
She has managed across the full loyalty ecosystem at senior levels.
SVP/Chief Client Officer at Brierley managing a $25M global book. SVP at Capillary managing a $35M+ portfolio across North America, Japan, and Denmark. She has been the person the client calls, and she has been the person the client is calling about.
Reason to Believe 03
She leads people well enough that they stay through the hardest conditions.
100% team retention during an M&A event. This is not a soft metric. M&A is the single greatest test of whether a team leader has built real trust or just managed by compliance. When her team stays, the client's program keeps moving.
how I work
Three ways to engage, one commitment:
I stay through the build.
Engagement type 01
Strategy + Execution Advisory
For brands that need a senior operator embedded in the work — attending the vendor sessions, reviewing the roadmap, challenging the plan, and holding the team accountable to delivery.
Loyalty program design or redesign
CRM and customer engagement strategy
Offer architecture and currency design
KPI framework and measurement build
Technology selection and RFP support
Engagement type 02
Fractional Chief Customer Officer
For brands between leaders, or growing faster than their current team can manage. Elisabeth steps in as a senior CCO/CMO equivalent — strategy, people leadership, and board communication — without the full-time cost.
1–3 days per week embedded leadership
Loyalty, CRM, and retention ownership
Team structure and capability building
Executive and board reporting
Leadership bridge during transition
Engagement type 03
Strategic
Retainer
For CMOs and CCOs who need a trusted senior thought partner — available for the weekly decision, the difficult conversation, and the question that shouldn't go to the agency. Access to 20 years of operating experience, on call.
Ongoing strategic advisory access
Program and campaign review
Vendor and partner evaluation
Competitive intelligence
Quarterly deep-dive sessions
how it works
An engagement that moves at the speed of your business, not a consulting cycle.
02
Diagnostic
A structured review of your program, your data, your team, and your technology. Three to four weeks. Produces a clear-eyed assessment of what needs to change and in what order.
01
Discovery Call
A direct conversation about where you are, what's not working, and whether this is the right engagement. No pitch deck. No sales process. An honest assessment of fit on both sides.
03
Build Phase
The work. Strategy development, vendor management, team alignment, implementation oversight. Elisabeth is in the room — not reviewing output remotely. This is where the difference is felt
04
Operate + Measure
Programs don't work until they're running. Ongoing advisory through the first cycle of operations — learning what the data is showing, adjusting what isn't working, and measuring what was promised.
who I work with
Mid-market to enterprise brands that are done getting decks.
The right client is a CMO or CCO at a mid-market to enterprise brand who has already tried the big firm route, the boutique route, or both — and is looking for someone who will sit in the working session, not just the quarterly review.
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It exists, it has members, it costs money. But the CFO is asking hard questions and you don't have clean answers.
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A consulting firm told you what to build. Nobody has helped you build it. You need someone who stays past the presentation.
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You need someone in the room who has been on the vendor side — and knows exactly what the demo is not showing you.
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The plan is clear. The team isn't moving. You need someone who can hold both the vision and the people simultaneously.
What Clients and Colleagues Say
The reference that matters most is the one from the client who had the hardest problem.
Elisabeth was a great partner guiding us on every critical step leading up to the launch, which had a series of technical contingencies, and helping us post launch sign up and serve our new members. Elisabeth is a loyalty expert and I would highly recommend her to any company seeking a thought leader in this space. Beyond this, she's also a true partner listening to client concerns and advising on how to best solve problems and grow member loyalty and frequency.
Erik Kapila
Client — Loyalty Program Launch, Fleet Farm
“
Elisabeth is the kind of VP who leads with clarity, strength, and unwavering leadership control — the rare combination that not only drives outcomes, but elevates everyone around her. She modeled what it means to conduct yourself as a confident, credible woman in technology — to speak with authority without over-explaining, to navigate high-stakes conversations with composure, and to command a room through grounded assertiveness and strategic calm.
Hailey Huynh
Product Owner — Global Client Implementation
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Thinking & Writing
The thinking is free.
The application is where I come in.
Elisabeth shares original analysis on loyalty strategy, customer engagement, and what actually works in the industry — without a platform to sell you and without a vendor to protect.
Industry Analysis
"I’ve watched a lot of loyalty and engagement strategies die in slide decks."
Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the brand didn’t have the budget. Because nobody was in the room when it got hard.
Here’s what I mean.
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A CMO hires a consulting firm. Twelve weeks, $400K, and a presentation that accurately diagnoses the problem and recommends a clear course of action. It's a good deck. The partner who sold it shows up for the kickoff meeting and the final presentation. The rest of the time, someone three years out of business school is doing the work.
The deck gets presented. Leadership approves the direction. The engagement ends.
And then the loyalty team — the same team that was too stretched to fix this before the consultant arrived — is handed a roadmap and told to execute it. Without the resources. Without the expertise. Without the person who designed it.
Six months later, the program looks exactly the same as it did before $400K was spent.
I've been in that room. On the agency side. I was the person who designed the roadmap. And I watched it happen too many times before I started asking harder questions about what "done" actually meant.
I've also been on the other side — inside a loyalty technology platform, watching which client organizations actually implemented what they were sold, and which ones filed the implementation scope away and called us eighteen months later asking why the system wasn't doing what they expected.
Both of those experiences led me to the same conclusion: the market is not short on loyalty strategy. It is short on people who will design the program, connect the teams, and stay through the build.
That's why I started Keller Standard.
I work with mid-market and enterprise retail and hospitality brands — with the CMO, the CCO, or the VP of Loyalty — on programs that need to move from strategy to results. I don't hand off the deck. I stay through the build.
If you're working on something in loyalty, CRM, or customer engagement — and you're tired of advice that doesn't connect to execution — I'd like to talk.
Everything I know about what works, and what breaks, is going here. I'll share it because I think it's useful, and because the people who find it useful are usually the people worth working with.
Industry Analysis
"Most loyalty programs don't actually build loyalty. They build habits. Here's the difference — and why it matters for your budget conversation this quarter."
The distinction between habitual purchase behavior and genuine loyalty is not semantic. A customer who buys from you every week because it's convenient will leave the moment someone makes it more convenient.
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A loyal customer stays with you when a competitor offers them something better. They choose you even when you're not the most convenient option. They recommend you without being asked. Their relationship with your brand has an emotional component that points and miles can't fully account for.
A habitual customer buys from you because it's convenient, familiar, or because they've already got points they want to use. The moment someone makes it cheaper, easier, or more rewarding — they move.
Most loyalty programs are optimized to maximize habitual purchase behavior. They are very good at that. Redemption mechanics, expiration dates, tier thresholds — all of this is designed to drive purchase frequency among existing customers. It works. Spend goes up. Retention metrics look fine.
Right up until a competitor launches a better program or a better product, and you discover that what you were measuring as loyalty was actually just inertia.
The programs that actually build loyalty are designed differently. They identify the moments where the customer's choice to stay with you is genuinely contested — and intervene there. They measure the delta between a customer's behavior and what it would be if they didn't have the program, not just the absolute engagement numbers. They invest disproportionately in the top 10% of members, not the bottom 50%.
That's a different design brief. It requires knowing what genuine loyalty looks like in your category before you build the mechanics to create it.
Most brands haven't answered that question. They've answered "how do we reward purchase frequency" — which is useful, but not the same thing.
What's the actual loyalty behavior you're trying to build — and how are you measuring whether you're getting there?
Operations
"The CFO asked our loyalty team to show incremental lift. Nobody in the room had a clean answer. That's a $40 million problem and it's fixable."
Three years ago I watched a CMO walk into a budget review for a $45M annual loyalty program investment. The CFO asked one question: "How much of this revenue would we have gotten anyway?
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The CMO didn't have an answer. Not a clean one. She had engagement numbers, redemption rates, active member spend — all the metrics the loyalty team tracked. What she didn't have was an incremental lift model: a rigorous, defensible calculation of how much of the revenue attributed to the program would have existed without it.
The meeting didn't go well.
This is the most important conversation in loyalty and the one most loyalty leaders are least prepared to have. Partly because the measurement is genuinely difficult. Partly because the answer might be uncomfortable. And partly because for years, loyalty programs were funded as a cost of doing business in their category — airlines have programs, retailers have programs, so we have a program — rather than as an investment that had to justify its own ROI.
That era is ending. CFOs are asking harder questions about marketing spend across the board. Loyalty programs — with their ongoing currency liability, technology costs, and communication expenses — are a meaningful line item. The CMOs who can defend their program with a clear incremental lift model will protect their budget. The ones who can't will be asked to cut it.
What a rigorous loyalty ROI model needs to do:
- Separate base spend from incremental spend (the revenue you'd have gotten without the program)
- Calculate the true cost of the program including breakage estimates, technology, communications, and human capital
- Model the customer lifetime value of members vs. non-members over a multi-year window
- Show the retention impact: members who would have churned but didn't, and what they were worth
None of this is easy. But all of it is possible. And the loyalty leaders who build this capability — who can sit down with a CFO and say "our program generates $X in incremental revenue against $Y in fully-loaded cost, here is the model" — are the ones who get the investment they need to build programs that actually work.
Have you had this conversation? What does your loyalty P&L actually look like?
If you've read this far, you probably have a problem worth talking about.
The first conversation is direct, specific, and free. I'll tell you what I see in 30 minutes — and whether I'm the right fit to fix it.