In today’s attention economy, brands continually seek new ways to engage and activate customers across channels. Each customer re-engaged through socials or organic methods decreases acquisition costs and increases lifetime value to the brand.
Traditional Web2 brands, however, often struggle to reconnect with their customers across fragmented touchpoints not linked to their centralized member database. This fragmented member model makes it difficult to offer the types of interactions and experiences required to fully engage customers and convert them to loyal members.
Web3 offers a new solution to engage across touchpoints through memberships powered by interoperability and composability. These features make it easy for brands to plug and play into an exploding set of tools for community engagement, partnerships, and perks like token-gated commerce, members-only spaces, and multiplayer rewards.
In this post, we’ll explore how Web3 Academy delivered web3 benefits to their existing customers using Kazm's integration with Unlock Protocol. The integration enables brands to layer web3 benefits on top of existing touchpoints without migrating or building from scratch.
Web3 Academy is a media platform providing services such as newsletter and podcast that helps early tech adopters stay on the forefront of web3.
As a premium service, Web3 Academy offers Web3 Academy PRO, a weekly onchain analysis report combined with industry insights that helps creators, marketers and builders understand how to build and invest in web3. To gain access to Web3 Academy PRO, members subscribe through Substack.
The Web3 Academy team engages their PRO members and wants to offer exclusive experiences across platforms, but facilitating these cross-platform experiences while their membership data sits inside of Substack’s walls is challenging.
For example, if Web3 Academy wants to offer a members-only channel in Discord, they would export a list of subscribers from Substack, capture email addresses for every Discord member, then cross-reference these two lists to confirm paid subscribers before granting Discord access.
The Web3 Academy team knew that the interoperability offered by web3 tech could solve this problem. They wanted to find a seamless way to bring their non-web3 native subscribers onchain to unlock web3 perks without requiring an NFT purchase.
The Kazm x Unlock integration offered the perfect solution.
Kyle Reidhead from Web3 Academy says this: "With the integration, Web3 Academy will be able to unlock the ability to take customers from one platform and give them experiences on another platform. This wasn’t really possible unless you were building an API or bespoke integration. It’s really difficult and challenging to do this in Web2.”
The Kazm x Unlock integration offers fully managed, onchain memberships. With Kazm’s managed memberships module, Web3 Academy can configure tiered requirements. Kazm connects to all community touchpoints to verify requirements before airdropping (or allowing minting of) an NFT through Unlock Protocol. Kazm then keeps the membership NFT in sync with requirements over time so that whenever someone subscribes or unsubscribes, their membership tier or status is updated accordingly.
The power of the Kazm and Unlock integration is that it automatically ties the functionality of the NFT to the tiered membership requirements and keeps those in sync over time. When a membership is upgraded or revoked, it instantaneously changes member access on token-enabled platforms that gate content, spaces, and perks.
Kazm also offers an updated take on loyalty through gamified rewards and points. Web3 Academy can award members and upgrade their status based on actions they take, like engaging on socials, reading articles, or watching education videos. With Kazm, they can define rules for gamification once, and put ongoing loyalty & rewards on autopilot.
The Kazm x Unlock integration makes it easy to keep memberships in sync with subscriber status.
Web3 Academy has two membership tiers in Substack: a PRO tier and a FOUNDERS tier. Kazm integrates with Stripe to verify subscription status. According to the no-code rules defined by Web3 Academy, Kazm then grants onchain memberships through Unlock Protocol and keeps those memberships in sync with subscriptions.
The onboarding flow for members is simple — they log in, connect accounts, and submit. Members who don’t meet the requirements will be prompted to subscribe. Those that are verified subscribers will have the ability to mint their membership NFT through Unlock, earn XP through quests, and check their status on the leaderboard.
Web3 Academy can choose whether to airdrop the NFT or allow members to mint on their own. In this case, the team is opting to airdrop and cover the gas fees for their members using Kazm’s pre-loaded gas pump.
With the Kazm x Unlock integration, Web3 Academy is now able to easily:
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