Building a Loyalty Program that Your Members Will Love

Loyalty program system

With ever-changing consumer trends, it is difficult for you to keep up with your customers’ demands. Yet, it is a necessary endeavour if you wish to retain their business.

According to a study by salesforce, today, 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their individual needs, and 70% of consumers claim that how well a company understands them impacts their loyalty.

Needless to say, if you want customers coming back to your store, then you have to adapt your business to answering shoppers’ needs and wants.

Why focus on loyalty?

According to the Pareto Principle, 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customer base. Who are these 20%?

Your loyal customers, of course.
Loyal customers spend 67% more than new customers or infrequent shoppers. Moreover, it costs 5 times as much to acquire a new customer than it is to retain them. This goes to show that the ROI of keeping customers loyal is undoubtedly greater than trying to sell to a new customer.

Loyal customers are also great brand ambassadors. They rank pretty high on your NPS scale, and they will promote your brand to their family and friends, and even acquaintances. This helps you to get your brand name out with minimal effort on your part.

Finally, loyal customers have a longer customer lifetime value—that is, you will earn more money from them over the course of their whole relationship with your brand.
If you’re looking to improve your sales volume, revenue, and profits, then investing in loyalty program system is in your best interests.

Investing in a Loyalty program system

If you’re just starting out on your loyalty marketing journey, then the first thing you need to know is what impacts your customers’ loyalty the most. This can be great customer service, great products, or… it can also be rewards.

In fact, the power of rewards is so profound that 30% of customers would leave a brand for a competitor if they feel that there is no reward for their loyalty.

That doesn’t mean you should be giving out rewards as and when you like, though. That’s a sure-fire way to lose track of what rewards you have given and to whom.

Giving out too many rewards removes the joyful feeling that comes when receiving one. Handing out too few may not be able to satisfy customers.

This is why you need to invest in a loyalty program system.

Loyalty Program System: The Basics

Loyalty programs are typically systems that help you and your customers keep track of their eligibility for rewards. The earliest forms of such programs are standalone systems, where customers simply exchange their points for rewards, and that is that.

But the customers of today want dynamicity in their loyalty program. They want it to engage them, instead of being nothing more than glorified records.

After all, your loyalty program is another touchpoint along your customers’ journey with your brand. It is a chance to engage them and bring them closer to your brand.

Customer engagement loyalty marketing is an art, and here are some tips to get you started on building a loyalty program that will absolutely hook your loyal customers.

Choosing a the right loyalty program system for your business

Of course, the first step to designing a loyalty program is to figure out how you want it to function. What kind of elements do you want to add to it? Gamification? Tiered systems? Multiple campaigns?

The features you want will affect which software you require to facilitate point-earning and reward distribution. You should choose an engine that fulfils all your criteria.

The wrong engine will only lead to complications further down the road when it is no longer suitable for your business operations, for example, in scale. Not only do you have to learn to use the new software, but you also have to change it up for your customers too, which may lead to dissatisfaction.

Earning Points
Digital marketing game point system

Before choosing your software, you need to decide on few of the things below:

  1. How customers can earn points. Will this be in the form of a point bar, stars, badges, or stamps on a stamp card?
  2. How much must customers spend in order to qualify for a point? One point for a dollar, or will you employ a different ratio?
  3. Do you want to have daily minigames that let customers earn points when they play it?
  4. Do they get points for following you on social media and sharing your post? Or when they refer your brand to others?

Having your customers earn points in ways other than purchasing with your brand is a great way to encourage engagement on other channels. This involves them more in their relationship with your brand.

Reward Distribution

Rewards will be the main draw of your customer engagement loyalty system. They are incentives that motivate customers to earn points from interacting with your brand, that will entice them to engage with you.

Figure out what kind of rewards you wish to give out to your customers. It can be anything from vouchers, coupons, or even complimentary items.

Also, you need to decide on how many points they need to earn to redeem those rewards. What’s tricky part is that you cannot spread the rewards too far apart, lest customers feel that it takes too long to earn the reward, and they will give up and be disengaged.

Aesthetics
Hotel Voucher

It only takes 90 seconds of initial viewing for people to make a subconscious judgement about a product, including your rewards program design.

Not only will good aesthetics entice customers to interact with your program, you can also design the rewards wallet with your brand’s image. That is, with your brand logo and colours. You can include micro animations & design elements to engage the users.

Every time your customer interacts with your brand, they will then be exposed to your brand image. The longer the duration of exposure, the easier they’ll remember your brand—this is a subtle form of customer engagement loyalty marketing.

Personalisation

A whopping 71% of customers are frustrated by impersonal shopping experiences, and 80% of customers would do business with a brand that personalises their customer experiences.

Today, customers want companies to tailor their experience to their preferences. They want to see content that is relevant to them, and this includes your loyalty program.

To turn your loyalty program into a customer engagement loyalty system, you should focus on personalising the experience for your customer.

Allow them to earn rewards that they’d like, such as how Starbucks does. Send them their rewards or promotions and deals straight to their email or SMS inboxes. Surprise them with gifts on their birthdays.

Of course, this means that you need to know your customers’ personal information, like their name, their phone number, email address, birthdays, purchase history, amongst others.

One way you can do this is via a form your customers have to fill in upon signing up.

Once you have that data in your grasp, use it to personalise your customers’ experience with their loyalty program. This can help you better engage with your customers in more touchpoints other than your customer engagement loyalty system.

Gamification
Scratch & Win CNY

Customer engagement loyalty marketing nowadays rely heavily on gamification elements.

  • Stamp Cards in lieu of point systems, for instance.
  • Leader boards to showcase members who spent the most money or time with your brand.
  • Daily minigames that award players with points or rewards if they win.

Gamification can really steal your customers’ attention. It adds an element of fun to your loyalty program, motivating them to interact with your brand voluntarily.

You can add small games like Catch the Falling Objects, or Find Prize that customers can play to earn loyalty points. You can also make reward redemption more engaging by offering to win rewards in the form of simple games like Spin-the-Wheel or Fortune Cookie.

Gamification is not necessary to your loyalty program, but it can easily transform a bland loyalty program into one that engages customers.

Building a loyalty program that continuously engages customers is not easy. You need to work it into the design of your program, to motivate customers to engage with you whilst you engage with them at the same time.

A loyalty program system  is sure to help you a long way in your loyalty marketing. 

If you’re looking for a loyalty program system + rewards management system that can help you create the customer engagement campaigns of your dreams, then we can help! We specialise in rewards and loyalty management, and we are dedicated to helping you design and push out a program that all your members will love.

Our engine helps you keep track of the end-to-end lifecycle of all your rewards, and it offers anti-fraud features. In addition, we can couple our rewards management system with our gamification services to provide your customers even more fun and enjoyment.

Better yet, you don’t have to learn to use our software! We’ll handle all the technical bits and bobs for you.

If you are interested, then be sure to contact us here to discuss your customer engagement loyalty marketing today! Our dedicated team is willing to answer all your questions, and you can even request a free demo!