Want to build the best loyalty points program for your business?
You couldn’t be in a better place.
This article will take you through a step-by-step process to help you develop a program that gets you more repeat customers than ever.
Read through for this and much more.
What is a loyalty Program?
A loyalty program is a program that’s aimed at rewarding loyal customers of a business. A customer retention strategy encourages customers to continue purchasing from your brand, not your competitors. The more customers engage with the brand, the more rewards they get.
This is how to build the best loyalty program:
Step one: Set goals for your loyalty program.
Before creating a loyalty program, it’s important to define what you want the program to achieve. Generally, loyalty programs are aimed at rewarding customers for specific actions.
The objectives you set for your loyalty program will determine the customer behavior you choose to reward and the type of reward you offer. It may be boosting sales, increasing traffic to your site, increasing customer engagement, or spreading your brand.
Thus, you must identify and define your loyalty program’s objectives to encourage targeted customer behavior and boost specific aspects of your business. Without concrete goals in place, it will be impossible to determine if the program is effective or not.
If, for instance, you aim to increase your online reviews and boost traffic to your site, you can craft your loyalty program such that your customers get rewards each time they write a product review.
Step two: Determine how your customers will earn points.
After you have set the objectives of your loyalty program, the next step is to determine how your customers will earn points towards rewards in your program. Including various options for how your customers can earn points is crucial. This will help keep them engaged and entice them to learn more about your brand.
The best approach to keep your customers engaged is to reward them for behaviors that make sense to them, as this will keep them interested.
To be successful, you’ll need to study your customers and their expectations. Find out what they are most likely to engage with and how they engage with your brand. Identify what matters most to your customers and structure your rewards to target them.
Let your customers earn points for reviewing your products, making a purchase, setting up an account, engaging with the store on social media, and celebrating a birthday.
Step three: Choose how to reward your members.
Selecting the right rewards is crucial as the rewards are the key motivators for customers to earn points. You should thus ensure that the rewards are valuable to customers. After finding out your customers’ expectations, go for rewards that benefit them and keep your business profitable.
Always remember that customers are not interested in earning points only but in getting rewards that make sense to them. Offer your customers a good selection of rewards to choose from to increase the likelihood that they will consider them appealing. Put yourself in their shoes and find out what’s more desirable.
Motivate your clients to earn points by offering rewards like dollars-off discounts, free shipping, free products, and percentage discounts, among others. What’s most important is to offer the kind of rewards that your customers can’t ignore and make your loyalty program as irresistible as possible.
Step four: Decide the value of your currency.
The value of your currency deserves careful consideration as it determines whether or not customers will remain in your loyalty program or not. If you make it too hard for customers to claim a single reward, it will become unlikely for them to stay in your program despite having many ways of earning points and interesting rewards.
It is crucial to find the right balance between the cost of your points and their worth to your customers. The best way is to have rewards with a high perceived value, which makes earning points worthwhile, but with an actual low cost on you. By doing this, you can be sure that your customers will be motivated to accumulate points, use rewards, and ultimately stay true to your brand.
Aim at setting a currency value that strikes a reasonable balance for your customers and business. In essence, to inspire brand loyalty, you’ll want your customers to earn rewards.
Step five: Brand your loyalty program.
Creating a loyalty experience that reflects your brand values requires much more than creating a reward structure that encourages people to purchase and spend at your business. You will need to brand all the aspects of your program to ensure it’s in line with the rest of your brand. Give careful thought to all the details to ensure that your reward program stands out in your customers’ minds.
From the name you give your program to the design of your explainer page, ensure you develop a program that distinguishes your brand from the rest and that’s not easy to forget. To ensure this, you can:
- Give your currency an attractive name.
- Come up with a short but interesting name for your program that’s easy to remember.
- Use familiar colors for the style.
- Add graphics to make your program more appealing.
Step six: Advertise and launch your loyalty program.
An excellent program with great rewards that remains unknown to your customers wastes time. Besides creating and bringing your program to live, you’ll need to make serious efforts to make it known to people.
Take steps to market your program to your existing customers for early adoption and new customers. The program and reward type should encourage customers to sign up.
The best way to advertise your program is by creating an explainer page. This standalone page explains how users can accrue and use points in your reward program with images and brief texts. The explainer page should give your customers everything they need to know about your program at a glance.
You can also email your customers to let them know that you’ve launched a rewards program. You can take advantage of your existing customer list as they already have an interest in your brand. By demonstrating the benefits of your programs, you may convince these loyal customers to sign up with little effort.
Step seven: Keep improving.
Establishing a great reward program, launching it, and marketing it is not enough. You’ll need to keep improving the program for optimal efficiency. By continuously experimenting and learning your program, you’ll be able to develop strategies that can successfully and consistently increase your customers’ loyalty.
Most importantly, come up with ways of gauging your program’s success. Listen to your customers’ feedback, which will give you helpful tips on where and what to improve. You’ll ensure its longevity and ongoing success by continuously improving your program.
Essential Components of Effective Loyalty Progam
To build an effective reward program, finding the features that make a great program is important. The following are some of the essential components of effective loyalty programs.
- Brand personality: A good loyalty program should clearly represent your brand’s values and personality. Ensure that the loyalty program connects with your brand experience and store.
- Valuable and tailored rewards: Customers aren’t just interested in earning points just for the sake of it. The real motivation is the rewards they will get from the points. Thus, ensure that your rewards are what your customers want. Make sure the rewards you offer highly perceived value to your customers.
- Onsite reminders: Rewards are useless if your customers don’t know about them. You should thus ensure you have onsite reminders to let your customers know you are running a reward program. This can be through the explainer page or a customer launcher.
- Exclusivity: Your competitors are also running loyalty programs targeting the same customers. You should thus give your customers enough reasons to join your program and not the rest.
- Multiple engagement points: A good loyalty program should support various engagement points. You should, however, identify the most productive engagement points to use.
Bottom Line
Having a great customer loyalty program can help propel your business to grow. They have been proven to be excellent tools for promoting customer retention, encouraging repeat purchases, boosting brand visibility, and building customer loyalty. Thus, you must carefully consider how you design your program, from the name you give it to the rewards you offer.
A good loyalty program will keep your customers engaged with your brand while bringing in additional revenues and making it difficult for them to consider other brands.
Well, do you have a loyalty plan in place?
If not yet, simply follow our steps and get started.
Let us know what you think.