Customer retention is crucial for any e-commerce business as it ensures its sustainability. Besides boosting profitability, retaining customers can help promote your brand’s loyalty.
You’ll thus need to develop strategies to ensure your customers keep returning to your business. Read on to discover why you need a strategic, scalable loyalty solution for your e-commerce business.
What Are the E-commerce Loyalty Programs?
An e-commerce loyalty program is a customer retention strategy that online businesses use to recognize and reward customers for repeatedly doing business with them.
These programs are designed to keep your existing customers engaged and to encourage them to make more purchases and interact with your brand more often.
Why Are Loyalty Programs Important?
Loyalty programs provide a great way of future-proofing businesses.
An effective program can help you boost brand loyalty. The following are some benefits of a loyalty program for your business.
Customer retention
Acquiring a new customer costs up to 5 times more than acquiring a new one. Additionally, existing customers spend 67% on a business compared to new ones. That’s why focusing on customer retention is key to the survival of any business. The primary goal of any loyalty program is to help businesses retain customers. These programs have been proven to be among the best strategies for customer retention.
According to research, 84% of customers are likely to stick to a company that offers a loyalty program. These programs reward customers for remaining loyal to your brand and encourage them to make repeat purchases. Retained customers are the biggest assets for any business as they bring in more revenues and are more likely to become brand advocates.
Relevant customer data and consumer trends
Having your customers’ data is important as it can help you define and fully understand their needs. This is helpful as it enables you to meet those needs satisfactorily. You can create tailored marketing messages with reliable customer data that speak specifically to individual needs.
When customers join a loyalty program, they provide data that includes demographic information ( age, gender, and name), personal interests and hobbies, as well as other personal information such as income level, marital status, and the number of children, among others which would otherwise be hard to obtain.
Using this information, your brand can improve customer experience by delivering personalized offers, better customer communication, and relevant rewards. This data will also keep you updated with the latest trends allowing you to make adjustments as necessary.
Reducing unprofitable customers
A good loyalty program can help you segment your customer base and identify productive and unproductive customers. This can help you do away with those customers who avoid premium lines and only purchase reduced lines. These customers are more liabilities than assets as it costs more money to maintain them than they bring in.
Using a well-designed loyalty program, your business can reduce the payout to these unprofitable customers and reward only those who bring the most value to your business. This provides the best way to keep the customers that bring in the most profits for your business.
Better customer communication
Loyalty programs provide better communication between a business and its customers. Communicating effectively across your rewards program is essential for engagement as it strengthens the relationship between your brand and customers.
By regularly communicating with the members of your reward program, you can keep them constantly engaged with your brand. With the various social media platforms plus the brand’s website, interacting with your customers is simpler than ever.
Rewards current customers
Loyalty programs reward loyal customers of a brand and encourage them to stick with the business. They are aimed at rewarding customers for buying from the brand regularly. This makes them feel good about supporting your brand. Rewarding customers shows them that you appreciate their business and makes them feel valued.
Rewards are also designed to help customers feel like they are saving, which makes them more willing to stick with your brand. Customers love to get something in return for their purchases. Loyalty programs provide happiness and fulfillment to customers. Rewards show that you not only see your customer as one-time customers but are willing to build and maintain a healthy relationship with them.
Create mailing lists
When customers sign up for your loyalty program, they provide their information, including their contacts which you can use to compile a mailing list. This will make it easier for you to send your repeat customers emails and mailers.
You can persuade your customers to purchase from your brand by providing them with information about different sales and promotions that are currently running. Mailing lists can also help you nurture customers by keeping your brand in their minds.
The Cost of Switching a Loyalty Program
Building a loyalty program is a process that takes a lot of time and effort to grow and develop; it can’t be turned on and off. That’s why changing loyalty partners is a time-consuming affair. This may be necessary and even advantageous for firms with quick growth.
While changing a loyalty partner, you’ll need to re-evaluate and reassess the program’s design, structure, and goals. It’s also important to consider the cost of starting a loyalty program without a sustainable plan in the first place. Your loyalty program strategy should consider loyalty expenses, marketing, perk options, and continuous optimization.
Switching to a new partner also necessitates investigating and compiling the essential data for customer data migration. You’ll thus need to ensure that members’ points, VIP statutes, and other relevant data can be used after the relaunch. This is important in keeping the customers satisfied through the migration process.
What to Look for in a Loyalty Partner
The following are some of the things you should look out for while selecting a loyalty partner.
Strategic Partnership
Your loyalty provider should be more than a quick fix but a partner. Since loyalty programs tend to be industry and business-model specific, your vendor’s team should be able to leverage their knowledge to assist you in coming up with a successful program that meets your requirements.
You may need more assistance setting up, administering, and troubleshooting your brand grows. Your loyalty provider should have committed customer success managers to provide continued assistance and data-driven strategies to ensure you meet your business objectives.
Seamless integration
Go for a partner that offers a variety of third-party technology integrations. This will help you save time by avoiding giving loyalty members inconsistent experiences. You will also have access to useful, multi-solution data. What’s more, you’ll be able to provide individualized experiences for your top customers, whether you’re dealing with clients via email marketing, helpdesk software, or subscription service.
Having a partner that offers several solutions can help other tools, such as SMS marketing, reviews, and referrals, to work together more effectively.
Forward-thinking
Go for a loyalty partner who stays up to date with the most recent advancements in technology, research, and other knowledge that can equip your program for whatever the future may bring. Your partner must have a forward-thinking mentality and be capable of approaching you with suggestions on how to enhance your loyalty program or problems in the market that may later have an influence on your brand.
Turnkey solution provider
Go for a partner who provides a holistic approach. Since a loyalty program influences so many areas of your business, from marketing to management, a partner capable of offering a wide range of expertise, including program design, implementation planning, product development, and continuous program performance evaluation, is preferable. A good loyalty partner should be by your side every step.
What to Expect as Results
Any company’s success depends on selecting the correct loyalty provider. Small businesses must especially take extra caution while choosing a loyalty partner. Your loyalty program must be able to adapt when your business starts reaching new milestones and encountering new challenges.
A well-designed and smart loyalty program will help increase your revenues and consistently incentivize high-value customers if it is developed with the goals of your business in mind. It will also boost your brand loyalty. As your business expands, it may appear easier to level up your loyalty program. However, you’ll miss out on important program onboarding and foundation building by doing this.
Final Thoughts
A well-designed loyalty program can help you retain customers, promote brand loyalty, enhance customer communication, and boost your revenues. Hence, you’ll need to choose the right loyalty partner to achieve this.
Do you have a loyalty program for your business yet?
Well, here’s everything you need to know. Go ahead and create one.