Discover how loyalty programs can boost eCommerce sales. Learn 5 key factors to consider when creating an effective program for your business.
In today's eCommerce landscape, customer loyalty has become more crucial than ever. With the shift in business strategies from conversion and acquisition to retention, loyalty programs have emerged as a powerful tool for building a loyal customer base.
By improving customer retention rates, loyalty programs not only have a positive impact on key metrics such as LTV, AOV, and churn but also help in increasing brand awareness and boosting acquisition and conversion through referrals.
“The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.”
(source: Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance)
With increased odds of selling to your existing customer-base, a focus on fostering relationships with past customers is where a well-designed loyalty program can be a game-changer for your business. But how do you go about creating a successful loyalty program that resonates with your customers?
In this blog, we will explore the five essential elements that you should consider when crafting a rewards program that your customers will love. So, let's dive in and discover the key to a successful loyalty program with Influence.io.
A successful loyalty program is a crucial element in building long-term relationships with customers. With so many businesses offering rewards and incentives to retain customers, it is important to ensure that your program stands out from the competition. Here are the five key factors to consider:
The foundation of any loyalty program is good customer service. You must have a working system in place to address complaints and requests. Ensuring your system is user-friendly and accessible, support services should exist on multiple online channels: online chat, social networking sites, email and so on.
Besides ensuring there’s a reachable point-of-call, it is also important to maintain a consistent service standard across all of these channels, including a quick response-time and the focus on resolving customers' issues. Implementing these simple service points will ensure that your brand is providing excellent customer service and will help to build trust and loyalty with your customers.
"56% of global consumers say customer service is 'very important' in brand choice and loyalty."
(source: Microsoft)
Ensure your loyalty program is easy to join and implement with essential earn & redeem methods.
Elevate your customer's experience by personalizing your brands points program to suit your customers' needs: providing free shipping for frequent or large purchasers, as added shipping costs are one of the main reasons people abandon their cart. By rewarding customers with free shipping, this may encourage them to increase their cart value and motivate them to spend more to earn more in future.
Another example could be providing early access to discounts or new products, creating an exclusivity to your loyalty program can make them feel special and provide a more personal experience. Influence.io can help you achieve that by offering a flexible loyalty program with customizable earn and redeem options.
To meet the preferences of your customers, make your loyalty program accessible across various channels: your website, via email, social media channels, and even on an app. It could be as simple as ensuring that the information that is displayed on your store's website should always be optimized for mobile devices too. Improving your design to suit both forms of consumption will allow for a more streamlined customer experience.
To create successful omni-channel email marketing campaigns, it's important to make your loyalty program easily accessible across all your online platforms. This means making it visible not just on your website, but also on your social media pages, eCommerce app, and other traditional marketing channels like email blasts. By doing this, you can ensure that your loyalty program reaches a wider audience and increases the chances of customer engagement and participation.
A focus on suitability per customer means that you have to consider all different types of channels for your earn & redeem loyalty program. As such, allowing customers to redeem vouchers online and in-store increases their convenience and strengthens their loyalty.
Your loyalty program should focus on maintaining and reinforcing desirable behaviors from your customers. Referrals are a great way to make an action of a loyal customer, a profitable one. Gain profit by asking your ‘brand-ambassador’ to refer a friend in return for a reward of their choice. Your brand profits through gaining a new customer and keeps an existing customer happy by rewarding them.
An effectively designed loyalty program can attract high-value customer segments while simultaneously deterring less valuable customers, resulting in cost savings. Furthermore, such a program can autonomously adjust itself and is intrinsically self-selecting.
Having a clear plan for what you want to achieve with your loyalty program is critical. You should be able to track and analyze data to determine if your program is meeting its goals.
In case your loyalty program is not delivering the expected results, it is important to make changes or adjustments to ensure its long-term success. These changes can be as straightforward as offering different redemption options for your customers to choose from. This allows you to identify which rewards are most popular and to encourage loyalty through these successful rewards.
The success of a business relies on the ability to build long-term relationships with customers, and an effective loyalty program is a crucial element in achieving this. To stand out from competitors, businesses must ensure their loyalty program focuses on good customer service, offers simple & personalized reward systems, is accessible through various channels and includes a clear plan for analyzing data to measure success.
By following these key elements, businesses can provide excellent customer service, build trust and loyalty with customers, and increase profitability.
Implementing a customer loyalty program provides numerous benefits for businesses. Loyalty programs allow companies to own the platform, build a community, and interact with users who want to extract value in exchange for the benefits of membership. Join Influence.io today to build your community.
By doing so, businesses can improve their interactions with their most valued buyers, dominate their competitors, pamper repeat customers through a VIP program, and establish a strong, predictable repeat purchase rate.
Additionally, implementing a customer loyalty program can lead to revenue growth, better relationships over longer time spans, reduction of one-time buyers, and better first and zero-party data.
By owning the attention of their customers and becoming the go-to solution when your customers seek a solution, businesses can run a loyalty programme with minimal effort. However, getting to that point requires commitment to loyalty, not just as a priority, but as a business strategy.
Building long-term loyalty focuses on building trust and strong relationships with customers over short-term gains. Therefore, emphasizing brand reputation over just offering the lowest price and prioritizing customer engagement and loyalty over constantly trying to acquire new customers. Focusing on building a loyal customer base that will stay with the brand over time.
With a key focus on fostering brand loyalty, businesses can build sustainable customer retention and turn regular buyers into enthusiastic fans who will stick with the brand for years to come, creating a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts for decades.