Loyalty Program
Complexity creates
confusion
When you first start
your loyalty program the whole process is new to your brand community. It’s
important to not overwhelm them right off the bat, and all the great ideas you have will be
too much for your customers to process all at once.
From
our experience, you are better off starting a rewards program that is simple.
You can add additional functionality over time as your community grow
accustomed to the program. There are a couple key ways to get your loyalty
program off the ground quickly that are still very effective.
Simple earning rules
This is one of the most effective ways to encourage
loyalty and is also the easiest to set up. All you need to do is set the amount
of points you want to reward for
every dollar spent, and let your customers start earning. We recommend starting
with 1% back on purchases, and making points equal to 1 cent each. We’ve found
this to be an effective place to start.
The simplest way to set this up is to award 100 points for
each dollar spent. Setting the point value of purchases this way makes it
easy for your program members to understand what their purchases are worth from
an earning perspective, and sets you up to make easily understood spending
rules as well.
Simple
spending rules
Once
you have set the amount of points you will be rewarding, you need to also set
how points will be
redeemed.
Start your program by allowing a set number of points be used to get one dollar
off. This will let your customers know exactly how much their points are worth
as they earn them.
A
simple program lets you launch quickly
A simple program allows you to launch
now, rather than weeks or months down the road. As we like to say “A
simple loyalty program is always better
than no loyalty program”. Every moment spent in development has an opportunity
cost, so you miss out on time that your customers could be becoming engaged
members of your community. Every day that passes without implementing is
costing you potential revenue.
Instead
of spending weeks perfecting your collection of earning rules, or crafting a long list of
rewards for each VIP tier, starting with just few simple rules will get your
program live faster, so you can start building a community sooner rather than
later.
Starting
simple provides great marketing potential
This
staged launch process also provides a great way to market your loyalty program. Every time you
introduce new features to your program, you can market them to your customers
and encourage engagement. Say you launched with a simple earning and spending
rule, and now you are ready to add VIP tiers to your
program. You can email your community and let them know about the new program,
and what benefits they get with each tier.
When
launching, instead of marketing it as a new loyalty program, the simplest way
to communicate it to your customer base is to frame it as the official launch
of your brand community.
A
loyalty program is about you, but a brand community is about your awesome
customers.
This
shift in mindset will help you craft email, social media, and other marketing
communications that emphasize the value that the program brings to your
clients, and not just how it will help your business grow.
Simple
launches allow for customer feedback
If you launch with a
basic program you can get your customers to help you decide where to improve.
It should come as no surprise that the best ecommerce loyalty programs are the ones
that are driven by customer data and insight.
By
launching a simple program it is easy to interpret the data and results you are
seeing. The program is being driven by the few rules you have set to start. You
can use the information you gather from the early stage resultsto determine what is
effective and what is not.
You
may have to adjust how many points to award or what a point is worth. These
fundamental learnings can get lost in a program that has tons of features and
rules. It is important to have a firm grasp of your programs fundamentals before
proceeding with all the features available. I know we sound like a broken
record, but, when starting a loyalty program, keeping it simple is
key.
It
is also important to involve your customers in the evolution of your program.
Before introducing the next feature, ask your customers what they thought of
the last feature. Did they use it? Was it easy to use? Did they know it
existed? This will ensure that the features you are adding
in the future will not only used by your customers, but actually provides them
value.
Building
your program so that your community members want to use all of your
features will keep them engaged with your brand, and ultimate help the
community keep growing.
When
starting a loyalty program you need to keep it simple
We have launched
thousands of loyalty programs, and the successful
ones use a basic program to start. A simple program at launch gets you started
right away, gives you powerful remarketing potential, and allows you to involve
your customer in the program’s direction.
A
basic program launch allows you to avoid overwhelming customers, while at the
same time gathering valuable insight on where to improve the program in the future.
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