5 Key Ideas for Setting Up a Successful Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs can have an astounding impact on your business, increasing visits, spend, and overall revenue immediately and for years to come.

But to reap the rewards of a loyalty program, the program must be set up and run with both strategy and foresight.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of five “dos” and “don’ts” on setting up a loyalty program for success.

1. Don’t Make it Too Complicated.

Your loyalty program should have more than one path to sign up, but those paths should all share one thing: ease of use.

Offering in-store sign up opportunities is always a good idea because when a customer is inside the store, they’re thinking about your brand and future purchases. You can streamline any sign-up process by providing electronic options, but making that electronic option user friendly is absolutely critical. By keeping things quick and easy, customers don’t feel as if they’re sacrificing too much time to join your loyalty program and are more likely to hop on board.

But what about customers who really are in a hurry and can’t be slowed down by even the simplest in-store sign up? Making sure a rushing customer has a way to sign up from home, at their convenience, means that chance at gaining a loyalty program member doesn’t go away once they’re out the door. Advice to keep things simple still stands, however, even if the customer has a lot more time to work with. You can learn more about the best ways to implement your customer loyalty program with simplicity in mind by checking out our webinar.

2. Do Get Employees Excited.

Simple signage won’t cut it. If you can get your employees excited about being brand ambassadors, then that excitement can lead to more customers who are eager to be a part of your loyalty program. Your employees are the public-facing representatives of your brand, after all, so they’re the ones in the best position to generate more sign-ups. When you get the employees excited about signing up more customers for your loyalty program, that increases your chances—sometimes by a lot.

But how do you get employees excited? One of the best ways is to give employees more incentives, so they’re more interested in promoting the benefits of your program to customers. For example, our webinar details how a Paytronix client used an internal employee promotion to get a 244% increase in loyalty program sign-ups in just one month. Incentives can differ from store to store, but getting ideas from successful loyalty programs is always beneficial.

3. Don’t Make it Hard for Customers to Provide Feedback.

Your program shouldn’t operate in a vacuum—in fact, it’s to your benefit if it doesn’t. A customer loyalty program is all about building a relationship with your customers, which just can’t happen if you don’t accept feedback or you make the feedback process too difficult. If you can keep an open mind (and an open line of communication) when it comes to customer feedback, you might be surprised by how advantageous feedback can really be.

Learning how to communicate with customers and collect feedback efficiently can lead to significant loyalty program improvements in the future. Those improvements can yield more customers who are loyal to your brand and willing to spread the good news about your program to the people they know.

4. Do Get Customers Their First Reward Fast.

First impressions are important in just about every avenue of life, and that doesn’t stop being true when it comes to loyalty programs.

Both engagement and long-term value increase when your customers are able to receive or earn their first reward quickly. It’s in your best interest to hook loyalty members in with a fast first reward, and setting up your program to do so doesn’t have to be difficult. Going about this in the best way will change depending on your particular situation, but know that starting off with the right reward quickly can make a big impact on the success of your program.

Learn more about your customer’s engagement with “first rewards” by checking out our webinar. Plus, what psychological trick can you use to “prime the pump” and see significantly more frequent visits—with no extra cost for you?

5. Do Set Up Timely Automated Touchpoints.

No, you don’t have to “bother” your loyalty program members, but keeping in contact with them is crucial. Setting up your marketing automation with the perfect balance of timing and messaging can make this process simple and worthwhile.

The first step is to figure out which kinds of touchpoints to use. For example, do you think emails or text messages might suit your branding and customer base better? Or maybe a combination of both? The medium of a message, the wording of it, and how frequently they appear—all these things could make the difference between a loyalty member being thankful for a periodic reminder, or resentful of your intrusion. When building your touchpoints, it’s important to decide what methods to use, the reason for the contact, and the timing of each.

Also, think about what drives your audience. For example, which messages are most likely to get people in the store? Our webinar mentions a customer-friendly type of engagement that 72% of people say they prefer to receive, so that might be a good place to start.

At first glance, these five tasks seem easy to accomplish, but it’s the details of each that set a loyalty program up for success—or failure.

There’s a lot to learn, but we’ve made it easy: We’ve put together a free, on-demand webinar that answers all of these questions and more, called “The Dos and Don’ts of Rolling Out a Loyalty Program.” 

In just under 30 minutes, you’ll learn the crucial points that turn a so-so loyalty program into one that engages customers, increases their visits and average spend, and adds a major bump to your revenue.

Click here to watch the free, streaming webinar now!