How Do You Create a Good Loyalty Points Program? 8 Tricks for Treating Your Customers Right

Are you trying to create a good loyalty points program that keeps your best customers coming back for more? Successful loyalty programs help businesses stand out, spread brand awareness, educate customers, and build relationships that leads to customer retention. Let’s face it, nothing is more spooky than your customers flirting with the idea of leaving you for a competitor.

Trick #1: Make Your Loyalty Points Program Accessible

According to Salesforce, 65% of all buyers expect a connected experience across all of their devices. That includes your loyalty points program! An effective loyalty program will let customers shop and redeem points for online rewards from their desktop, laptops, phones, and tablets. Full mobile optimization is key. You might even consider creating a mobile app for your loyalty program (especially if you are trying to motivate millennial customers!).

Accessing and interacting with your loyalty points program should be consistently easy and intuitive. Providing wishlists, making it easy for customers to check their point balances, and integrating your loyalty program with your company website or e-commerce platform will make participating in your program a joy!

Trick #2: Communication is Key

Communicate, communicate, communicate. From enrollment to redemption, and everywhere in between, make sure you are connecting with your customers. Successful loyalty programs provide clear, consistent communication, making sure customers are informed about the value of the program.

Fun, engaging content, collateral, and end-to-end loyalty marketing campaigns, will keep participation high and customers motivated.

Trick #3: Let Customers Choose their Rewards

You know the old saying, “The customer is always right?” That’s even more true for a loyalty points program. A good loyalty program is all about the customer. Letting your customers redeem their loyalty points towards millions of rewards will make the reward experience feel personalized and meaningful. Not only that, offering a wide variety of rewards means that you will have something to offer everyone, from part-time customers to VIP accounts.

Need help with loyalty program reward ideas? Check out these popular online rewards. For larger audiences, you might consider debit card rewards or gift card incentives, which are flexible but a little more impersonal.

Trick #4: Offer Top Rewards for Top Performers

Another consideration for your loyalty points program is to make sure that the value of the rewards scale to match the profitability of the customer. Including high-end merchandise and custom reward fulfillment makes top customers feel valuable and recognized..

For top accounts whose business you can’t live without, a group incentive travel trip might be just the ticket. Group incentive travel gives you the chance to really connect with your most valuable customers in a memorable way.

Trick #5: Only Give Customers Good Surprises

Interacting with your loyalty points program should be consistently and predictably awesome. But it’s important to keep things fresh and exciting. Try mixing things up with limited-time promotions and point bonuses, or adding elements of gamification to your program. Gamification is the use of points, scoring, and competitive elements to make your program more fun and engaging. Examples of gamification include spin-to-wins, interactive trivia, leaderboards, or on-the-spot points certificates.

But make sure that you only offer fun and rewarding surprises. This brings up our next point:

Trick #6: Follow Through with Fast Reward Fulfillment and Redemption Support

Whether it’s fast reward fulfillment or live redemption support for a merchandise rewards program, or planning and management for a travel program, make sure you don’t drop the ball at reward redemption. The reward redemption process is a chance to really reinforce the positive emotions a loyalty points program can create for your brand. By the same token, offering a poor customer experience at reward redemption will cause your loyalty program to do more harm than good.

Trick #7: Seek Customer Feedback

One of the benefits of a customer loyalty program is that it gives you the opportunity to let customers know that they matter. Loyalty programs are the perfect opportunity to seek customer feedback. You can even offer points to your customers for completing satisfaction surveys, updating contact information, or providing lifestyle or demographic data to use for future marketing.

As a vendor, this sort of customer feedback is invaluable. But make sure you use it! Really look at what your customers have to say and use that information to improve your products or services.

Trick #8: Analyze Your Data

Loyalty program platforms can grant you additional insight into the customer experience. You can see which accounts are most engaged and what promotions or rewards make the biggest impact. Sharing this information with your sales team can be a powerful sales enablement tool. Following up with engaged accounts creates opportunities for cross-sells and upsells. Looking at popular promotional items can give you ideas for your next promotion and inform future loyalty marketing.

Integrating your loyalty program with your CRM makes this data more accessible and empowers your sales team to use that data to improve your service. Additionally, tracking loyalty program KPIs helps you monitor the success of your marketing and to spot accounts where you need to spark re-engagement.

Download This Guide to Create Your Own Loyalty Points Program

If you are interested in creating your very own loyalty points program, we just released a new e-book! This free e-book will walk you through program design, reward selection, choosing loyalty program software, marketing your program, and more. Think of it as our treat to you!