It’s 2019. Your customers, on average, spend 24 hours a week online. They shop online, they get their news online, they connect with friends online, they might even grocery shop online. Doesn’t it make sense that they should be able to redeem for their loyalty program rewards online, as well?
Incorporating an online rewards site with your loyalty program has multiple benefits – for your customers and for your business.
Benefit #1: An Online Rewards Site Makes Your Loyalty Program More Accessible and Customer-Friendly
The idea of a loyalty program that isn’t customer-friendly is a little ironic, isn’t it? But a surprising number of loyalty programs are still plagued by poor communication, multiple sign-ons, manual processes, and slow fulfillment.
Accessibility and customer experience are important factors in building customer loyalty and are crucial to the success of your loyalty program. An online rewards site can be integrated with your existing customer portals to make participating in your program a seamless part of the customer experience. (Additionally, given the amount of shopping and research today’s customers do from their phones, be sure to look into mobile optimization!).
Benefit #2: Online Rewards Are Scalable & Diverse
Allowing your customers to choose their rewards from an online catalog lets you offer a wide range of rewards. From movie tickets to big-ticket electronics, travel rewards, event tickets, and charitable donations, your customers are sure to be able to find something they love and that feels meaningful to them.
Additionally, a wide array of reward options means that you have something to offer each segment of your audience, with small, attainable rewards for part-time customers and big, meaningful rewards for top accounts. This way, your loyalty program is able to stimulate growth, maintain customer profitability, and secure retention across all segments of your customer base.
Benefit #3: A Loyalty Program Website Can Improve Marketing Automation & Adds New Touchpoints
Effective communication is an essential component of a loyalty program. In fact, the Incentive Marketing Association recommends allocating 10-20% of your loyalty program budget towards program communication.
However, if you are efficient with your loyalty marketing automation and use a greater variety of channels to reach your customers, that percent of your budget will go much further. A loyalty program rewards site adds the following touchpoints that you can use to market your program, your brand, and your products:
- Web copy & imagery.
- Announcements at the top of your site.
- Triggered emails when customers perform specific actions.
- Reward redemption invoices.
- Participant surveys.
- Optional modules for interactive platforms, leaderboards, or push notifications.
Once the collateral for these touchpoints is designed, delivery can be automated with tokens and triggers for increased personalization.
Benefit #4: An Online Rewards Platform Improves Reporting & Gives You More Customer Data
Another benefit of an online rewards site is that all of the records are digital. There’s no need to keep up with a paper trail or manually update Excel sheets. All of the data points are aggregated and easily accessed from an admin dashboard. From there, this data can be filtered or broken down into additional reports. You can also use registration, claims verification, invoice uploads, and surveys as an opportunity to collect additional customer data throughout the lifetime of your program.
All of these data points can be integrated with your CRM. This helps you maintain a cleaner, more complete customer database and gives your reps additional insights into customer engagement. Accurate customer data enables you to effectively segment your customers by region, company size, departments, and other metrics so that you can further personalize your sales and marketing strategy.
See It in Action: Integrated Loyalty Program Site Case Study
Ideas are one thing. Results are another. Check out this case study to see what this industrial distributor was able to achieve by integrating its e-commerce platform with an online rewards site.
Have ideas for your own loyalty program? Let’s start having those conversations!
Til next time,
Nichole Gunn
