Nowadays, there are more and more companies decide to use loyalty program to attract customers to come back and purchase more. According to a report, each 10 000 firms, there will be 40 000 firms use loyalty program for their business. So now you can see that loyalty program appears everywhere: supermarket, gym club, pizza store …. Almost all of these owners of business above are not successful with their loyalty program, they may send out a thousand request about this program, but the response rate is just like a sand on a desert.
Why do they fail? And how we could success with loyalty program? Let’s find out in this post!
So, how to encourage customers to engage with our customer’s loyalty program? Here are some ideal tactics to win this battle:
1. Your loyalty program is too complicated!
Our survey of loyalty program shown that the loyalty program will be more effective if its policies are clear and easy to understand with customers. 21% of them don’t want to join in a complex loyalty program which they aren’t sure about what they will gain from it. So, in the very first step, you have to make a clear plan for your loyalty program and keep it clear as much as possible.
You have to create a guideline page which includes:
- How many ways that customers can earn points
- How many points that they can earn from each specific action
- How do they reserve point
- How many points are required to redeem a reward
- How many points that they can redeem for $1
…….
With this basic information, I’m sure that everything will be clear with your reward system.
2. Vary the way to earn points
Customers are tired with the traditional loyalty program with only one way to earn points: purchasing. Customers want a program that allow them to earn point everywhere around your site such as writing a review, sharing your product on the social network, refer a friend or doing anything else that you want they do.
Let’s imagine that your customers have to wait a year to receive a reward value $2 for their birthday without any other way to earn more points to use for discount, how would they feel? Will they want to join that program for just a penny value expectation?
3. Remind customers earn and spend points
To increase the participation rate of customers with loyalty program, it’s very important to don’t let customers forget to interact with reward points. In fact, with many companies, there are a not small number of customers who forget to redeem the points in their cart till the loyalty program end.
On site: Our customers are busy with their life, no one has time to check their points daily. Therefore, it’s necessary to create a reminder for customers about new potential ways to earn points as well as spend points. There are some ways that you can remind customers about their point: popup, slide, hot line, account status, product label …
In the past, when I participate a project with my friend to improve the performance of reward points programs for some E-commerce websites. These website faced with a problem that although they offer many ways for customers to receive points and their gift for these points is so interesting: up to 30% discount, free gift, … but the programs do not receive a positive response from customers. They ask us for help. After few weeks to understand all of information which is needed for re-structure these projects, we start to create some banner at welcome page, some hot line announce about reward points at check out page, … and the response of customers increase quickly !
Off site: Another strategy that is very efective is remind the customers is using Google adwords, Facebook advertising, email … to remind customers about reward points program. However, in my experience, the best tool for helping customers know and remember about your loyalty program is Email. I have doubled the participation rate of an E-commerce company with sending email remind them that they can use their current points to get up to 20% discount.
4. You don’t want to give the reward to your customers?
Do you really want to reward customers by their loyalty with your products or you just want to fraud your customers? I have read some stores have a loyalty program with a policy like this: “Each point equal $1, so if you can get 15 000 points you will receive a Canon camera model 2015” What do you think about this? Is there anyone want to join this program? They have to spend $15000 to get your reward. So keep your camera, no one want them!
Do not use marketing to fraud your customers! Loyalty program is used to hook customers to buy more and just buy from you. Then you will reward them by your gift. So make your reward reachable, no one want to join a game and they know that they won’t get the prize. If your point can be reach, your customers will want to join to achieve it by purchase more and that’s all you want so let make a deal, no trick!
