The ability to customize your loyalty rewards program presents an ocean of opportunities for brands and numerous benefits for customers. A successful rewards program speaks the brand language and taps into a customer’s emotions. It helps customers to get engaged and stay connected to a brand.
The loyalty rewards platform should empower a business to customize their loyalty rewards program as per the business need, perform analysis, get insights and take proactive action with ease. As per 2017 Colloquy Loyalty Census, 53% customers state the top reason for participation in a loyalty rewards program is ease of use.
1. Tier-Specific Rewards
Tiers are a great way to customize the rewards program for your end users. Customizing rewards for different tiers creates a feeling of exclusivity. Brands can offer special rewards to customers in every tier.
Icebreaker, a global hi-end sports clothing brand, offers tier-specific rewards to customers in their rewards program. They offered an automatic reward when a member reached a certain level. The automatic rewards are not published in advance and acts as a pleasant surprise element to the user. For example, when a member reaches the ‘Seeker level’, they receive a 20 GBP gift certificate. Their strategy is to build customer delight without diluting the brand by giving away discounts.
2. Member Filters
A loyalty rewards program is never successful without its ability to create targeted campaigns using rewards points. With the filters feature, you can quickly slice and dice members into various segments based on details such as points balance, purchase history, referrals, enrollment date, date of birth etc.
Once segments are created, targeted marketing campaigns can be directed at these segments to maximize revenue from those segments.
The advantage of member filtering is to focus on those users who are most relevant to your business.
3. Tagging and Segmentation
Segmenting the shoppers on different attributes allows brands to create groups of shoppers with similar qualities. This helps brands to target marketing campaigns to suit shoppers’ needs and behaviors. The tagging feature facilitates the creation of such segments. Instead of manually searching and tagging different users separately, multiple users can be selected and placed into a segment.
Let’s take an example- Andrea, Ecommerce manager at Elite Dresses a clothing brand, while analyzing her customer accounts finds that 5 customers are making purchases >$5,000 on their website every month. Andrea can tag these customer as ‘Premium Customers’ and set a special loyalty rewards on their next purchase. At the end of the year, Andrea decides to offer a special reward for these Premium customers.
4. CRM Integrations
Integration of Loyalty Rewards Programs with CRM allows brands to send customized emails to their users and include rewards program information in their marketing emails. Brands use email platforms to establish a personalized connect with their customers for different instances. E.g. welcome email, reminders, product updates, offers, invitations, greetings etc. Creative and diversified email personalization methods are used to increase brand engagement, foster customer loyalty.
Research by Accenture states, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that personalizes messages. With such integrations, brands can set rules, triggers and extend personalized offers to their loyalty program members with relevant content as per their program state, interests etc. In doing so, open rates and conversion rates can be improved.
The above features can empower brands to create precisely targeted rewards promotions for their key segments. This helps brands maximize revenue from their loyal customers. They can enhance the loyalty rewards program by offering customization with a simple approach for brands to improve the customer engagement. A data driven loyalty platform can help brands, to act upon the user data more efficiently and effectively.
Samir Palnitkar is the founder of Zinrelo, a technology company that specializes in loyalty rewards programs. An expert on building and growing “retention-first” businesses, he frequently writes on customer retention and loyalty rewards programs. Samir is also the founder of four other successful startups, holds five technology patents, and is the author of two technical books.
