Four Key Components for a Successful Customer Loyalty Program

11/11/2016 | Share:

A good customer loyalty program can really make or break your brand. Consumers who have had negative experiences with loyalty schemes will tend to avoid the entire brand in the future, so creating a program consumers love will not only benefit your brand, but build a loyal customer base. Follow these simple tips to help get you started.

Simplicity is Key

It may seem like an obvious point, but keeping the rules and system of your loyalty scheme simple is something that will undoubtedly increase your sign ups. There’s nothing worse than signing up to a loyalty scheme to then realise in order to reap any sort of reward you need to complete a long list of confusing and unrealistic checkpoints, and even then the reward does not equate to the amount of effort you’ve put in. So whether it’s 1 point equalling £1 or the more points you get the larger the discount, keeping the system transparent will avoid confusion.

Make it Rewarding

We’ve touched on it briefly above, something that you definitely need to do is make the loyalty scheme rewarding. You need to make sure that customers are working towards something they actually want. There are a whole host of rewards such as money off vouchers, exclusive offers and using your points to buy things, so choose something that works for your business model. Whatever you choose, ensure that it is something that the customer wants.

Stay On Brand

Your loyalty program is an extension of your current business, so it is important to keep the scheme on brand. This not only means choosing a name for your loyalty program that is relevant and memorable, but also ensuring your reward scheme is recognisable as part of your brand. If you’re adding a loyalty program section to your website, be sure to keep it consistent with the rest of the site. If you decide to go with a third party to create the scheme, you must insist on white labelling.

Grow with your audience

As time goes on, your brand and business will evolve and grow as will your audience. Be sure to create a loyalty program that can do the same. Keep up with the times and be sure to keep evolving and adapting your program to stay fresh and current. This also involves listening to your customers, if there is a regular niggle about an area of the scheme – change it! Sticking to a rigid, old fashioned formula will only end in tears.