Like many endeavors, the more you put into your customer loyalty platform, the more you get out. This means taking advantage of all the options available to you and ensuring you keep track of the flowing data you hope to get from successful business.
However, if your overarching approach to a customer loyalty platform in general is wrong, then you may fall flat at the first hurdle. This is why Social&Loyal shows you practical applications to ensure you get the most out of your loyalty program as well as making some broader considerations in terms of customer engagement.
Practical Considerations for Your Customer Loyalty Platform:
Establish Your Loyalty Program
The first step of getting the most out of your loyalty platform is one of equal parts excitement and trepidation. You will be making the decisions which will set out the structure of your loyalty program and making either a first or new impression on your chosen market.
This is because loyalty programs are integral to the marketing landscape from now and long into the future. If you are a new brand, you have the opportunity to impress right off the bat. If you are an established company, there is pressure to prove your previous successes are not only relegated to the past.
As customer loyalty software becomes industry standard, more eyes are on individual customer loyalty programs. As the perception of success often moves within fickle parameters, ensuring you set yourself out as a loyalty platform worth investing in is imperative. Do your research before you launch and it will reap dividends.
Build Customer Profiles
To decide on the customer loyalty program which best suits your customer base, you need to know them first. This means researching your demographics, whether established or potential. Use social media to see who is responding to your profile, find out what similar businesses do to achieve success and ask potential customers what they respond to and don’t from your product or service.
Using your loyalty software, you will be able to compare and contrast which demographics are more willing to provide your business with custom and which you need to work on. Once you have demographics, you can use the same software to collect customer data and create individual profiles.
Stay Engaged with Appropriate Feedback
However, all of this data isn’t to be used before you launch your customer loyalty program and then filed away never to be looked at again. Your customer data is a living thing. It fluctuates and is useful at some periods more than others.
Staying engaged means using your chosen loyalty platform to provide updates on what might benefit the customer. This is done by feeding their individual data into their profile. It is also done by allowing them the ability to choose what type of engagement they want.
Having preferences on your chosen interface (whether through a particular domain, using an app or even simply face to face interaction at point of sale) allows customers the reassurance that they have control over how you as a brand interact with them. Obviously, this also extends to being up front on how you use their data and helping them to know how this data use can benefit them.
Promote
Customer engagement takes so many forms. It is everything from seeing in store advertisements to push notifications on apps. Engagement increases during promotional periods and these are often the best opportunities to improve loyalty while simultaneously courting new business.
Social media is a necessity for many businesses. Some depend on them so much, algorithm changes can make or break their entire business model. You need to ensure your customer engagement on social media is one which is worth the investment.
One part is by using loyalty software to stay on top of trends. It allows you to see where you and similar businesses like you are succeeding and failing, but it also allows you to create content which helps keep you relevant to your customer base. Promo codes are a great way to stay engaged and also prove loyalty is rewarded by showing those who don’t stay engaged will miss out.
Contests and promotions aren’t limited to social media, but they will be greatly improved when incorporated into it. Photo contests, ‘like’ contests, caption contests, fan art contests and so many more options are available to you. Making the most of your loyalty platform means using them and then building on them by analyzing success rates and scoping feedback.
Getting the Most Out of Your Loyalty Program:
Being Creative
These practical uses of your loyalty platform are the keys to ensuring you stay engaged. Being creative is one way you can make sure it is the right kind of engagement. With increased accessibility and types of customer interaction comes increased competition. Brands which don’t reflect the standards of their customer base will lose out. Being creative is something to which customers in every demographic respond.
Being creative means taking the information you have from customer data and appealing to their wants in new and interesting ways. Use trends, be artful and create surprises, these will all help you stand out and encourage loyalty.
Bespoke Loyalty
With all of these opportunities for engagement, customers find themselves with the corresponding opportunity to be spoiled. Using bespoke loyalty reward programs means you can be the one to spoil them.
Customers will show through their purchases and interactions what they value in your brand and you can use this to provide the rewards that make an impression. More than that, you can provide rewards which they didn’t know they wanted until you presented them. If getting the most our of your loyalty platform means putting the most in, going the extra mile with customized loyalty will be worth it, especially when it comes to referrals.
Conscience Led Loyalty
There is misinformation about data usage out there, but it is negligent to see customers as conscienceless drones. Facebook’s recent problems with alleged data misappropriation means you need to be the kind of transparent company which proves they use their data only to improve their customer experience and not to exploit them.
The brands which go even further are those who are truly getting the most out of their loyalty platform. This is because they are not only seeing the reward for themselves, they are able to affect social change with the way they interact with customers. This can be by providing rewards which promote community improvement and, most importantly, showing you are a brand which not only hears the needs of their customers, but does something about it. The right loyalty software allows you to do this. Ensuring you get the most out of it, is up to you.
