How do you align your communication goals and messages with your loyalty program objectives and benefits?

An example that I have seen is to encourage returning customers into becoming members of a subscription at a discount. Rewarding behaviors that they are already doing is a great way to ensure success of your loyalty program because the customer only senses gains but is ultimately increasing their Life Time Value with the company.

The primary of objective of customer loyalty programs is to increase customer retention. And to know if your efforts are working you need to track these KPIs: 1. AOV over time - it should be increasing. 2. Frequency of visits - you want customers to be shopping more often. 3. Opt-ins to communications - it's hard to drive #1 and #2 if you can't communicate with your customers.

Staying true to your branding at this stage is really important. Telling the story of your loyalty program needs to feel authentic and customer centric. If it is too pushy, overly sales focused, or worst of all not branded properly design and tone wise, customer's will become suspicious and will be less likely to convert.

Remember to leverage gamification! A loyalty program is ultimately a rewards program. Lean into making your customers feel rewarded and appreciated in your communications and incentives. Use congratulatory messaging and 'cash in' buttons so your audience feels like they are winning!

Segmentation allows you to communicate relevant messages to your audience, which increases open rates and conversions, and lowers unsubscribes. If you send irrelevant messages or promote products a customer has never bought or will likely never buy, they'll get annoyed and unsubscribe. If a customer is getting messages relating to their favorite products and purchasing habits, they'll more likely engage and convert.

Early on the article mentioned value proposition. It's important for your team INTERNALLY to understand the value that your loyalty program can create for your brand. Here's an example: Let's say you want to create a user loyalty program for your SaaS company. If this program is positioned internally as simply being a 'marketing' program, your sales team might not see the value. But if you use the loyalty program as a way to reduce user churn, suddenly, the sales team and upper management can see the value that the loyalty program creates.

While it's essential to define business objectives that are driving your organization to building a loyalty program you don't need to create the infrastructure of the program from scratch. There are third party loyalty program services and apps which can help you identify goals, set up incentives, collect data, and even plug-in to your email marketing platform or other tools through Zapier. Using a third party provider can make it much quicker to start automating customer communication and increasing the use and success of your loyalty program incentives.