FEBRUARY 24, 2023

How to Measure a Customer Loyalty Program's Success?

Nowadays, with excessive competition and endless choices for customers, brands are doing their best to focus on customer retention. Recent studies from Accenture show that at least 90% of companies, if not more, have invested in some sort of loyalty program to reward their loyal customers. Picking the right loyalty program is one thing, and then making sure that your customer base profitably engages with it is a whole other ball game.

Recent studies by Bond have disclosed that on average, a customer is part of at least 14.8 loyalty programs, but they are only active on around 6.7 of them. Many factors play a role in the success of a loyalty program.

From getting your customers to join your brand’s loyalty program to them actually participating in it and eventually earning and redeeming points, all of it takes effort from your brand.

We are going to talk about all the factors that make a difference and make your loyalty program a success.

What are customer loyalty programs?

Customer loyalty is when customers pick you over the competition every time. It is when the customers keep coming back to your brand for repeat purchases. And in order for you to reward your customer’s loyalty, a customer loyalty program helps you in providing value to your customers for their loyalty toward your brand.

Surely, your good quality products and or services will convince your customers to come back but it’s not enough. Since there are so many other brands and multiple different options out there, no one can blame them for trying different things. Hence, a loyalty program gives that extra boost of motivation for your customers to feel valued and for them to have a rewarding experience with your brand every time.

Effective ways to Promote Your Loyalty Program to Increase Enrollment

Now that we understand how the loyalty rewards program works, let’s begin by talking about the enrollment of your customers in your loyalty programs. Off the bat, it should be obvious that the loyalty program should excite your customers. Offering joining bonus rewards or twice as many reward points when your customers register on the loyalty program gives instant value to them.

Now, depending on the design or the type of loyalty program you’ve opted for, it may or may not be a paid one. Mind you, gaining the membership fees or the subscription fees on their joining is not the only important factor. Even with a free loyalty program, your customer fills in their details to register with your program, and now that is very vital for the success of your loyalty program.

For your customers to trust your brand with their personal data is a good measure of loyalty. On the other hand, this data is very good for your company to help you segment your audience and target them with customization and personalization.

Identifying your target audiences

The second most important step after getting satisfactory enrollment from your customers is segmenting them appropriately. Their data collected on registration gives you a goldmine of ways to attract customers. Your loyalty program like most can ask the customers to fill in details such as name, gender, date of birth, address, contact number, and, of course, email address.

Straightaway with this data itself, you can segment your audience based on their geographic location, their demographic variables such as gender, age, and so on. Further, their frequent interaction with your brand will reveal their preferences, their priorities, and their availability too.

Segmenting your audience helps you to know them better and then offer them better loyalty rewards to increase their interaction with your brand. Identifying and targeting your audience appropriately plays a major role in the success of your loyalty programs.

Setting goals and targets

Knowing what your customer likes, needs, and wants can help you leaps and bounds. It helps you to set productive goals and find creative and interactive ways to effectively engage your customers. Now, the research done by PDI shows that 50% of customers are highly inclined toward joining a loyalty program only if they can earn loyalty rewards on their daily purchases. Whereas, another study at Excentus reflects that 36% of customers are more likely to do repeat purchases if they can earn fuel rewards from the loyalty program.

These statistics prove that knowing your customer base better, understanding their preferences, respecting their priorities, and appealing to their likes can go a long way when it comes to profitable customer relationships. This will encourage and motivate your customers to not only do repeat purchases but also regularly participate in your loyalty programs and earn and burn reward points. Setting the best goals can have a win-win effect where your customers earn by buying something they like and redeeming for something they like too.

Collecting and analyzing customer data

Next comes the analyzing part of the data. Every time your customer interacts with your brand, whether it is to make repeat purchases or to participate in loyalty programs, data is consistently being collected by the system. This data can give you valuable insights into customer behavior. Let’s take the GiiftEngage platform for example.

It gives you the edge in managing your loyalty program with just a click. It gives you easy access to manage the content, launch targeted user engagement campaigns, and best of all, it gives you complete control over the statistics to analyze everything from accrual & redemption statistics, performance comparisons, and PV/UV analysis to retention analysis. To top it all up, it also provides you with customized reports for your customers’ interests.

Optimizing and adjusting the program

Considering that we just spoke about collecting customer data and analyzing it, you may be wondering why you should do that. It is because all these customer details can be of great help to your company. It empowers you to optimize your loyalty program and adjust the rewards and offers to get maximum ROI.

The data collected from the customer interaction can unveil many insights such as some customers like cash rewards more, while other customers prefer shopping options over travel options.

It may reveal that a certain percentage of customers that prefer traveling options are more likely to book their hotels and flights together. This can help you bring in the types of hotels they prefer and the airlines they choose to travel with. There are so many possibilities that can give you progressive results on a daily basis.

Key Takeaway, our conclusion

Even after having the perfect customer loyalty program, you still need to work on it regularly to keep optimizing it. Keeping your brand and your loyalty program up to date with the latest trend to cater to your customers better is the need of the hour.

Some recent studies of loyalty programs done by Bond reveal that 95% of customers prefer to engage with their loyalty programs using trending technologies such as chatbots, AI, VR, and smart devices.

The success of your company’s customer loyalty program depends on a combination of many factors but the core solution of it all is to pick the right loyalty partner who provides your brand with the very best and the most trending solutions that the loyalty industry has to offer.

Now, at Giift we are the world’s leading innovative loyalty solutions provider focusing on next-gen loyalty technology. We offer end-to-end loyalty program management aimed at acquiring new customers, building lasting relationships, and strengthening your brand loyalty.

At Giift, we believe that the best solution is the one that is tailor-made for your business. So, get in touch with our industry experts to find the right solution for you!