Designing Loyalty Programs for an Omnichannel Customer

Does your loyalty program and customer engagement programs account for changing customer preferences?

With over 7 billion global cell phone subscribers and nearly 1.7 billion active social media accounts online, the world continues to rapidly digitize. With ever demanding customer expectations, retailers need to continuously innovate with technological solutions that go beyond the online transactions.

As a retailer, you can leverage the ubiquity of mobile phones and the growing popularity of social media to ensure customer satisfaction while driving footfall and conversion rates. So let’s ask the key question: Does your loyalty program and customer engagement programs account for changing customer preferences? Consumers today don’t like stacking up their wallets with loyalty program cards. They prefer an easy and adaptable mobile app loyalty program.

The Different Facets of Digital Loyalty Programs

Technology acts as an enabler in designing loyalty programs that encourage customer adoption and customer loyalty. Depending on your mobile loyalty application vendor, you can set your own rewards or use pre-defined rewards. The following three steps outline the prerequisites for implementing a successful digital loyalty program:

Define the program goal and the target audience: It is necessary to first identify the primary goal of the loyalty program (increase in repeat customers, increase in average order size, decrease in customer churn, etc.) and the intended target audience.(high loyal customers, repeat customers with high order size, etc.)

Set and measure ROI objectives clearly: While your loyalty program should motivate your target audience, it should also ensure positive ROI for the business. A well thought out loyalty program should consider the needs of both your customers and your brand. Merely setting goals is not enough; you need to ensure that there are credible means to measure these goals and incorporate mechanisms to improve upon existing systems.

Promote your program through the right channels: Again, merely implementing a loyalty program is not enough, you need to promote it wisely. Social media, email marketing, and mobile marketing are the main channels you can use to successfully build program awareness. You can also use various other creative means by using content promotion and syndication tools to promote your programs.

Executing a Successful Digital Loyalty Program

Capturing customer information is a prerequisite to execute any successful loyalty program irrespective of the channels they were acquired from.

Typically, a customer’s mobile number is often used as a unique identifier for a program registration. Customers may need to enter their mobile number into a kiosk at an outlet; alternatively an in-store device may automatically recognize their phone and punch a mobile card. For home deliveries, a QR code on the receipt can be scanned to add loyalty points. Online purchases also automatically add points to the customer’s account. Your mobile loyalty program should easily integrate with email and social media so that you can send tailored offers to repeat customers based on their buying patterns; and customers can share offers via social media to earn additional loyalty points.

Payment disruption players such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay and a surge of other prominent players such as Paytm, Citrus, etc. are changing the way people transact at retail outlets. Your mobile loyalty app should be able to integrate with these popular payment options. Ideally, using a payment app at checkout, you should be able to fill the bill details, add a customer’s loyalty points, and incorporate any available discount coupons. It is also important to keep track of customer trends while integrating loyalty programs across mobile and social channels.

The total value of mobile payment transactions in 2016 is forecasted to grow by nearly 210%. Retailers need to capitalize this opportunity and devise the best coupon offers, loyalty program deals, discounts, and other campaigns that can be accessed through mobile wallets.

So, go ahead and stay competitive by building an omnichannel loyalty program that incorporates the demands of today’s digitally savvy customers.

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Amrutha is a passionate marketer with over 8 years of experience in the areas of SaaS-B2B marketing, demand generation, enterprise marketing and product marketing across Retail-tech, Conversational AI and IT management domains. As a passionate technology marketer, she loves helping SaaS companies achieve their market expansion, product adoption, brand awareness and demand generation goals. Apart from loving her profession as a tech marketer, she is also passionate about travelling and blogging.