Going the Distance: Four Ways to Build a Better Customer Loyalty Program for Your Brand

It’s easy enough for a customer to join your loyalty program, especially when you’re offering an incentive such as discounts. All your customer has to do is give out some basic information, and voila! They’re in the fold, a brand new loyalty member with your company. From there, it’s happily ever after. You offer the perks; they stand solidly by you, bringing you their continued business. Simple. Or is it? In reality, just how many of those customers are act ively participating in your loyalty program? Do you know? Sure, loyalty program memberships are on the rise according to market research company eMarketer, having jumped 25 percent in the space of just two years. However, that figure may be a bit misleading. The truth is that, while loyalty program sign-ups may be more numerous, active participation in such programs is actually in decline. At the time of the study, the average US household had memberships in 29 loyalty programs; yet consumers were only active in 12 of those. That’s just 41 percent. And even that meager figure represents a drop of 2 percentage points per year over each of the preceding four years, according to a study by loyalty-marketing research company COLLOQUY.

When discounts just aren’t enough

So what’s a brand to do? How can you make your loyalty program worth your customer’s while—as well as your own? After all, gaining a new loyalty member doesn’t mean much if your customer isn’t actively participating in your program. Consider this: Does your customer loyalty program offer members anything different from what your competitors are offering? Chances are your program includes discounts. That’s a given. And what customer doesn’t appreciate a good discount? But when every other company out there is providing this staple benefit in comparable amounts, it becomes less and less likely that customers will remain loyal to any one particular brand. Frankly, it’s all too easy for customers to get lost in a sea of loyalty member discounts. They’re everywhere. In fact, just under half of internet users perceive that all rewards programs are alike, according to a 2015 eMarketer survey. The key to success, then, is to differentiate your business from the crowd. If you can offer your customers something unique and valuable beyond the usual discount, chances are they’ll be more likely to stick with your brand. Here’s some inspiration from companies who get it.

Virgin: Reward more purchases with more benefits.

That’s not to say you need to get rid of discounts entirely. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Customers still love a good discount. The goal is to be creative in terms of the loyalty perks you offer. Take the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, for example. As part of its loyalty program, the airline allows members to earn miles and tier points. Members are inducted at the Club Red tier, from which they can move up to Club Silver and then Club Gold. Here, it’s not just a discount. It’s status. And people respond to feeling important, elite. Still, even where the rewards themselves are concerned, Virgin is motivating loyalty customers with some pretty attractive offers. At the Club Red tier, members earn flight miles and receive discounts on rental cars, airport parking, hotels and holiday flights. But as members rise in tiers, they get even more. At the Club Silver tier, members earn 50 percent more points on flights, access to expedited check-in, and priority standby seating. And once they reach the top, Club Gold members receive double miles, priority boarding and access to exclusive clubhouses where they can get a drink or a massage before their flight. Now that’s some serious incentive to keep coming back for more. Discounts are still part of the equation – but they are designed with innovation and personal value in mind, elevating them to more than just savings.

Amazon Prime: Pay upfront and become a VIP.

What if your customers only had to pay a one-time upfront fee to get a year’s worth of substantial benefits? It may not sound like the smartest business idea at first glance. But take a closer look. Amazon Prime users pay a nominal $99 a year to gain free, two-day shipping on millions of products with no minimum purchase. And that’s just one benefit of going Prime. It’s true that Amazon loses $1-2 billion a year on Prime. This comes as no surprise given the incredible value the program offers. But get this: Amazon makes up for its losses in markedly higher transaction frequency. Specifically, Prime members spend an average of $1,500 a year on Amazon.com, compared with $625 spent by non-Prime users, a ccording to a 2015 report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Patagonia: Cater to customer values.

Sometimes, the draw for consumers isn’t saving money or getting a great deal. The eco-friendly outdoor clothing company Patagonia figured this out back in 2011, when it partnered with eBay to launch its Common Threads Initiative: a program that allows customers to resell their used Patagonia clothing via the company’s website. Why is this program important to customers? And how does it benefit Patagonia? The company’s brand embraces environmental and social responsibility, so it was only fitting that they create a platform for essentially recycling old clothing rather than merely throwing it away. The Common Threads Initiative helps Patagonia build a memorable brand and fierce loyalty by offering its customers a cause that aligns with deep personal values. OK, so their customers get to make a little money, too. Everybody wins.

American Airlines: Gamify your loyalty program.

If you’re going to offer your customers a loyalty program, why not make it f un? After all, engagement is key to building a strong relationship with your customer. And what better way to achieve that goal than making a game of it. American Airlines had this very thing in mind when it created its AAdvantage Passport Challenge following its merger with USAirways. The goal: find a new way to engage customers as big changes were underway. Using a custom Facebook application, American Airlines created a virtual passport to increase brand awareness while offering members a chance to earn bonus points. Customers earned these rewards through a variety of game-like activities, from answering trivia questions to tracking travel through a personalized dashboard. In the end, participants earned more than 70 percent more stamps than expected – and the airline saw a ROI of more than 500 percent. The takeaway: people like games.

Stand out from the crowd.

Your approach to your customer loyalty program should align with your overall marketing approach. Effective branding is about standing out, not blending it. Being memorable is key. To this end, keep in mind that loyalty programs are no longer a novelty. That means that yesterday’s strategies won’t work moving forward, so look for ways to rise above the noise, setting yourself apart from the cloying drone of countless other cookie-cutter programs.

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In It to Pin It: 8 Ways to Win New Customers with Pinterest

A Pinterest-ing development in social media

The results are in and they’re rather stunning: Pinterest is now the third largest social network in the U.S., right behind Facebook and Twitter (Google+ who?). Moreover, a recent study by BlogHer showed that women trust recommendations from Pinterest more than any other platform. Not too shabby for a network that’s barely two years old and still in an invite-only open beta phase.

The basic mechanics of the site are simple. Members (known as “Pinners”) can establish a profile and “pin” all the cool, funny, trendy and inspirational things that they find in their online travels to digital bulletin boards, where images (and their associated links) are bookmarked. Pinners use these boards to visually document anything and everything pertaining to their interests, whether those interests entail fashion, home décor, food, parenting, wedding planning, tech gadgets or cars.

As you’d expect from any social network, pinners can follow each other. They can also “repin” other users’ images as well as like or comment on pins. Naturally, there’s also integration with the other Big Two, with the option to share links to pins on Facebook and Twitter.

More interesting is the question of why the site has caught fire so quickly. The primary reason lies in its anatomy. True to its name, Pinterest creates a highly streamlined experience for its users that is curated according to their interests. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where users have to sift through every photo and status update from those they follow in a linear fashion, Pinterest users can focus solely on their hobbies without their feeds being cluttered with information that holds no value to them.

The most important question, of course, is how you can harness the power of this explosive new social network to grow your business. To answer that question, here are eight ways you can use Pinterest to win over new customers and fans:

1. Tap into what people love.

Before you dive in, take some time to study the ecosystem and how its members interact. One of the greatest advantages of Pinterest from a marketing perspective is that the community is very open, so it’s easy to see who’s influential in a certain area of interest and what types of content generate the most repins and comments.

By monitoring these trends, you can identify where the best opportunities lie for your brand to create the kind of content that your customers crave.

2. Focus on values, not products.

Think your brand isn’t a good match for an image-driven platform? Don’t be too quick to dismiss your Pinterest potential. Plenty of brands that don’t seem like the most obvious fit for Pinterest – from GE to Kotex – have found creative ways to leverage the platform to engage with customers.

The key is focusing not on your products or services but on the core values that define your brand. Organize your boards around these pillars of your brand and share things there that anyone who shares that common interest or passion would enjoy. Make sure to offer a healthy balance of content that includes your products where relevant but also great stuff from across the Web as well as repins from other users.

Whole Foods Market, for example, has quickly emerged as a Pinterest rock star using this approach. The company’s core values include caring about the community and the environment, promoting healthy eating habits and providing education about good nutrition. Drawing upon these values, they’ve created a diverse collection of boards –ranging from “Who Wants Dinner?” to “Winter Entertaining” to “Super HOT Kitchens” to “We’re Used to Reusing” – where they share content from a wide array of sources that collectively represents the Whole Foods lifestyle.

3. Tell a story in pictures.

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Pinterest is image-based rather than message-based – which is one of the key reasons for its success. When users scroll through feeds or boards, they’re presented with a simple, uncluttered interface that includes a stream of pictures interrupted just slightly by a brief caption below. As a result, to be successful, it’s important to ensure that the images you pin to your boards tell the story of the content they represent in a visually compelling way.

For example, if you want to share a link to a post from your blog on Pinterest, you need to make sure it includes a powerful image that encapsulates its key theme or message and is also intriguing enough to prompt someone to click through to see the full story.

Keep in mind, too, that when followers re-pin your images, they can change the caption. As a result, it’s important that the images you pin can stand on their own outside the context of your brand’s boards so that they continue to convey your message and values as they are repinned from one board to another.

4. Be a participant, not just a contributor.

Creating boards that offer great curated content organized around your customers’ interests is a good first step. But as with any social network, to get the most out of your presence on Pinterest, you must also listen and engage, not just broadcast.

Repinning other users’ content to your brand’s boards demonstrates that you’re there to do more than push your own agenda by elevating those who have something interesting to offer on your topics of interest. Likewise, following other users’ boards and commenting on others’ pins is an effective relationship-building tactic that can draw new eyes (and potential new customers) to your own boards.

5. Let your customers create content for you.

Pinterest makes it easy to crowdsource content. All you have to do is create group pinboards and invite other users to pin content to those boards – a great way to spark engagement with your brand.

You can also use group pinboards as a springboard for contests where you ask customers to pin pictures of themselves using your products, with prizes for the most creative, innovative or inspiring images. It’s a win-win strategy for both your brand and your customers, as your customers can enjoy a turn in the spotlight while you can promote your products in a tasteful way that’s very palatable to the community.

6. Diversify your boards.

Another element that differentiates Pinterest from Facebook and Twitter is that users have the option to follow specific boards in addition to following users. This means that a user may elect to follow just one or two of your boards rather than everything you post.

While this may initially seem like a disadvantage to you, it’s actually a benefit. Why? Because it means you don’t have to worry about limiting your content to only that which offers the broadest appeal. Instead, you can tailor each board to fit a specialized interest.

Returning to our Whole Foods example, each of their boards is tailored to a fairly narrow area of interest, whether that’s recipes, seasonal entertaining, home décor, DIY projects, gadgets or books. While all of these boards may not appeal to every Whole Foods customer, by providing such a wide array of boards, the brand has greatly increased its chances that every customer can find something that resonates with their interests.

7. Make sure your great content can be found.

If you’re investing the resources required to create and curate interesting content, you want to make sure it can be found by the greatest possible number of customers and potential customers, right? The good news here is that there are tactics you can use to boost your odds.

First, just like Twitter, Pinterest supports hashtags. Tagging each image with the central idea or theme of your board will increase its chances of being found in search. Additionally, the sharing tools built into Pinterest automatically pick up these hashtags and include them when users share your content on Facebook and Twitter.

Also, make sure when possible to form the name of your boards around keywords. For example, West Elm offers home décor boards organized around specific color palettes (“Coral,” “Aquamarine”) and patterns (“Stripes,” “Chevrons”). By naming their boards according to these keywords, West Elm helps lead users who are looking for decorating ideas focused on that color to their boards.

8. Turn pins into traffic.

Don’t overlook the opportunity to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website. If you pin cool imagery and interesting content from your site to your boards, you’re basically seeding Pinterest with a lot of links back to your site.

You can also add the “Pin It” button to your site right next to your other social sharing buttons in order to make it as easy as possible for visitors to add images from your site directly to their boards.

And if something either you or one of your customers pins happens to become incredibly popular? Think of all the potential clicks back to your site!

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Mythbusters: Website Edition

As a web designer, I routinely speak with business owners and marketing managers who are in the midst of a website redesign project for their company. During these conversations, I am always amazed by the myths about user experience and interface design that they mistakenly cling to. Many of these misconceptions are the by-product of previous website projects – leftover relics from an Internet of old. Others are more baffling, as their tenets are not now and never were true. So in the interest of championing the best practices and principles of modern website design, we’re channeling our inner myth busters and blowing the lid off five of these most persistent myths (dramatic explosions not included):

Myth #1: Visitors need/want instructions on how to use your site.

The Internet is no longer a new and unfamiliar medium, yet many companies still populate their websites with content that seems targeted to someone who has never actually navigated the Web before. When you include instructions for visitors about how to use to your website, you are adding a lot of extra words, which in most cases only serve to weigh down your pages with unnecessary visual clutter. In fact, the goal of any good design is to create an interface that is so intuitive that no instruction or explanation is necessary to help visitors move from one page to the next and complete routine processes such as making a purchase or signing up for an account. As a result, if you feel instructions are necessary, that inclination is a major red flag for serious design flaws that must be addressed in order to provide a quality experience for your user. To be fair, there are certainly instances where some level of guidance is needed. Complex interactions or applications that are truly unlike anything that has come before on the Web will require some level of training for your users, but the vast majority of websites do not fall into this category. If your site is, well, just a website (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), forego the instructions and have faith that your users are savvy enough to know and understand the well-established conventions of using the Internet.

Myth #2: These days, everyone has a high bandwidth connection.

Over the last few years, the average size of a webpage has doubled, largely due to our profuse use of images. Current design trends that call for giant, page-spanning photographs combined with the drive to deliver high-resolution images for retina displays mean that the file size of the images we are using continues to climb. Many people argue that this is acceptable because, as the size of our webpages grow, so does the bandwidth speed of our Internet connections. But is this really the case? It is true that the number of people with access to high bandwidth connections continues to increase, but the belief that all visitors have the benefit of a lightning-fast connection is nothing more than wishful thinking. There are still many areas of the country and the world that are shackled to the type of slower connections that are only a distant memory for many of us. Also, keep in mind as well that mobile visitors may be operating on a network that is either unreliable or has data download limits. In both of these instances, a website that is bloated with large content (i.e., giant videos, unoptimized images, etc.) will pose a problem. Ensuring that your website is optimized for performance is as important today as it has ever been, regardless of how fast connection speeds may be. After all, no one has ever said, “Wow, this website loaded TOO quickly for me!” Better performance and faster downloads improve the quality of experience for all users.

Myth #3: There may be some users visiting your site on a mobile device, but not that many.

Years ago – when the iPhone was still a novelty and everyone and their 12-year-old brother didn’t walk around with a smartphone in their pocket – this may have been the case. But today, visitors are accessing your website on a wide variety of devices with a range of different screen sizes. Examining the hundreds of websites that we manage reveals that an average of 30 percent of all traffic to those sites comes from mobile devices of one kind or another, and for some, it’s as high as 50 percent or more. This is consistent with the forecasts of industry analysts, who predict that by 2015 – that’s next year, folks! – the majority of all Web traffic will come from mobile devices. Additionally, not only are visitors accessing your site on mobile devices, but the same visitor is likely using multiple devices to access your content. We call this the “muti-device user”. As we covered previously in our article “Website Design for a Multi-Device World”: The multi-device world is populated by multi-device users. While a staggering variety of devices are, indeed, being used to access web content today, it’s also important to remember that the same user is often using multiple different devices to access your website – and they expect that site to work well regardless of which device they happen to be using at the time. Gone are the days of “mobile users” coming to your site only to locate your phone number or directions to your office. Today’s mobile users – and multi-device users – expect convenient, on-demand access to the same content that they can find on the desktop version of the site. Clinging to an outdated belief that “no one has a reason to visit my website on a mobile device” will quickly translate to “no one has a reason at all to visit my website at all.” Read more: Website Design for a Multi-Device World

Myth #4: You should open off-site links in a new tab/window.

This is the most common myth that I hear from clients, who insist that all links that lead to another site must open in a new tab or window. This request stems from a belief that if a visitor leaves your website to look at content somewhere else on the Web, they will never find their way back. By opening that link into a new tab, your website remains open in the user’s browser for them to return to at any time. Or at least, that’s how it works in theory. Unfortunately, I have seen this practice backfire on a number of occasions. Why would this be the case? Think of the Web as a linear experience. You move from one page to another and another. You can travel seamlessly to and from any point along  this timeline by using the browser’s back and forward buttons. But when you open a link in a new tab, you start a new timeline for the user. Having observed many website users over the years, I can tell you that the back button is a feature that they are intimately familiar with. If that user clicks a link and visits a new page, and they then want to return to your site, they will intuitively click the back button until they get there. However, if you’ve opened the off-site link in a new tab or window, then the back button eventually leads to a dead-end for that visitor. Your site, which they want to return to, is not part of their current timeline because it is open in a completely separate tab. Of course, all the user needs to do is close the current tab, and your site will be in front of them again, but I’ve seen many visitors who are unaware of or confused by this. Instead, when the linear experience of the back button doesn’t bring them to your site as they expected, they instead type your website’s URL into the browser’s address bar, thinking that something went wrong along the way. They now have two instances of your website open, so in your efforts to “help” them easily get back to your site, you’ve actually confused the user experience. Does this mean you should never open links in a new tab or window? No, it doesn’t. For example, it’s a good practice to open PDF files in a new tab because these documents feel like they are separate from the linear experience of browsing a site. Additionally, opening links in new tabs is not “wrong,” per se. It is an acceptable solution, but if you choose to use that approach, do so for a reason other than the mistaken belief that if visitors leave your site, they will never find their way back. The linear experience of web browsing – and using the back button to return to a webpage – is a well-understood convention, so don’t be afraid to let your visitors explore in the manner that is most natural to them.

Myth #5: Visitors absolutely will/absolutely will not complete a form.

The final myth we will debunk concerns web forms. Interestingly, I hear competing opinions from clients regarding forms on their websites. Some believe that visitors will not fill out a form no matter what. Others think that their users will gladly complete a lengthy questionnaire for almost no reason at all. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Gathering information from website visitors is a valuable exercise. It allows you to understand who is coming to your site so you can follow up with them, engage with them and hopefully convert them into paying customers for your business. Just asking for visitor’s information is not enough, however. Very few people will be willing to complete a form unless they have a clear understanding of what they will receive in return – and what they receive needs to be of greater value to them than receiving more marketing from you. This value can come any number of different ways, such as receiving a free whitepaper or application download or registering for an event or webinar. In each of these cases, there is a legitimate reason for your site visitors to complete a form that gives you their personal information. If, however, your form simply says, “Sign up for updates!” without any further information about what those updates entail, how frequent they will be delivered or what potential value they hold, then there is a slim chance anyone will be inclined to complete that form. Creating a valuable offer is step one. Step two is the design of the form itself. Asking for too much information will be a roadblock for many visitors, who will either perceive a form with a large number of fields as being too cumbersome or too intrusive to complete, so the best course of action is to ask for only the information you need. If you never intend to call someone, then don’t ask for their phone number because that’s one less obstacle you’ll have to overcome. The more concise and easy your form is to complete, the more likely your visitors will do so. Website visitors will fill in forms, as long as you make those forms easy to complete and provide value to them in exchange for sharing their information with you.

R.I.P. myths and misconceptions

The Web and the behavior of its users are constantly evolving. Since the last time you engaged in a website redesign project, there have undoubtedly been a number of shifts in trends and tendencies, and what you learned through that experience even just two or three years ago may not be applicable today. Because of this ever-changing landscape, the importance of working with web development firm that keeps pace with these changes and the best practices of modern website design cannot be understated. Such a partnership will ensure that the decisions driving the the design of your site are relevant to today’s Web and are not relics of a time gone by.

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