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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Put Away the Smoke and Mirrors

“Smoke and mirrors.” “Dog and pony show.” “Image is everything.” These phrases, which are deeply embedded in the vernacular and philosophy of old-school marketing firms, may appear on the surface as nothing more than harmless – if hackneyed – corporate speak. However, these seemingly innocuous clichés actually betray one of traditional marketing's dirtiest secrets. Once the clever headlines, catchy taglines and glamorous images are stripped away, all that’s left at the core is fluff, spin, deception and the art of inventing meaning where there is none. Even they don’t believe their own hype. Yet these are the very same people to whom business owners and decision makers have entrusted their livelihood for decades. Who’s to say the interactions you have with your followers can’t be meaningful?At its heart, your business shares the same goal with every other: to grow, thrive and compete successfully in your market niche. In order to do this, you must engage your customers and build a community around your brand. With old marketing, the relationship between seller and consumer has always taken place at arm’s length, using traditional media channels that rely on flash and frequency, that require a tremendous investment to outshine and outspend the competition. However, who’s to say your relationships with your customers can’t be personal? Who’s to say the interactions you have with your followers can’t be meaningful? The answer: No one who values your success over their own bottom line.

Leading by example

We tend to take established brands for granted, assuming the secret to their success lies in their ability to pour unlimited resources into every available advertising medium to broadcast slick, highly polished messages of self-promotion. However, a closer look at some of today’s most recognizable names reveals a different story. Let’s start with Amazon. If you think about it, there is nothing inherently glamorous about an online bookstore. Yet Amazon has managed to create a following so pervasive that it catapulted from an upstart dot-com to one of the world’s most powerful e-commerce megabrands, all without ever relying on pricey TV and magazine ads. “Advertising is the tax you pay for unremarkable thinking.” How did they do it? The answer is not smoke and mirrors. They did not trick anyone into drinking the Amazon Kool-Aid. Rather they committed themselves and their budget to creating a better shopping experience by developing more intuitive technology, stronger distribution networks and more competitive shipping deals. These are genuine and distinct advantages from which their customers benefit each and every time they interact with the brand, thus solidifying Amazon’s reputation for ease of use, low prices and quality service. Another brand that has risen to the top of its category by flying in the face of traditional marketing wisdom is Geek Squad. As founder Robert Stephens explained at Advertising Age’s 2007 IDEA Conference, “Advertising is the tax you pay for unremarkable thinking.” Instead, by taking a creative approach to what he himself calls an innately “boring business,” he has transformed his one-man show into a corporation that employs more than 17,000 nationwide. In an interview with Inc. magazine, Stephens explained his low-budget strategy:

Without spending any money on marketing, we were able to get people talking about Geek Squad by tapping into themes and archetypes people already understood. We embraced the fact that we were geeks, and we dressed all of our employees like 1960s NASA technicians, since NASA is a symbol of problem solving, teamwork and impossible tasks…In our early years, we found that more than 90 percent of people found us through word of mouth.

In fact, he credits his initial lack of monetary resources with forcing him to work harder, to be more innovative, to dig deeper, to develop an original and authentic approach that has differentiated Geek Squad from all other competitors:

At the crossroads of marketing and meaning

So where do these two concepts intersect for you? It lies in the fundamentals. Your business – let alone your category – would not exist if there were not a legitimate need for your product or service among some segment of the population. There is a community out there that is receptive to your message, that is waiting to be wowed with a newer, better way of doing things. Furthermore, your company would not be here today if at some time someone somewhere hadn’t felt passionately enough about whatever it is you do to risk everything to get that company off the ground. It’s time to reignite that passion and convey it in a way that inspires others. Make a conscious decision to be better, to be different. Resolve to enhance your usefulness; commit yourself to unrelenting innovation; make sure you are delivering a premium experience to your customer; then tell people about it in a genuine and compelling way. And that’s where you’ll need help. But you don’t need just any old traditional agency; you need a partner who shares your belief in what you have to offer and your passion for why you do what you do better than anyone else. You need experts that can show you how to communicate this to your audience in a real and honest way, using available technologies to build community among your customers and keep them actively engaged to the point where they include you as part of their identity. When you have something meaningful to say, and you say it with conviction, people will listen. No smoke and mirrors required.

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Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content: Goodbye Testimonials. Hello Success Stories.

On the Web, content is king. Visitors don’t come to your site to marvel at its visual design; they come for its content. And the burden therefore is on that content to compel them to take action, whether that’s making a purchase, completing a registration form or even just picking up the phone to contact you for more information.

These actions are the “win” for your site – conversion points that transform visitors from statistical blips in your website’s analytics into real live prospects that can become customers and clients. It all starts with powerful content.

Why content must come first

A website redesign is an exciting project, but all too often the primary focus is on the visual aspects of the redesign while content is addressed only as an afterthought. The visual aesthetics are undoubtedly very important, and your new site certainly needs to feature an attractive design and provide an exceptional user experience.

However, the most important function of any website design is supporting content, making it easy to scan and pleasurable to read. So why then, when we redesign a website, do we often just dump old, stale content into a shiny new design? We may make some edits to ensure the content is accurate, but accurate content is not the same as effective content.

Accurate content is factually correct, but effective content is that which your audience is actively seeking and can use to make an informed decision to take the next step in their engagement with your brand.

To be truly successful, a website redesign process must address not only the visual look of the site, but also the quality of the content.

In this series of articles – Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content – we will take a look at types of content that are common to many websites and explore ways that they can be redesigned and improved, beginning with a staple of most business websites – the testimonials page.

The harsh truth about testimonials

Almost every client wants to include a testimonials page on their website, but if you look at the analytics, these pages are by far one of the least often visited.

The reason these pages are relatively unpopular with visitors is one that companies are hesitant to acknowledge: many online testimonials are bogus, and as a result, people have become very skeptical of their validity.

While it’s certainly true that some unscrupulous companies fabricate the testimonials on their sites, other well-meaning companies will post legitimate comments that for one reason or another (usually privacy concerns), can’t be publicly attributed to the person or company who said them.

Unfortunately, these anonymous testimonials hold as little weight with prospects as fictitious ones. If you can’t put a name and a company with a positive review, visitors will naturally regard the validity of these words as suspect, and the very presence of these faceless testimonials on your site will ultimately do more harm than good in the process of building trust with potential clients.

Are your testimonials crippled by lack of context?

Another issue with the typical client testimonial is that these comments are often presented without any context. Glowing words of praise are nice, but they tend to fall flat in the absence of any information about the engagement that warranted them.

What prospects really want to see is reinforcement that other clients who have like business needs have had a good experience working with you on projects that are similar in nature to their own. Therefore, without some insight into the project itself, the resulting testimonial doesn’t carry the same weight or value that it could.

Was this a quick, one‐off project or part of a long‐term engagement?

What challenges did the project present, and how were they met?

What tangible business results did the company gain from working with you?

These are just a few of the questions that, when answered, can provide the critical context needed to add real value to those positive comments.

Goodbye testimonials. Hello success stories.

To develop more effective customer testimonials, we need to rethink our approach in order to address these problem areas. How can we provide context and also eliminate potential doubts as to whether or not the comments are genuine? The answer: success stories.

A success story is a short description of a project, engagement or interaction that elicited the customer’s testimonial. It does not need to be an in‐depth case study that examines every aspect of the project; it just needs to provide that aforementioned context.

When preparing to write a customer success story, start by answering these questions:

• Who is the client (name, industry, basic background information)?
• What were we initially hired to do?
• What were the client’s objectives? What problems were they facing that they needed our help to solve?
• Did we do anything innovative or go above and beyond in a tangible way to meet the needs of this client?
• What measurable business benefits did the client realize from this project?
• What’s next for this client and this engagement?
• Was there anything else noteworthy about this particular project?

Not every one of these questions will apply to every engagement, but the answers can help you put together a short narrative about the project. It will also give you a great reason to reach out to the client to approve the success story and ask for a testimonial to accompany the piece.

Testimonials + success stories: an unbeatable team

Testimonials that come directly from clients do have value, so when you can add one alongside one of these success stories, their comments go from being anonymous praise that, right or wrong, is often perceived as fake, to very valuable content that prospective buyers can use to evaluate your products or services.

A good success story accompanied by a strong client testimonial takes a negative perception of testimonials and flips it on its head because now there is both context and attribution. The testimonial reinforces the success story, and the impact it makes on your visitors is stronger because of it.

This process can work in reverse as well. If a customer sends you an unsolicited email or letter praising your company and the experience they had with you, they are a perfect candidate for a success story. Reach out to them and ask if you can use their comments and their overall experience as part of a success story on your website. If they took the time to extend their kind words in the first place, then they are very likely to be willing to participate in this process as well.

Once the success story goes live, send them a link and thank them again for their help and their business. They will likely pass this link along to their friends and connections via social media or even just through word of mouth, thereby raising greater awareness of your company and driving business to your site.

Hard work pays off.

When I speak with businesses about the value of rethinking their client testimonials and moving to a success story model, a common reaction is that it “sounds like hard work.” That is absolutely correct. It is hard work.

It is far easier to create a laundry list of comments that you have received over the years than it is to author success stories to accompany those comments, but the fact that this is hard work is to your advantage. If this process was easy, everyone would be doing it, but since it’s not, your site and your business can stand out if you take the time and effort to augment typical testimonials by transforming them into informative success stories.

Don’t stop there!

Finding ways to improve client testimonials is just one example of how rethinking content can make your website a more powerful conversion engine. Subsequent entries in this series will explore other common elements of website content that can be improved to bring more value to your visitors and greater returns for your business.

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