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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A Tale of Two Tweets – And Five Takeaways for Brand Survival in a Consumer-Driven Culture

It was the best of times…and the best of times. Two very different brands, two very different markets, two very different tweets – but it all adds up to one very big lesson in the power of word-of-mouth marketing in today’s consumer-driven marketplace. Our story opens on October 1, when ESPN NFL Nation reporter Terry Blount tweets a photo from Houston restaurant Skeeter’s Mesquite Grill, where the specials board advertises the “Matt Schaub”: “Pick six toppings for your burger and pay dearly for it.” This clever play on words was a reference to an interception the Texans’ quarterback threw during their September 29 game against the Seahawks – an interception that was returned for a touchdown, turning the tide of the game and paving the way for the Seahawks to claim an overtime victory. The photo quickly rippled through the Interwebs, and over the course of the next three days, this local mom-and-pop eatery received over 400,000 hits on its website, and its managers gave more than 50 interviews to media outlets across the nation, including ESPN’s SportsCenter and Mike & Mike as well as The New York Times and the New York Daily News. From Houston we travel to Richmond, Virginia, where John and Sherry Petersik, masterminds behind the hugely popular home improvement blog Young House Love tweeted a photo to their 27,000+ followers of a package delivered to their doorstep with a little something extra for their famed four-legged family member (coincidentally named “Burger”). But they didn’t just tweet it. They also posted it to their Facebook Page, where they have more than 86,000 followers. And to Instagram, where they have nearly 56,000 followers. Assuming that some of those followers overlap (as they surely do), that’s still a lot of valuable publicity garnered for the price of a dog treat. Even more noteworthy? The many commenters that eagerly chimed in to sing the praises of their own thoughtful neighborhood UPS delivery driver. So what do these moments of marketing kismet mean for you? After all, they are lightning-in-a-bottle moments to be sure. But the point is not to replicate them; it’s to learn from them. Here are five key takeaways that you can apply to help your brand not only survive but thrive in today’s consumer-driven marketplace:

1. Deliver delight.

How much effort did it take for that UPS delivery driver to leave a treat along with the day’s package? How much did it cost the company? Nearly nothing, yet this seemingly insignificant gesture of care and courtesy garnered thousands upon thousands of positive impressions on social media. That’s an ROI that’s nearly impossible to beat. So ask yourself: what can you do to delight your customers? How can you invest a little extra effort, time and thoughtfulness into making their lives easier or bringing a little bit of unexpected joy into their day? Even in today’s tech-centric world, it’s the personal touches that make the most lasting impression.

2. Follow the trickle-down rule of happiness.

It’s a formula as simple as it is true: Happy employees = happy customers. It starts with hiring the right people – people who are the right fit for your corporate culture, who share your passion and your vision and who are driven to go the extra mile. Then empower those people. Make sure they know that you have only one rule when it comes to serving your customers: do whatever it takes to show them that they are valuable and appreciated. When you surround yourself with a top-notch team, you can entrust them to make the right decisions when the rubber meets the road to uphold your brand’s reputation.

3. Know your tribe.

There’s no magic spell you can cast to make your marketing efforts go viral. However, when you know your tribe, you know what they’ll respond to. You know what they’ll find funny or clever or quirky or cool. You know how to stay on the right side of the line between being in on the joke and making a pandering marketing ploy. Skeeter’s hit the right note among their sports-loving clientele with their timely, cheeky special. By having a little fun at Matt Schaub’s expense, they sent a clear message to their base of Texans fans: We know the feeling. We’re one of you. It’s the marketing equivalent of saddling up to the bar with a pint to commiserate over the outcome of the game.

4. The walls have eyes. And ears. And blogs.

Did that UPS delivery driver know that the home where he left the treat for the garrulous Chihuahua was inhabited by bloggers? Probably not. Was he following a PR plan carefully researched and plotted by UPS’s corporate marketing team. Most certainly not. But that’s exactly the point. In today’s era of social media, you should treat every customer as though they’re the Petersiks. Not every one of your customers has their own blog, but nearly every one of them has their own Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram, etc. Each of these platforms is a megaphone that they can use to sing your praises or rip you to shreds. You never know whose megaphone is the loudest, and there’s nothing people love more than jumping on a bandwagon. Which direction that bandwagon is heading is up to you.

5. Brands are made in moments.

This is a corollary to #4, but in these times when everyone has their own soapbox, brands aren’t defined in board rooms; they’re shaped moment by moment in homes and in cars and on screens across America. Every encounter between your brand and your customers – whether real-world or virtual – shifts and redefines your reputation. Whether your annual marketing budget is in the thousands or the millions, there’s nothing you can do that carries the weight of the word of someone who has experienced your products and services first-hand. So rather than obsessing over every word on your website, put your time and energy where it counts – on the front lines where your brand and your customers come face-to-face.

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Deal-Breakers and Dead-Ends: Six Turn-Offs That Alienate Website Visitors

Without question, the task of driving new visitors to your company’s website is not easy. Success requires serious strategic planning and a significant investment of resources, from content marketing and social media promotion to search engine advertising and offline marketing initiatives. So once those hard-won visitors arrive, why in the world would you immediately turn them away? Well, you certainly wouldn’t do so intentionally, but there may be deal-breakers and dead-ends lurking within your site that will repel a potential new customer faster than a cheesy pick-up line and cheap cologne. Here are six mood-killers that you must avoid if you hope to woo new customers, entice them to engage with your site and provide such a positive experience that they will tell all their friends what a great catch you are:

1. Download our app

If you’ve invested in creating an app for your brand, naturally you want to bring this to the attention of mobile visitors and encourage them to download it. But it’s all too easy to cross the line between promoting your app and perturbing your customer. Recently, I was in the process of working on an email marketing campaign using the popular service Constant Contact. I found myself with a spare moment between meetings, so I grabbed my iPad and set out to make a few quick edits to my draft. When I logged into the site and selected the email I wanted to edit, I was greeted with a message asking me if I wanted to download “QuickView”, their app for iPad and iPhone. But I was in a rush and had no interest in downloading and figuring out how to use their app to accomplish the simple task of making changes to an email I had already begun crafting. So I clicked “No, thanks” and was then returned to my list of emails. Once again, I clicked the email that I wanted to edit – and once again I was greeted with the prompt to download the app. I was stuck in a loop of non-productivity. Unless I installed the app, I could not complete my desired action on my iPad. By any standard, this was a very poor user experience. Unfortunately, this is not an unusual scenario. If you browse the Web on your mobile device with regularity, you’ve undoubtedly encountered this type of “Download our app!” a number of times. However, the problem arises when downloading an app is the only viable way to interface with a site via a mobile device and the objective of providing a good user experience is sacrificed in the interest of securing a permanent spot in the user’s pocket. Instead of trying to force your app on mobile visitors, take a more subtle approach. For example, displaying a small banner at the top of your site’s mobile view is a great way to make users aware of your app without disrupting their workflow or compromising the quality of their experience. Never, ever require your visitors to download an app to use your site; rather show them the respect of allowing them to interact with your brand in the way that they most prefer, whether that’s through a browser or through your app.

2. Give us your digits

We get it. When a new visitor comes to your website, you want to capture as much information about them as quickly as possible so that you can continue your engagement with them long after they’ve moved on to other corners of the Web. With this motivation in mind, there are many sites that immediately greet new visitors with a pop-up-style message. Instead of seeing the expected home page content, the user is presented with a request to complete a form to provide their contact information in exchange for a welcome discount offer or to follow the company on Facebook for future updates and promotions. Either way, these pop-ups are very disruptive to the user experience and provide obstacles that only make it more difficult for the visitor to accomplish what they originally came to the site to do. Think about this experience for a moment. Yes, it would be ideal if every visitor to your site would willingly complete a short form that gives you invaluable data. But in reality, no one comes to your site for the express purpose of helping you market to them, so by giving such a message top priority, you are telling them that your needs are more important than theirs. That’s a pretty poor way to start the conversation. This phenomenon is so pervasive that there is even an entire website – tabcloseddidntread.com – dedicated to these types of interruptive messages. While the writing on the site is a bit snarky, the point it makes is a valid one: these messages create a poor user experience from the outset. As a result, any value you might gain in collecting user data is quickly negated if that user has no interest in continuing their engagement with you because you’ve created such a negative first encounter. Instead of leading off the conversation with your survey request, Facebook follow prompt or current promotion, simply allow your visitors to dive right into the site to find the information they’re seeking or complete their desired task. Keep your mailing list sign-up and Facebook links in your site’s universal framework, and if you do your job in creating a positive experience for them, your visitors will willingly allow you to become a presence in their email inbox or their Facebook news feed all on their own.

3. One-size-fits-all framework

Today’s website visitors are accessing our sites on a wide ranging variety of devices with a myriad of different screen sizes, and yet, many sites are still built with the “desktop-only” mindset of years ago. This is a major strike for users on mobile devices who expect more from their experience than simply seeing the desktop site shrunk down to display on their small screen, with text that’s illegibly tiny and links that are nearly impossible to press. The Web is no longer a one-size-fits-all world. That being said, while one “size” may not fit all, you can still have one site that will work seamlessly on a wide variety of screen sizes and devices. By employing responsive design, you can build a singular jack-of-all-trades workhorse that dynamically reflows its layout based on the user’s screen size. The image below illustrates the difference between how desktop-only layout (i.e., the “do nothing” approach) is rendered on a phone’s browser versus a site that’s optimized for small screens with a responsive approach. Read more: Website Design for a Multi-Device World

4. Vexing video

Video can be a powerful way to convey information, but if that video fails, then your message is lost. There are a few ways that video can provide a stumbling block to engagement with your site visitors. First and foremost, not all video formats are compatible with all devices. For instance, Flash videos will not play on iPhones and iPads, which means that instead of seeing your excellent video content, every user on an iOS device will get a message that says something to the effect of “This video cannot be shown on your device.” Other visitors may not want to download a large video due to limited bandwidth or data download concerns, and as a result, your content is not able to achieve the effect you desire. In still other cases, your visitors may be able to download and view a video but may not be able to use audio – perhaps because they are in a public area, such as an office or store. Video without audio is fairly anti-climactic, so if the only way they can consume your message is by watching and listening, then you will leave these visitors cold. The moral of the story is this: If you are going to use embedded video on your site, make sure to choose a format that can be played on all devices and to reinforce its key message and content in other areas for visitors who may not want to watch or listen to a video.

5. The mystery of the disappearing navigation

Your website’s navigation structure is a critical component of the user experience, and the links it contains are the gateway to the information your visitors are seeking. For sites with lots of pages and a deep sitemap, a common design schema is to use drop-down menus that show subpages contained underneath the site’s top-level navigation choices. These drop-down menus are typically powered by Javascript. But what happens if the user has disabled Javascript in their browser or if that script fails to load for some reason? When this happens, your navigation menus may never be shown, leaving visitors stranded with no way to easily maneuver through your site. Failure to load a script is not the only way that navigation suddenly goes missing. Some sites with very elaborate navigation options for the desktop version eliminate the bulk of those options for mobile devices. This can create a dead-end for users who are familiar with the desktop version and are left searching aimlessly for links they will never find. Instead of eliminating links for smaller screens, find ways to present the same content in a way that’s better suited to the device’s display. Additionally, make sure that your site’s navigation has a fallback option should a script fail to load or something else unexpected happens.

6. Page is loading…

Today’s websites have become fat, bloated behemoths. Oversized images and animations, embedded videos and other features have contributed to the substantial size increases we have seen in webpages over the past few years. Bigger pages mean longer load times, which is a major turn-off for visitors who have no lack of other suitors vying for their time and attention online. Better website performance will yield better website results. By optimizing your site’s performance and ensuring that it loads quickly even for visitors with slower connection speeds, you can avoid showing users a half-loaded page and hoping that they will wait around to see the rest. More often than not, that’s a losing gamble, and the visitor you worked so hard to win will turn elsewhere to find a site that will perform according to their expectations.

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