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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Check Your Ego at the Door: Embracing User-Centered Website Design

The creation of a new website is a process filled with important decisions. As the owner, CEO, or decision maker at the organization for which the new site is being designed and developed, you will be asked for your feedback or approval a number of times along the way – but what are you using as the basis for that feedback? Too often decisions are made during a website’s creation that are based on the preferences of the site’s “owners” and not on the needs of the people who will actually use the website. This is the wrong way to go about making decisions for a project, because the reality is that your website should not be designed for you, it should be designed for your audience. In this article, we will take a look at how you can shape the decisions you make on a website’s creation, or its subsequent upkeep, to help you meet the needs of your website’s most important audience - the clients and customers that will bring you business and ultimately make your site a success.

Making design decisions

No one wants to have a website they don’t like the look of, but the fact of the matter is that design decisions are not made for aesthetic reasons only. Visual choices for a project should be made by taking the needs of your audience, and your business’s goals for the website, into account. Many people assume that their website should be a reflection of their personal tastes or sense of style. That is not the case. It’s sometimes hard to hear, but your preferences of what looks good and what doesn’t should be secondary to what is appropriate for your site’s users. You certainly want something that you are proud of, but when reviewing design options, but sure to consistently ask yourself, “what would my audience think?” Or better yet, ask some of your actual users for their feedback and use that data in your decision making process. In the end, the goal is to come up with a design that you love and which properly represents your company, but will also meet the needs of your audience. When in doubt, however, defer to your users’ needs and remember that old saying – “the customer is always right.”

Give users what they want

While a great design is certainly important, the reality is that your customers are not coming to your website to be “wowed” by its visual design - they are coming to your site for its content. If you want your site to succeed, it has to offer the content your audience is looking for and make it easy for them to find it. When considering what content should be presented on the website, and also where it should be presented, you should once again ask yourself what is right for your audience. You may be very proud of the awards your company has won or feel that the “Message from the President” is insightful, but be truthful - is that what your site visitors are coming to find? If not, then does it make sense to present that content on your homepage or someplace else with similar prominence? Oftentimes website content is prioritized based on company egos or a sense of what they want to see, rather than what users are looking for. We are proud of our accomplishments, so we want them front and center for all to see. Our President runs the company, so his words must be important, right? While these may both be true, if your site visitors are not looking for this content, and yet you place them in a spot of prominence instead of content that your audience actually wants, then you are putting your needs or opinions ahead of theirs. Leave the ego aside when making content decisions for the website. Those awards announcements and presidential messages can certainly have a place on the site, just make sure it’s an appropriate place that doesn’t interfere with what your users come to the website to see.

I want my website to do something cool!

Website owners love pizzazz. We see another site that does something “cool” and we want something similar on our own site. Unfortunately, we rarely ever stop to consider whether that awesome animation or cool feature is actually effective or if it helps meet the goals of your site. When considering adding something you think is “awesome”, you should once again (I imagine you are starting to see a pattern here) ask yourself how that addition will help meet your business’s goals or your users’ needs. Does it help at all, or is it just something cool to add? Almost always, it is the later – nothing more than some “wow factor.” That alone would not be a bad thing, but too often, the “wow” that is added actually makes it harder for our users to do what they came to the website for in the first place. Take animated introductions or “welcome” videos on websites, features that are one of the more popular requests made to add some wow to a site. Would you ever start a business meeting with a song and dance number, trying to entertain your audience before the meeting begins? Probably not – yet that is exactly what you are doing when to you add that animated blast of pizzazz to your website. It is all show and no substance and your site visitors will see right through it – that is if they stick around long enough to even see it. Oftentimes, overblown effects such as unnecessary animation, videos, or music files that play when the site is loaded do the opposite of “wowing” your audience. Instead, those effects often drive them away. If you surprise site visitors with an audio track or a video that autoplays on page load, a likely response is to quickly click the ‘BACK’ button – taking the traffic you worked hard to get away from your website and your business. Your customers, and potential customers, come to your site for a reason. Anything that gets in the way of what they are looking to accomplish lowers the chance that they will continue deeper into your site to complete their task. When adding wow factor to make your site more memorable, always be sure that whatever you add is not done at the expense of your site’s usability. Furthermore, ask yourself if you really even need it, because a site that welcomes visitors and easily allows them to find the information they need to complete the task they came to complete is certainly doing “something cool” – it is meeting your users’ need and driving business results for you. Let’s take a minute to look at a few examples of wow factor added in appropriate, and inappropriate, ways so we can compare the two.

Video – the right way vs. the wrong way

We’ve already mentioned adding “welcome” videos to a website. Often, this video takes the form of a commercial or advertisement that a company ran on television. They receive a web- ready copy of the spot and, wanting to make the investment they made in that video stretch as far as possible, they decide to add it to the website. But for what purpose? If the goal of the initial commercial was to introduce viewers to your company and get them to the website, then why put it on the website to show users who are already there? The website for cosmetic dentist Gary D. Light & Associates starts with a video that pops up on the site and autoplays, distracting users from the rest of the site’s information. Even worse, if you’re in Internet Explorer – which many of your users will be, the video opens again on every single page you visit, even though you may have already closed it two or three times. That is a recipe for annoying your audience. The website for car dealership Tasca also begins with a video that autoplays, showing one of the company’s commercials. Visit the site for the first time and the video overtakes the screen with a commercial. It’s a bit jarring if you are not expecting it the video and audio to begin blaring out of your speakers. Overall, this is a quality website with lots of useful features for someone shopping for a vehicle. Does that opening video help in that search or does it drive you away when it pops up unexpectedly? A better way to present video is what you will see at the United Way of Rhode Island. Their annual “campaign video” is one of the feature pieces of content for the website, and it is presented directly on the homepage in the large billboard area. Rather than autoplay the video, however, a site visitor has to request to see it by clicking the large red “Watch” button. In this way, the video is made readily available to those who want to see it, without interrupting the user experience of those who do not.

The three questions

When new visitors come to your website, they will ask themselves a few questions, namely:

1. Who is this company?
2. What do they do?
3. What do I do next?

Not only do users ask these questions, they do it quickly, in as little as 4-8 seconds once they visit the page. To successfully meet your users’ needs, you need to make sure the content you place in front of them helps answer these questions and directs their experience. The website for Bradford Soapworks is a nice looking site with quality information throughout, but the homepage opens with a letter from the company chairman. There is no mention of what the company actually does, no images of their products and no clear calls-to-action to answer the question of “what do I do next?” That message from the Chairman, however important to the company, does not seem to be in line with the needs of site visitors. In contrast, the website for The Savannah Soap Company does a great job of answering these 3 basic questions and the eye-catching visuals, presented in the site’s large billboard area, also include calls-to-action to “start learning” or to “learn more”, giving visitors a clear direction as to what to do next. When presenting content on your website, consider the answers to the 3 visitor questions outlined above and consistently ask yourself whether the placement of the content you are using is appropriate to meet your visitors’ needs and answer those questions.

Talk to your audience

If you truly want a site that will be a success, continually ask yourself what your customers would want as you make decisions on the site – both during initial design and development phases and again later on during the site’s maintenance. Or, as I mentioned earlier, take it a step further and don’t only ask yourself what your users would want – actually ask them! Whenever appropriate, ask real customers how you are doing on your website. Did the decisions you made along the way help them in the ways you intended? What else could you do to make their experience better? You will be amazed at the quality feedback you can get simply by asking a few questions. Now, this doesn’t mean you should simply put a “tell us how we are doing” form on your site and call it a day. The most likely submissions you will get through those forms are spam-bots or angry visitors who are more likely to fill out such a form when they are upset. While you certainly want to know if someone is upset with the site, this feedback form alone will give you a very skewed picture of how you are doing. Soliciting feedback from your site means truly interacting with your audience. Pick up the phone and call some customers to ask them your questions – or work with a firm that specializes in user testing and see how the site holds up in those tests. However you gather the data, the best way to meet your users’ needs is to learn what those needs are and the best way to learn what they are is to speak to your audience.

Love your website

A website is a reflection of our business, so it makes sense that we want it to also be a reflection of us – our likes and preferences. We want our website to be “ours” - but in the end, while the website itself may be yours, the experience it creates belongs to your audience. If you truly want to make the site a success, start by making sure that the experience it creates - from the design visuals, to the content presented, to the wow factor you decide to (or not to) add, is a wonderful experience for your users. Meet their needs and they will make your site a success. I don’t know about you, but to me, a site that does that is about as “cool” as it gets.

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SPF for Your Website: Three Simple Steps to Protect Your Online Presence

As the days get longer and the mercury rises, we’re reminded yet again of the importance of remaining vigilant when it comes to applying sunscreen to protect ourselves from summer’s damaging rays. It’s a simple yet necessary precaution that if neglected has both short-term consequences – the painful agony of sunburn – and long-term ramifications – skin damage and increased risk of skin cancer. The same holds true for our websites. If we are not proactive in taking the necessary precautions to keep our online presence safe, problems will inevitably arise. Here are three simple measures you can take to apply SPF to your website that will safeguard the integrity not only of your brand’s online presence but its reputation as well:

(S)ecure your site against SQL injections.

Websites that feature data-driven applications can be vulnerable to attacks known as SQL injections, whereby malicious code is added to an entry field, then run and executed. These attacks exploit security vulnerabilities in problematic code, attacking your site’s database and performing any number of actions, from adding unapproved content to your public-facing site to allowing the hacker to download your entire database. This is a prime example of why rigorous testing is absolutely critical prior to launch. If your site is already up and running, consult with your web team to make sure that it has undergone thorough testing and is protected against such hacks. If you want to take additional precautionary measures, there are also security companies that specialize in detecting these types of website and database vulnerabilities, and they can provide you with a security audit.

(P)rotect your domain name.

It’s common sense that you must pay to acquire the domain name where your business will reside online. However, it’s important to remember that you have to continue to pay in order to retain the rights to use that domain name. Essentially, when you purchase your domain name, you’re not buying it outright. Rather, you’re renting that name for a specified period of time. Most registrars (Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com, etc.) allow you to secure a name for anywhere from 12 months to 99 years. If you allow your registration to lapse, however, the domain name becomes available for purchase again and is open to the public for anyone to acquire. Bear in mind that there are actually companies that profit handsomely from business owners who neglect their domain registrations. They monitor domains that are nearing expiration, taking ownership of them the moment they become available. If you have the misfortune of having your domain acquired by one of these companies, usually you can negotiate having ownership transferred back to you, but it will cost you dearly. Unfortunately, while this is a shady practice, it is not illegal. If you allow your domain name to expire, it is fair game for anyone to register it – including these types of companies. Before your domain name expires, your registrar will likely send you many notices prompting you to renew. I start getting domain name renewal notices six months or more before the scheduled expiration date, and as that date gets closer, the notices start coming more and more frequently. Still, despite this barrage of email notifications, there are still many companies that are unaware that their expiration date is approaching, and they either lose their domain name altogether or are forced to pay a king’s ransom to get it back. Often when this situation occurs, it is because the person who initially completed the registration process for the domain name is no longer with the company, and therefore the email address they used to register the name is no longer valid, so the multitude of email notices go unreceived. The company innocently thinks they are protected until one day they stop receiving emails (yes, your email is tied into your domain name), or a customer mentions that they tried to go to the site, and it was simply gone. Even though there is a grace period after a domain has lapsed that allows you to reclaim your ownership before it becomes open to the public, the lapse isn’t always discovered in time to take advantage of this safety net. To prevent this, it is critically important to keep the contact information for your domain registration up to date. Either contact your registrar directly or speak with your web team to make sure you know when each of the domain names you own needs to be renewed, and double-check to ensure that the contact information for your account is valid.

(F)ortify your forms.

Web forms are a staple of doing business online. In fact, rare is the site that doesn’t include a form of some sort that allows the user to input information to be transmitted to the site’s owner, whether its purpose is to make a contact inquiry, sign up for a mailing list, complete a purchase, apply for employment, etc. As anyone who has a form on their site can attest, however, not all submissions received via these forms are legitimate. This is called robot spam, which is created by spammers who write programs that send out spambots to indiscriminately fill out any and all different types of forms on the Web, looking for entryways to expose a site’s security vulnerabilities (see SQL injections above). If you find your inbox filling up with indecipherable junk submissions, it’s these bots who are to blame. To combat these spambots, you can install a CAPTCHA system on your form, which generates an image with a random combination of numbers and letters that the user must enter in order to submit the form. The spambots can't interpret these CAPTCHA images, so therefore they can’t complete the process of sending the form. While there is legitimate debate as to whether or not CAPTCHA is the most effective way to prevent bogus submissions, it still remains the most popular solution for web form security. However, the reason it’s important to block these bots goes beyond eliminating the annoyance of a cluttered inbox. A few months ago, my company decided to remove the CAPTCHA requirement from our contact form. We knew we would get a flood of spam submissions, but we decided we could deal with a little extra hassle on our end in exchange for reducing the inconvenience to legitimate users of having to interpret those squiggly letters in order to simply get in touch with us. As expected, the amount of spam we received increased dramatically, but it was still manageable. Then, all of a sudden, we stopped receiving any submissions at all. We also began seeing some of our emails to other people bounce back. What we discovered was that our web domain (which is where our emails originate from) had been blacklisted as spam by Microsoft (which is what powers our email platform). Apparently, all the bogus submissions from our website (which resides on our domain) to our email caused Microsoft to identify us as spammers. This is because our form submissions came from an email address associated with our own domain name (many web forms are configured this way). Obviously, we were not the ones generating the spam, but this strange series of coincidences conspired to get us blacklisted! Fortunately, it was an easy process to get our domain removed from the blacklist, and we quickly re-installed the CAPTCHA system on our contact form, but we certainly learned an important lesson about security and spambots along the way. If you allow those bogus entries to make it through, there is a risk that you, too, could find yourself blacklisted and unable to send email to some of your most important contacts.

Seize the day and stay safe.

Since summer is vacation season for many of us, business tends to slow down slightly as our clients and colleagues enjoy much-deserved time off. That makes this the perfect time to seize the opportunity to apply these S-P-F practices today to ensure that your online presence is well protected all year long.

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