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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Remarketing: A Second Chance at Love

Consider this bit of classic situation comedy:

Guy meets girl at a laundromat.

Girl gives guy her number.

Guy accidentally washes the receipt she wrote it on.

All hope of love is lost.

The poor schlep. If only he had a second chance, right?

Fortunately for him, we’re all familiar enough with TV tropes to know that their story doesn’t end there. Fate will intercede to bring them together again, and all will be well.

Fortunately for you, the story of you and your prospective customers can have a similar happy ending.

In many ways, marketing is like dating. There’s an initial introduction, followed by a period of wooing to secure their digits (or email address or mailing address or Facebook “like,” as the case may be). Every step – and every hour and every dollar spent – along the way in nurturing that relationship is designed to keep things moving through the proverbial funnel to greater levels of commitment until you arrive at a proposal (call to action) and the resulting commitment (conversion).

But what if, in spite of your best efforts to get your customer to the alter (the checkout or contact form), they lose interest, forget you exist (ouch!) or, worst of all, go AWOL before clicking “submit”? Like the guy in the laundromat, you need a second chance.

Enter remarketing – the fairy godmother of sales.

Reunited and it feels so good

As we’ve covered previously, there are plenty of things you can do both to optimize your chances of converting a new customer and to minimize the odds that a shopper will walk away from their cart mid-session.

Inevitably though, despite your best efforts, some prospective buyers will simply fall through the cracks. They might decide they need more time to consider their purchase, or they might be pulled away from the computer by one of the many distractions of daily life. Whatever the reason, unlike our friend in the laundromat, you don’t have to rely on fate to reunite you. You have more than a damp blank receipt in your pocket; you have the ability to deploy remarketing.

In principle, remarketing is not rocket science. It’s exactly what it sounds like: reaching out once again to someone who has already responded to earlier marketing efforts and engaged with your brand on some level. Essentially, it’s preaching to the converted – or nearly converted – if you will.

More specifically, remarketing uses information collected about a visitor’s activity on your site (e.g., viewing a product page, adding a product to their shopping cart, etc.) to put your brand and your products in front of them again via a highly targeted follow-up message that’s customized based upon parameters relating to the actions they took while on your site.

Typically, this follow-up is executed in one of two ways: either by pushing ads for your products out to other sites they visit as they continue browsing or by sending an email message directly to them if their contact information is available to you. These ads and emails typically feature tailored messages and images designed specifically to re-engage the prospect in the action they previously abandoned based on information collected about their browsing activity.

The nitty gritty

How on earth does this work?

What’s happening behind the scenes is that a code snippet provided by your analytics resource of choice (e.g., Google AdWords) is embedded into the source code of strategically selected pages of your site.

This code then places a cookie into the browsers of those who visit such a page on your site, assigning specific information about their visit. These cookied visitors are skimmed off into a new “audience” within your analytics and sent customized ads over advertising networks known as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). Google AdWords is the probably the best known DSP, but there are a host of others out there, many of which claim to specialize in remarketing. Alternately, recipients of remarketing may instead receive automated, custom-tailored emails if that visitor has previously provided their contact information to you.

The proof is in the ebelskiver

Let’s consider an example that’s close to home (pun intended). My wife recently visited the Williams-Sonoma website in search of a special pan required to make her latest obsession: tiny filled pancakes known as ebelskivers.

She located the tart-maker on the site but did not select the option to “Add to Basket.” Within a few hours, she received the following email (because she had registered to receive updates from the company previously, they already had her email address on file):

The “Buy Now” button embedded within this message took her directly back to the page for the product, just one convenient click away from purchase.

“Hello, Clarice.”

One word of caution: as with any marketing strategy, you must always implement this tactic in ways that show respect for your customers and reinforce – rather than undermine – the trust they have in your company and your brand.

Overly eager DSPs will promise to make it rain, but there’s a fine line between a gentle reminder and creepy stalking – or “cookie bombing”.

A retargeted ad that reminds a visitor that they have items remaining in their shopping cart is a courteous customer service gesture. Bombarding them with the same ad for days or weeks will come off as a much more self-serving ploy that’s likely to cost you not only the potential sale that’s currently on the table but any future business from that customer as well.

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20 Questions to Determine If It’s Time to Redesign Your Website, Part 1

Your website should be your number one salesman 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If that’s not the case, then you need to find out why it’s not performing as it should. If your answer is “no” to any of these questions, a redesign might be just the right prescription to boost your site’s ability to attract new leads and cure what’s ailing your conversion rate.

1. Is the design beautiful?

Once upon a time, it was enough to simply have a website as the online outpost for your business – a virtual Yellow Pages ad of sorts. In today’s culture of the Web, that’s no longer the case. Just as design principles, interface conventions and programming languages have evolved, user expectations have become more sophisticated right along with them. Potential customers make no differentiation between the quality of your website and the quality of your brand. If your site is ugly and outdated, your brand will be headed for extinction right along with it.

2. Is the content beautiful?

The text on your website is just as much a part of its design as other ostensibly visual elements such as the color palette, typography, images and layout. If this seems like an oxymoron, it’s not. In fact, design is the packaging for the delivery your content. If a visitor to your site lands on a page and sees nothing but a disorganized sea of text, they’ll be immediately overwhelmed, and they won’t even begin to try to make sense of it. Good design applies content to the canvas of your site with the finesse of an artist. By augmenting your text with beautiful photography, illustrations, diagrams, infographics and pull-quotes, you’ll create a more pleasing user experience every time.

3. Does it reflect the personality of your brand?

In the age of social media, the walls that once existed between companies and their customers have been torn down. People want to do business with people, even when the actual exchange occurs between computer screens. It’s easy to let your corporate guard down on Facebook and Twitter. But what happens when your fans and followers land on your site and find it completely devoid of personality? The discrepancy will be off-putting. It will make your social media engagements feel phony and make the user experience on your website feel cold and empty. There are any number of ways to infuse personality into your website – blog articles, powerful images, video content, interaction with customers through reviews and comments...the list goes on and on. Make sure that your website has a pulse.

4. Is it built for your target audience?

A site that tries to serve the needs of every imaginable user will effectively serve the needs of none of them. Think about your typical sales prospect. How sophisticated are they? Where are they in their decision-making process? What are their questions and concerns? Do they know what they need buy not who they want to buy it from? If so, the most important objective your site needs to accomplish is establishing credibility and trust. Do they not know what they need? Or are you bringing something new to the market? Then your website must first lay a foundation of education while also building trust.

5. Is it user-driven?

Does your site serve you or your visitors? Before you answer, realize that’s a more complex question than it seems on the surface. A site that serves you goes straight for the kill with its sales pitch. It’s all about you, you, you, and how absolutely, indisputably awesome you are. A site that serves your visitors is built around utility. It speaks their language. It answers the questions and concerns that are on their minds. It helps them make decisions they feel confident in. It makes their lives easier or more fun. It gives them reasons to come back again and again. It offers them opportunities to interact with your brand and with other customers like them. It creates a place where the members of your tribe want to be. And, yes, it does sell. But it does so based on a foundation of trust and relationship-building.

6. Is the content-to-framework ratio in check?

Many websites devote far too much real estate to the framework, letting supersized logos and tag lines, multiple tiers of navigation, log-in and search fields, mammoth masthead images and trendy social media widgets become the dominant visual elements of the site. Remember that the framework of your website represents nothing more than a set of branding and navigational tools that literally frame the canvas on which your content lives. And just as a frame shouldn’t steal focus from a painting, the framework of your site shouldn’t steal the spotlight from the content you depend on to achieve conversions. Instead, it should remain as streamlined and unobtrusive as possible. If your visitors spend enough time on your site, they should all but forget it’s even there. If more than 20 percent of the screen is devoted to the framework, the only cure is to apply good principals of architecture and organization to rebalance the design.

7. Is there engaging content front and center throughout?

In today’s Web marketing universe, content is the catalyst of organic business growth. High quality, unique content that is updated regularly elevates you perceived authority with search engines, which improves your ranking in searches pertaining to your core offering, which brings more qualified visitors to your site. And when those prospects land on your site, your content builds trust, vets your expertise and motivates buying decisions. But remember, content is not just your brochure copy, nor is it just your blog. It’s your product descriptions, videos, images, customer reviews and reader comments. All of these elements must work in conjunction to allow your customers to connect with your company and your brand on a more intimate level.

8. Is it a slave to the fold?

For years, everyone obsessed over making sure every ounce of important content was squeezed into the limited real estate that falls above the mythical “fold.” Unfortunately, this is nothing more than a wide-spread fallacy of good website design and architecture. Think about it: which would you rather do – dig through page after page of content or simply scroll down? That’s right. Scrolling down the page is a perfectly acceptable method of scanning and seeking through content. This is all the more true now that touch-based interfaces have gone mainstream and scrolling involves the mere swipe of a finger. By contrast, pagination introduces a wait state which requires visitors to reset their viewpoint and mentally realign with your interface. This is a jarring and disruptive experience, and with every click-and-reset, you run the risk of losing their patience or attention. Simply put, give your content room to breathe and let your pages scroll.

9. Are your customers’ voices being represented?

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: in today’s consumer-driven marketplace, nothing holds greater sway than word-of-mouth. If you want to build instant trust and credibility through your website, find ways to let your customers do the talking for you, whether it’s through testimonials, case studies, ratings or reviews.

10. Does it stack up to the competition?

As we’ve established previously, you shouldn’t fall into the trap of including unnecessary bells and whistles on your site simply because your competitors do. Your site should be designed to serve your business growth objectives and no one else’s. But make no mistake: today’s consumer will shop around. You’ll will be compared to the competition. However, it’s important to scrutinize the fundamental elements of the user experience your competitors’ sites provide. If they’ve set the bar, you must raise it higher.

Did you pass?

If you’ve answered “no” to several of these questions, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You can’t afford to let another day go by with a website that’s not only underperforming but actually sending customers to your competitors. If you’re 10 for 10 in the “yes” column, don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. You’ve only passed the first half of the test. Next, we’ll take a closer look to uncover the insidious, silent killers that are harder to detect but equally deadly to your site’s performance.

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