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.

The Anatomy of Viral Marketing

Three deadly myths of viral marketing

“Viral” is a term that’s thrown around very loosely by marketers these days, which has muddled the true meaning of the term.

Here are three common misconceptions about viral marketing that will doom any campaign to failure from the start:

Myth #1: Viral marketing = Share buttons

Making content sharable is not the same as making it viral. Viral marketing is not as simple as adding social sharing badges to your website. Likewise, extending your content to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will not make it viral.

These are merely vehicles that make it easier for people to pass your content along to others in their network. There’s no guarantee that whatever is being shared will have life beyond the initial posting.

Myth #2: Viral = Video

“Viral” and “video” are uttered in the same breath so often that it seems as thought they are inextricably linked.

In fact, this is not the case at all. There’s nothing about videos that makes them inherently more viral than any other kind of content.

Viral videos may get a lot of hype, but in reality, any kind of content can go viral – a photo, an article, a fundraising campaign, even an entire website.

The potential of something to go viral has nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with the content and its ability to motivate a continuous chain of sharing.

Myth #3: Viral = 1,000,000 million hits

Going viral is not the web-equivalent of a record going platinum. There’s no arbitrary number that certifies something as having gone viral.

The primary goal of viral marketing should not be to achieve a pre-determined number of hits, views or retweets but to create something with nearly unlimited potential to resonate with people – whether on an emotional, pragmatic or ideological level – so that its reach exceeds ordinary expectations.

What is viral?

By definition, viral content is self-perpetuating and requires little or no additional investment in the act of moving it through the Web from one person to another.

To answer that question, forget marketing jargon and go back to biology class. What sets a virus apart from other organisms is that it has the ability to replicate itself when it finds the right environment variables.

The same quintessential elements apply to viral marketing. By definition, viral content is self-perpetuating and requires little or no additional investment in the act of moving it through the Web from one person to another. It is the very opposite of traditional advertising’s pay-to-play model, which demands greater spending to buy greater exposure.

The concept of viral marketing is nothing new, but it has exploded in the past decade because the mechanisms for sharing have evolved and expanded as social media has permeated the mainstream.

The original form of viral content was the e-mail forward. When someone found something entertaining, informative or self-defining, they’d paste it into an e-mail message and send it to everyone in their address book, and many of those recipients would likewise forward it along. Social sharing is today’s version of the e-mail forward.

On the surface, viral marketing seems easy because the most successful campaigns make it look that way. However, once you dig deeper into its anatomy, it becomes clear that there are a limited number of pathways through which a piece of web content can go viral.

It’s not enough for something just to be good. There’s too much good stuff on the Web for all of it to catch fire. If you want to create something that will grow and extend itself after you send it out into the world, it must harness one of three fundamental elements of self-perpetuating content: entertainment, a giveaway or self-definition.

The three channels of viral marketing

1. Entertainment

This category is probably what naturally springs to mind when you hear the word “viral.” However, this is actually the most difficult route to take and demands a level creative resources that are typically prohibitive for the average business.

With the hype surrounding high-profile viral marketing campaigns like Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” it’s easy to oversimplify the formula for what it takes to pull this off. Everyone thinks their own stuff is entertaining, but in the eye of the beholder, this is rarely the case.

When you attempt to play in this space, you’re going up against the big guns who have immense resources to throw at superstar writers, artists, editors and producers. In the face of those odds, it’s very risky to hope that you’ll strike the magic combination of unique content and flawless execution to win the jackpot.

For every phenomenal success like Old Spice, there are plenty of embarrassing, high-dollar flops. And, yes, sometimes a kid with a webcam becomes an Internet sensation. But that’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. It’s nothing you can create artificially, and it's very difficult to cultivate organically.

2. The giveaway

In stark contrast to viral entertainment, the viral giveaway is potentially attainable by any business large or small, local or national.

There are two ways to approach this type of campaign, depending on the nature of your business:

If you deal in goods, you can give away free or discounted products to customers (think Groupon).

If you deal in services, you can give away time or expertise (or both).

In either case, there is heavy competition in the giveaway space, so it’s critical to ensure that there is significant perceived value in your offering, typically in terms of time or money saved for your customer.

But the giveaway is not viral in and of itself. What creates the mechanism for self-perpetuation is framing it as a reward received in exchange for participation in spreading your message.

This is something not all companies are prepared to do. The idea of creating something only to give it away seems ludicrous by conventional thinking.

However, you can’t look at the giveaway as a loss. The reality is that this is today’s marketing. Instead of pouring tens of thousands of dollars into carpet-bombing advertising that no one believes in, you’re investing in word of mouth – the most powerful form of trustcasting.

The act of giving away your valuable goods or expertise creates trust among your customers, who pass your message along to their friends and followers, who then spread it through their networks. Suddenly hundreds of new potential customers suddenly know who you are and what you do, with the added benefit of being recommended by someone they know and trust, and that trust is conveyed to you by association.

3. Self-definition

A product, an idea or a concept that is new, innovative, unique or just plain awesome is sharable.

But when it makes a bold statement – not about your company but about life, work or culture – that strikes a chord in the beholder, that’s when it has the potential to go viral.

When someone shares this type of content, they’re defining themselves through the act of sharing, attaching themselves to the history, the character or the lifestyle that exists around your brand. They’re identifying themselves as belonging to your tribe.

When Nike’s “Write the Future” debuted in May 2010, it set a new record for the most views of a viral video ad in its first week.

Its popularity was undoubtedly due in part to the celebrity appeal of the soccer superstars featured, but it also touches on a deeper love for the sport, for the World Cup and even for the feeling of connection with others inspired by a shared passion for a certain team or player. When someone shares this video with their friends, they’re attaching their identity to these broader concepts.

But you don’t have to be Nike to pull this off. If I post a link to your blog to my profile on LinkedIn, I’m defining myself as a torchbearer for your ideas. If I take a take a quiz on your website and tweet my score, I’m boasting about my intelligence. And if I make a donation to your nonprofit organization and share it on Facebook, I’m defining myself as an altruistic person who supports If your cause. In each case, my act of sharing challenges other like-minded people within my network to do the same, because they want to attach themselves to these ideas and qualities, too.

Execution

Viral marketing can’t be a one-off effort. You also can’t come up with an idea and tack on elements of viral marketing as an afterthought.

Viral marketing must permeate every aspect of your business model.

If you're going to play in this space, it must permeate every aspect of your business model, from your R&D process to your pricing structure to your marketing strategy. Your website and your presence on social media networks must be built to be part of the viral mechanism. You must focus on creating a self-perpetuating engine of traffic, conversion and sales.

To be successful, you must know your tribe and know it well. You must be realistic about what its members like and what they will respond to.

You must also be willing to take risks. Behind every successful viral campaign is trial and error, careful tracking of metrics and fine-tuning of the approach.

Are the risks worthwhile? In a word, yes. Today's most powerful business growth platforms are built on trustcasting and permission marketing. There’s no more direct route to owning your market than having a tribe of brand evangelists who carry your message for you, and viral marketing transforms the spark of word of mouth into an inferno that propels you ahead of your competition.

10 One-of-a-Kind E-commerce Websites That Put Ordinary Sites to Shame

This collection of creative e-commerce websites includes those that take a unique approach to creating a storefront, and each are discussed in light of what makes their creative designs work so well.

Hopefully, you too can find some inspiration in the collection below to help you in your own e-commerce website designs. Which of these made a big impression on you?

Mom and Popcorn

This vintage website is a very unique experience in that it jumps off the page and makes you forget what decade you are really in. Although not the typical clean cut design of most popular e-commerce sites, it remains easy to use and bursts with creativity. It is very easy to find what you are looking for and the prices are prominent. You don't have to click around aimlessly to figure out what to do next. Five stars for Mom & Popcorn!

The Affair

The Affair is a UK based, offbeat clothing company that makes no apologies; neither for its darkness and morbid atmosphere, nor for its unique shopping design. Although simple and uncluttered, it is anything but standard. For one thing it has a discreet but impossible to miss shopping cart link in the corner. When an item is added to the cart, there is an animation of the selected item dropping into the shopping cart. This is a great touch because so often people click several times to be sure their selection was made and end up with too much in the cart at the end. With The Affair's unique concept, there is no confusion. Another useful feature is that each product's thumbnail offers a 360 degree view so you can examine it from all angles. It's these details that make all the difference.

Storenvy

Storenvy is ingenious, both in concept and in execution. It takes social networking, Etsy, and Pinterest and combines them all into one with an interface as easy to use as Blogspot. It allows users to create their own store to sell stuff, or to buy by browsing hundreds of items from different sellers at once. It is able to pack a lot of information and products into a small space without getting cluttered or confusing. It comes with a built-in store creation wizard to make it super easy to get out there and sell your goodies. I only wish I had thought of it first!

Saddleback

Saddleback is a beautifully and meticulously designed website that sells all types of leather products. Every element of the site contributes to its design, which is a breath of fresh air from other designs that can be weighty and cluttered, even if nice looking. The attention to detail is what makes this rich site still completely practical and usable. One particularly nice touch is that it includes a list of the sites of their business rivals, making it easy to see that Saddleback is the complete package.

Heartbreaker Fashion

Heartbreaker has a pleasant design with a good use of patterns and textures, which is what makes it different from other creative e-commerce websites. The trend has been to avoid patterns because they can distract shoppers from the product. When done right, however, it can really enhance the store front. Heartbreaker also has a handy shopping cart box in the footer of the site as well as the top. Even though it breaks the mold, it is still very user friendly, and even stronger for it.

Oi Polloi

Oi Polloi is a retro site that sells clothes and footwear. It is surprising to find that it does not have a shopping cart immediately available - only once an item is selected does a shopping cart (here called a "Basket") descend as an overlay to the site, showing exactly what you bought, what size, and how much it is, as well as a subtotal. So there is not a separate page for the checkout, which is quite efficient in my opinion. Never be afraid to reinvent the wheel!

A Modern Eden

A Modern Eden sells prints, decals, and stuffed animals with strange angular designs. It makes use of trendy colors, and where normally the bright green background would be tacky or distracting, in this usage it is not only appropriate but adds greatly to the fun and feel of the site. The ribbon highlighting the shopping basket icon is a very nice touch as well.

Patrick Ervell

Patrik Ervell sells fashionable men's clothing with a really cool twist. Where expensive men's clothes can often appear stiff or uncomfortable, this site helps guys envision themselves wearing the clothing, with use of live moving models with every product! Normally this is a huge no-no. Animations can quickly become a very bad idea, especially if there is more than one moving item per page. But Patrik Ervell accomplishes it beautifully, with a sterile white background and simple, concise text only interspersed where necessary.

Marie Catrib's

Marie Catrib's uses vivid pastel colors; friendly, bold text; and interesting dotted lines and patterns to make the pastry and bread products come alive. Some unique elements include the ability to search by vegan or gluten-free, a toggle button to hide half the website to focus on browsing, most information in the footer, and having ALL the offered products on the home page of the site. Simple, easy to use, and captivating.

Brand Neusense

Brand Neusense breaks a lot of rules by being too crowded, having too many colors, and incorporating too many animations - yet, somehow it all works. First of all, the models look like real people, not - for lack of a better word - models. Even more so, though, this creative e-commerce website stands out because the homepage focuses more on the various brands it sells and on ads than it does on its product. It is designed thoughtfully for its target market, and that's all you can ask of a web designer.

So whether you have an upcoming creative e-commerce website design project coming up or you need to revamp your e-commerce site design, use the examples above in your decisions. Doing your research and noting what others do right (or wrong) is one of the best ways to create a website that puts ordinary to shame.