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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Applying Science to Social Media: Analytics 101

These days, the importance of using social media to connect with customers goes almost without saying. And with a variety of channels to choose from that offer direct access to millions of people at no cost, what’s not to like? Well, for one thing, there’s the issue of measurability. While the barriers to entry are next to none, how can you assess your company’s performance in engaging with all those existing and potential customers? After all, social media doesn’t conform to any of the familiar metrics that we’ve used to evaluate traditional mediums for decades. You can’t sum up your interactions on Facebook or Twitter in terms of rating points or share. Furthermore, what constitutes a good result for one company may not apply for another. What if yours is a service-based business rather than one that sells tangible consumer goods? Or what if you’re charged with managing social media for a ministry or nonprofit? Your standards for success will likely be completely different than those of a for-profit entity. The good news is that there are many tools available to help you gauge the overall health of your Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts. Even if your company doesn’t have the funds or the manpower to devote to managing your social media presence full-time, there are no-cost and low-cost options available to help you wrangle the ambiguous concept of engagement into quantifiable figures.

Free solutions

Let’s start with Facebook. The good folks at Facebook offer very helpful performance metrics via their aptly-named Insights feature, but trying to process this data can be like drinking from a fire hose (and one that changes fairly often) unless you know how to filter what you need from what you don’t. Here are a couple of simple calculations that you can perform to distill this raw data into meaningful information. At any given point in time, you can gauge the basic level of engagement on your Page by dividing the number of Monthly Active Users by the total number of Lifetime Likes. Multiply that figure by 100, and you’ve got the percentage of your fanbase that has interacted with your content in some form or fashion during the past month. Because Insights information is kept private and made available only to a Page’s designated administrators, there aren’t any industry benchmarks against which you can rate how your performance stacks up. However, what you can and should do instead is track your own figures over the course of several months. Is your engagement percentage dropping? Climbing? Holding steady? Keeping an eye on these trends will help you establish benchmarks for your own company and give you a feel for the types of tactics and campaigns that get the greatest response. Beyond that, you can determine whether your content is connecting with users or turning them away by comparing Total Likes to Total Unsubscribes. Divide Total Unsubscribes by Total Likes, then multiply by 100, and you’ll find the percentage of people who’ve left your page. Obviously, the goal here is to achieve as low a percentage as possible. Some unsubscribes are inevitable, but hopefully you’ll be looking at single digits. If your percentage is greater than 10, it’s time to scrutinize your content strategy to see what might be driving people away. What about Twitter? Their native platform is notoriously difficult for data analysis, but fortunately, there are a plethora of third-party toolsets that use Twitter’s API to crank out stats for your account. HootSuite is the platform of choice for many social media managers, largely because in terms of ease of use, they’re hard to beat. Once you get acquainted with the interface, it’s pretty easy to get a snapshot of who’s retweeting your content, who’s talking about you, and who’s asking questions that need your attention. You can either monitor this activity manually or set up reports to be automatically generated to give you a global view of the health of your Twitter presence. And did I mention that their Basic plan is free for up to five social profiles?

Almost-free options

What if you need more flexibility and data-filtering power than the free version of HootSuite offers? Then you might want to check out their Pro plan. A minimal investment of $5.99 per month will get you access to advanced reporting tools that will help you monitor sentiment and track social reach as well as the ability to add an unlimited number of social profiles. TwentyFeet also provides some promising tools at a very low cost, although they’re a much newer company without a proven track record established as of yet. However, unlike HootSuite, they offer tracking for YouTube (along with Twitter and Facebook). You can track one Twitter account and one Facebook user profile (not Page) free of charge, or you can add additional profiles for $2.49 per profile per year. Yep, that’s per YEAR, not per month. That’s a pretty incredible rate for the types of monitoring services they offer. The primary benefit of going the paid route with companies like HootSuite and TwentyFeet is the reporting option. If yours is a smaller company with limited resources, it’s much more efficient to be able to pull reports on demand rather than having to spend a lot of your own time crunching the numbers to gauge your performance.

Better information, better decisions

While this is by no means an exhaustive evaluation of all the available services that can help you track social media metrics, these solid, highly affordable options offer enough data to give you a clear view of your engagement across various platforms. Dive in today, and discover the difference that the insights you glean from these toolsets can make in your ability to guide and direct your company’s social media initiatives.

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Survival of the Fittest: Conquering Responsive Website Design

With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets today, serving the needs of mobile browsers is no longer acondary consideration when it comes to designing (or redesigning) your website. From the ground up, it’s critically important to ensure that you are building a platform that will look beautiful and perform elegantly no matter where or how a user might access it. While you can create a dedicated mobile site or app, responsive design offers a smarter, more flexible, more agile solution that will ultimately deliver a greater long-term return for your investment.

Defining responsive design

Responsive design is the concept of building a website so that the layout of the site adapts and changes according to the resolution of the user’s browser. Using this approach, you can build a single site that will look just as good on a monitor that’s 2048 pixels by 1080 pixels as it will on an iPhone that’s 320 pixels by 480 pixels and all browser sizes in between without the need to build a separate dedicated mobile version of your website. Ethan Marcotte, the forerunner in the field, identifies the three key ingredients of responsive design as follows:

• Fluid grids
• Flexible images
• Media queries

Wait, fluid what? Media what? Let’s take a step back and define these terms in plain English. Every website is developed based on a grid that governs the scale of and relative position of objects (such as navigation menus, images and text) to one another. A fluid grid has the ability to shift and reposition select elements of the site based on certain conditions in order to preserve the properly defined scale for layout, size and spacing. “Flexible images” mean that the images contained within the site’s design should scale in size and shift in position according to the dimensions of the device being used to access the site (larger images on large displays, smaller ones on phone screens, etc.) And media queries? Media queries are used to intelligently detect the size of the browser window and the device being used to access the site and bring back the correct layout for optimal viewing and navigation according to those parameters. But these technical elements only govern the mechanics of the site. What ultimately determines the success of a website that’s built on a responsive design framework is its ability to provide a user interface that’s both visually pleasing and easy to use. After all, responsive design isn't only about resizing stuff to fit within different screen resolutions; it’s about presenting users with a the best possible experience, both in terms of layout and content. With that in mind, here are five key UX/UI factors that must be taken into consideration in order to maintain the integrity of the user interface and protect the quality of the user experience when employing a responsive design framework.

Catering to the needs of visitors

Users accessing your website from different devices have different needs. For example, if someone visits your website from their iPad during their daily commute on the train, they’re only going to dig so deep. For example, while they’ll likely be interested in perusing your latest blog post, they’re not going to be looking for the bios of your board of directors or your privacy policy. You must think about each type of user that will be visiting your site and let their needs and interests dictate the way your site molds and conforms itself to the size of their browser or device.

Intuitiveness

Being innovative is a good thing; being too innovative is not. If, for instance, you decide to change the color of hyperlinks to an indistinguishable shade of black or invent new navigational conventions that perplex your visitors, you’ll send them running in the opposite direction,and the design will be a total failure. The purpose of responsive web design is to empower users to visit your website and browse freely and according to the conventions that are most natural and familiar to them, irrespective of the device they are using.

Touchability

Who can refute the fact that touchscreens are growing more popular with every passing day? Almost all major smartphones and tablets use touchscreen interfaces, and even certain laptops and desktops are being offered with touch functionality. Touchscreens needs to be treated differently. For example, in the world of the touchscreen, there is no such thing as a hover state. If, for example, you have “previous” and “next” buttons that would normally appear only when a mouse rolls over them, those elements would be unavailable to your touchscreen users. For finger-friendly navigation, all elements must be big, bold and obvious. Buttons that require users to mouse over them to get a sense of action must be replaced with style enhancements that draw attention to their “pressability.” It’s also a good idea when catering to touchscreen users to keep the navigation or sub-navigation menu to the right. Why? Because the majority of your users will be right-handed, so the menus will be more conveniently accessible if they’re on the right rather than on the top or left.

Images

While layouts, structural elements and text can be made flexible, images require special attention. Improper alignment of images can ruin even the greatest of designs. Images need to be automatically adjusted to ensure that the website looks awesome in either portrait or landscape mode (remember: most portable devices nowadays can switch instantaneously between views, depending on the user's whims and wishes). Also, when resizing images on the basis of the screen resolution of the device, care needs to be taken so that the images do not lose their quality. If a given image contains the logo or the name of the website, it needs to be given prominence, whereas footer images can take a back seat. The best is to load the images in their original size, unless the viewing area becomes too narrow for the purpose. When that happens, it means the user is on a mobile device, and the image needs to be narrowed in accordance with the screen width. This is the very essence of how smart responsive web design works.

What to show (and what to hide)

With responsive design, we have the ability to rearrange web elements and make every thing fit on the screen, no matter how small it is. However, making every single aspect of a normal web page available to mobile users is not only unnecessary but it can render your site practically unusable on smaller screens. For mobile devices, navigation, content and functionality must be pared down significantly to focus on those features that are most useful to users while on the go. For example, while mobile users frequently comparison shop on their phones, they might not be as likely to actually go through the entire purchase process on their handheld device. Therefore, while product information and pricing is key, e-commerce options should be extremely streamlined.

A Showcase of Responsive Design

To demonstrate just how effective responsive can be, let’s take a look at a few examples of companies that have embraced this new approach in building their sites. In each example, the full version of the site is show first, followed by a version as it appears on a mobile device.

Hicksdesign

Art Equals Work

City Crawlers: Berlin

8Faces

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