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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Small Changes, Big Impact: 5 Things You Can (and Should!) Do Today to Boost Your Website’s Performance

Every spring it happens like clockwork: the temperatures get warmer, the days get longer and everything in nature becomes more vibrant and colorful. Along with these changes in the great outdoors comes the irresistible urge to clean house and embrace a fresh start. Why not keep that motivational momentum going and apply it to your business – and, more specifically, to your website – as well? After all, there’s no time like the present to sweep away the old and outdated and bring in fresh new ideas and technologies. But you don’t necessarily need to dive head-first into a full redesign and all of the time and expense that entails to reap measurable results. Instead, here are five small steps you can – and should! – take today to ensure that your site is up-to-date, relevant and doing all it can to bring you new customers and grow the community around your brand:

1. Reposition your contact form.

For most website owners – especially those in service-based businesses such as law, accounting, consulting, real estate, etc. – the key “win” for their site is when it motivates a visitor to request more information or schedule a meeting. Contact forms are a ubiquitous website staple intended to provide a convenient – and highly measurable – avenue to initiate communication between an interested prospect and a company. However, perhaps because they are so commonplace, all too often these forms are given little strategic thought, resulting in a cookie-cutter name/email address/phone number format that yields more bogus spam submissions than legitimate new business opportunities. However, there is one simple change you can make that has been shown to get better results: reposition your standard “Contact us” form as an “Ask our experts” feature. By doing so, you shift the focus of the form to providing your visitors with an opportunity to submit a question that is specific to their needs and concerns. Rather than feeling like they are opening themselves up to an endless barrage of solicitation calls and emails, your visitors will sense that they are initiating a dialogue with an expert who will help them solve their particular problem. Make sure to respond to all inquiries within 24 hours, provide helpful advice that is free of charge and tailored to your prospect’s situation, and leave the door open to continue the conversation in a future meeting or phone call. By doing so, you will establish an important foundation of trust and confidence with your potential new client that will make them more inclined to engage your professional services. I have personally seen the submission rates on these types of forms increase dramatically. On one site where this small change was implemented, form submissions jumped from one or two per week to one or two per day – all legitimate business opportunities that were sparked simply by repositioning the focus of the form.

2. Productize your offering.

Another challenge that professional services organizations face in creating a website that works as an effective customer conversion engine is that they do not sell a specific product but rather a suite of services that can be customized to each client’s specific needs. This makes it terribly hard to market to visitors who come to their site and simply want to know “What exactly does this company sell, and how much does it cost?”. Because there are so many variables to the company’s offerings, there is not a quick and easy answer to these questions. If this challenge sounds familiar to you, one approach you can try is to “productize” what you have to offer. Create a bundle of services with a fixed price, and market that package on your site in a simple, straightforward manner that makes your offering easy to understand and helps visitors feel like doing business with your company is as simple as buying a product off the shelf at a store. This is exactly what my company did with some of the technology consulting services that we offer. Instead of only listing the array of services we provide, we also created a product that representing a very specific offering. This made it so much easier to answer the “What do you sell?” question, and it gave us something tangible to promote in our marketing campaigns. In reality, this approach in no way limited the range of services we are able to offer our clients; rather, it merely served as a vehicle to open doors to new opportunities and made it easier to start conversations with new customers for whom we could ultimately provide a custom-tailored solution. Examine the services that you offer, and work with your marketing team to create an appealing package that you can market – understanding all the while that this “product” is really just a means for you to connect with customers and begin the sales process with something tangible that they can easily understand.

3. Lose your home page carousel.

One simple change that I have seen many websites make in the past year or so is to remove animated image carousels from their home pages. These carousels have long been a popular fixture of website design, but the reality is that they can sometimes do more harm than good. Home page carousels typically feature giant, screen-spanning images which carry with them heavy download requirements both for the images and for the scripts that power the animation sequences, thereby creating a potential stumbling block in performance for users on mobile devices or with slower connections. Additionally, studies have shown that click-through rates on animated carousels are extremely low, and they drop significantly from the first slide to the subsequent ones. This is why many companies are replacing rotating carousels with a singular static message instead. This one change can greatly reduce a page’s download size (when my company did this on our home page, its file size decreased by 75 percent) while having little to no effect on actual user engagement or click-through. In fact, because the page now loads more quickly, many sites actually see an uptick in user engagement because fewer people are abandoning a site due to poor performance. Do you have a carousel on your website? If so, do you know whether or not it is working well for you? Your marketing team may be able to do some A/B testing between a version of your site with this animation feature and one without it to see which performs better. Since carousels do work well for some sites (like news organizations or sites with lots of frequently updated content), having this data can help you determine whether or not it’s time to ditch the carousel.

4. Update your image(s).

Stock photography is something of a necessary evil of website design, as more often than not, companies don’t have the budget to execute a full-fledged custom professional photo shoot. However, not all stock images are created equal. Stock photos that are overused or that look so obviously staged that they scream of their “stockiness” can cheapen a site’s design and leave visitors with a negative overall impression of the site. Replacing those images can make a big difference in a site’s visual appeal. If your site’s imagery is stale, you can make some simple image swaps to freshen it up. If you are going to change out old stock images for new stock images, make sure to seek out photos that feel fresh and that are not terribly overused (most stock photo sites will tell you how many times an image has been downloaded). An even better option is to try to add some unique imagery to your site. This could be photographs that you hire a professional to take or – in keeping with one of this year’s hottest trends – custom illustrations that you commission from an artist. If your budget is tight, incorporating even just one or two such one-of-a-kind images in key spots on your site can really boost its visual impact. For instance, if you lose that aforementioned carousel on the home page and replace it with one truly compelling static image and message, it can make a really powerful first impression on your visitors.

5. Publish less.

Most experts agree that publishing original, value-add content on your site on a regular basis is key to optimizing its success – both from a sales and marketing standpoint and as an advantage in the never-ending battle of SEO. While I agree with this approach in principal, for many companies, the drive to publish regularly has resulted in putting out mediocre content simply to meet an inflexible standard of frequency. This is often an entirely counterproductive effort, as content that lacks in quality, original thought or value for the reader reflects poorly on the organization and its perceived level of expertise. Publishing original content to your site on a regular basis is still a best practice, but that content must offer value for it to succeed. Let’s say a visitor comes to your site and is impressed to find that you publish new articles weekly or monthly; however, once they click through the headline to see what they can glean from your writing, if what they find is mediocre at best, what motivation do they have to return to your site again in the future, let alone entrust you with their hard-earned dollars? If, on the other hand, you publish new content less frequently, but everything you produce is of the highest quality, then that same visitor will know that the time they spend on your site will always be worth their while, and they will look forward to the next time you post something new. Re-examine your current content marketing strategy, and ask yourself whether you are focused on quality or frequency. If it’s the latter, commit instead to writing less but to improving the quality of what you offer on your site. While this change may not have an immediate impact, it will absolutely yield long-term results that your visitors will appreciate and respond positively to.

In closing

Eventually, your website will need a redesign, but in the meantime you can make small, strategic, surgical changes that will pay immediate dividends in your site’s success. This approach of implementing gradual but regular modifications will also benefit you when it does come time for that full redesign. By making intelligent improvements over time, you will ultimately be closer to your end goal, leaving less to accomplish with the redesign and thereby paving the way for a smoother and less costly project.

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20 Questions to Determine If It’s Time to Redesign Your Website, Part 2

Previously we helped you put your website to the test to identify the glaring problems in design and content that might be costing you valuable opportunities to win new customers. However, these variables really only scratch the surface when it comes to the performance of your site. If your website isn’t your number one salesman, there could be less obvious but equally insidious issues lurking beneath the surface that are killing your site’s ability to convert. If you answer “no” to any of the following questions, it’s time to seriously consider a redesign:

1. Is your site free of autoplay gimmicks and pop-ups?

If you want to alienate a visitor immediately, start playing music or have a spokesperson begin talking automatically as soon as they load the site. Uncued audio, video, animations, banners and pop-ups are completely taboo in modern website design. Don’t insult the intelligence of your users by forcing content upon them. It’s the online equivalent of having a pushy salesman pounce on them the minute they walk in the door and hound them into looking at products or services that may not be relevant to their interests at all.

2. Is the navigation intuitive?

When evaluating your website’s navigational structure, don’t look at it through the eyes of your most sophisticated, web-savvy users. Scrutinize it from the perspective of your most reluctant, technology-averse users. Are there an overwhelming number of pathways presented on the home page? Do the options offered in your top-level navigation menus correspond to specific user needs and motivations? How many layers are you asking users to dig through to find the types of information they are most likely to need? Are action buttons styled and positioned consistently so that they’re easy to identify as a user scans and scrolls through your site?

3. Does your site offer a search feature?

Sometimes visitors will arrive at your site with a very specific need or purpose in mind, especially if they are comparison shopping across multiple sites. Don’t force them to sift through layers of navigation to uncover the one piece of information they’re seeking. Provide a search feature in the global framework that lets them bypass the various menus and links and find anything and everything on your site that pertains to their particular interest, whether it lives in your brochure copy, product descriptions, blog posts or news articles.

4. Is your site compatible with small screens?

In today’s 24/7 world of business, the most useful website is the one that can be accessed anywhere, not just at a desk. As a result, it’s critically important to ensure that your site plays well with all mobile platforms and devices, including touchscreens and tablets. Pull your company’s website up on your phone. Then pull it up on your friends' phones. Then pull it up on every modern mobile OS that you can get your hands on. If you can't bring it up, browse through it, view the content and complete core functions effortlessly, then neither can your users. In order to ensure that you’re providing the best possible user experience for those on small screens, you must make sure that your site’s interface is clean and clutter-free so that you make optimal use of the available real estate to allow the most important content to take center stage. Also pay close attention to details such as the amount of time it takes to load your site via mobile networks, the size and readability of typography, the level of contrast between the text and the background, the function of menus and the “pressability” of links, buttons and navigational tabs.

5. Is your site touch-friendly?

With the explosive growth in the adoption of touch-driven smartphones and tablets, the likelihood is increasing with every passing day that customers will be traveling around your website using touching and swiping gestures rather than the clicking and scrolling action of a mouse and keyboard. To create finger-friendly navigation, all links, buttons and menus must be big, bold and obvious and have a buffer around them to allow a greater margin of error. In the world of touch, roll-overs and hover states are non-existent, so replace buttons that require users to mouse over them to get a sense of action with style enhancements that draw attention to them as action elements. Again, the only way to be confident about how your site rates on the touch-friendly scale is to put it through the paces on actual touchscreen devices. If you don’t already own such a device, borrow one or – if all else fails – make a trip to your local retailer and use the display models there. It’s worth a little legwork to ensure that you’re providing the best possible quality experience for the growing legions of touch users. Read more: Is Your Website Ready for the Tablet Revolution?

6. Is it Flash-free?

The mobile Web is officially a hostile environment when it comes to Flash. Apple’s iOS does not – and probably never will – support Flash. Android does support Flash, but the performance of Flash content on Android devices thus far has been less than ideal. If you have Flash anywhere on your site – whether it’s in the introduction, your navigation framework or video – get rid of it now, or else most mobile users will be plagued with problems. Today there are better, more lightweight and touch-friendly options available, such as HTML5 and JavaScript, that can replicate the same effects that once required Flash.

7. Is your site supported by a content management system?

Publishing unique, high-caliber content to your site on a regular basis is a crucial element of today’s marketing that is integral to helping your company conquer many key business growth objectives. The only way to achieve this efficiently and cost effectively is to have a content management system behind the scenes of your website that allows designated administrators within your own company to create and post certain content types – such as blog posts, company news, event information and press releases – within the existing framework of your site. A solid, robust content management system will make it easy and intuitive for almost any user to publish sophisticated, engaging content that includes photos or videos and follows graphical style conventions that maintain a cohesive look and feel with your site as a whole.

8. Is there a way for users to subscribe to receive updates?

It takes a lot of effort to find and entice new qualified visitors to your website, but the greatest payoff comes when you can grab these users and convince them to come back again and again. Don’t put the burden on them to remember to check in every so often to see what’s new on your site. Make sure they have the option to subscribe to receive updates either by RSS feed or email so that when you publish a new blog post or send out your next e-newsletter, you’re in their feed reader or inbox, prompting them to click through and dive into your latest content.

9. Is your site free of black-hat SEO techniques?

If your website has ever been in the hands of a less-than-reputable developer or SEO “expert,” there may be dangerous black-hat SEO tactics in play that are putting your site’s performance in organic search results in serious jeopardy. Black-hat tricks like keyword stuffing and invisible text are the crutches often employed by snake-oil SEO practitioners to artificially improve the position of a website in search engine results pages for specific terms or phrases. However, the problem is that all of these illegitimate methods are condemned by the major search engines, which are programmed to weed out and penalize imposters. While these techniques might provide a temporary boost, when they are uncovered by the search engines (and they inevitably will be), your site will be blacklisted, and you’ll be off the map completely when it comes to organic search. There’s no short-term benefit that’s worth the cost of such a great potential risk.

10. Do you have tools to track the metrics on key conversion points?

Where do visitors to your site come from? What keywords are they using to find your site? Which pages do they visit most often? Which pages might be turning them off and sending them elsewhere? How many visitors leave after viewing only one page? How long do visitors tend to spend on your site? The answers to all of these questions are critical to helping you shape your site and adapt your online marketing efforts to maximize conversions. However, unless you have the required tracking code in place in the underpinnings of your site to tie into a metrics toolset like Google Analytics, you’ll find yourself with major gaps in the information you need to make crucial decisions that affect the growth of your business.

How did your site rate?

If you’ve answered “no” to several of these questions, it’s time to move overhauling your site to the top of your business growth priorities list. By partnering with a top-notch website design firm, the initial investment required to redevelop your site to meet these criteria will be returned to you many times over in the lifetime value of the new customers you’ll be able to capture with a site that offers a powerful and engaging experience to users on any and every platform and device.

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