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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Parallax Scrolling 101: The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful

One of the hottest trends in website design is parallax scrolling. First employed by Ian Coyle on the Nike Better World site in 2011, this is a special scrolling technique wherein background images move by the camera – or in this case, your computer screen – more slowly than images in the foreground, thereby creating an illusion of depth in what is in reality a two-dimensional environment on your screen.

With its explosive popularity, you have likely seen this effect in use but may not have known exactly what it was or how parallax scrolling is reshaping the landscape of today’s Web. But just like any trend or technique, parallax scrolling is not the right fit for every site, and it does have a few drawbacks. To help you decide whether this is a bandwagon you should jump on, let’s dive in and take a look at parallax scrolling from every angle – the good, the bad and the beautiful.

The good

The obvious benefit of parallax scrolling is its undeniable visual wow factor. Even though this technique has become very popular of late, it is still not so overdone that it has become commonplace. This means that any site that uses this approach well will make a lasting impression on its visitors. In a world where every company and organization is looking for a way to stand out from the crowd, this can be a powerful advantage.

The bad

While the bold visual impact of parallax scrolling is hard to beat, there is a downside to all that eye-popping punch: due to the weight of these graphic-intensive designs, these sites generally take a bit longer to load. In our modern age of impatience, this could potentially be a deal-breaker. Many people will not wait more than a few seconds for your site to load, so if your awesome parallax scrolling means that you have a 20-second load time (which is not unheard of), that is a big problem.

The reason that parallax sites take longer to load is due to the size of the images that must be used to create this style of presentation. As a result, you must be cautious in how you implement this technique. It's easy to overdo it, thereby making your site so large and cumbersome that you’ll turn away customers who aren’t inclined to wait for the page and its images to load.

If you are considering incorporating a parallax effect on your site, be sure to consider performance and work with your web development team to ensure that all images are optimized so that your site not only looks great but also loads as quickly as possible.

The beautiful

Let’s look at a few examples of parallax scrolling that really amp up the wow factor:

Life Of Pi

The website for the movie Life of Pi illustrates the incredible journey of not only the characters in the film but also of the filmmakers who took on this challenging story.

Through the use of numerous still images taken from the film and pieced together, the implementation of the scrolling technique here gives the illusion of video content, providing an element of motion that really enhances the presentation.

Other effects used include images that start out black and white or as sketches and are colored in as you scroll down the page, as well as content that appears from the sides of the screen. In this way, the site is the perfect reflection of a film that relies heavily on visual effects, recreating that feeling of “movie magic” on the screen for its visitors.

Rimmel London

Rimmel London's site uses a traditional parallax effect, where images of the company's products appear in the foreground and scroll at a different rate than those in the background. This gives the site a sense of visual interest and perception of dimension that you simply would not get with flat, static photographs.

Parallax.js

This site, which is a sandbox aimed at web developers, has an incredibly complex and layered implementation of the parallax effect.

The scene depicted has multiple layers of ocean waves that move at different speeds and patterns along with a lighthouse that bobs up and down to give the illusion of an undulating seascape. For added effect, users on mobile devices equipped with a gyroscope can use the orientation of the device to manipulate the way the page moves and flows.

As this intricately layered demonstration of the parallax scrolling effect shows, with so many layers and axes of motion at your disposal, there is a mind-boggling array of possibilities for the kind of experience you could design for your visitors.

Make Your Money Matter

The purpose behind this website is to illustrate the difference between putting your money in a bank versus a credit union.

As you scroll down the page, a series of whimsical illustrations are layered into the page to tell the story of “where your money really goes” when you put it in a bank. In doing so, a topic that is fairly dry and serious becomes much more engaging and approachable through the strength of its presentation. The end result is much more powerful than it would be had the site’s owners simply published a flat page of content and bullet points relating this same information.

Sony

In much the same way as the site for Life of Pi, Sony uses a series of photographic images strung together to create the sensation that the visitor is watching a video in motion, as Sony’s products – ranging from a 4k television screen, speakers, a smartphone and more – appear to assemble themselves right before their very eyes.

This is a very cool presentation technique that far surpasses what traditional still photography alone could capture. Even a video of the product assembly process would not be nearly as engaging, because here, there is the added element of surrealism where the user’s scroll is what controls the build of the products.

TEDxGUC

The site for TedxGUC is far less intricate than others covered so far, but it’s still a great example of how parallax scrolling can deliver a narrative via the Web.

Using nothing but elementary illustrations and some well-written copy, this approach conveys its intended message much more effectively than it could through a few paragraphs of text alone. In fact, the strength of this site is in its simplicity, which goes to show that you do not need to be as over-the-top as the Life of Pi or Sony examples in order to use make effective use of the parallax scrolling technique. Sometimes, less is, in fact, more.

But does it convert?

The million dollar question is whether parallax scrolling has any measurable impact on the power of a website to convert leads and customers. While the results are still hazy on that front, a Purdue University study from 2013 did find that “although parallax scrolling enhanced certain aspects of the user experience, it did not necessarily improve the overall user experience.” This is, of course, just one attempt to evaluate a relatively new technique, but it is noteworthy.

That being said, this particular study did not take into account the memorability of the sites included. The ability of parallax scrolling sites to make a lasting impression is one of their key benefits – one which could theoretically have a very real effect on the site’s ability to capture and convert customers.

In summary

While the business benefits of parallax scrolling are yet to be fully determined, the visual wow factor of this technique is very appealing and is one of the main reasons it has become such a popular trend. In the end, like any element of web design and marketing, parallax scrolling is something that you and your trusted web development team will need to decide whether or not it is a fit for your brand and your website.

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PPC & SEO: Two Great Traffic-Building Strategies That Work Great Together

All too often, businesses approach pay-per-click advertising and SEO as mutually exclusive options. After all, why pay for results when you can get them for free? Well, it’s not quite that simple. In today’s digital age, PPC and SEO are both highly effective tactics for finding new potential customers and driving them to your website. Each has its own strengths and serves a specific set of objectives, and more often than not, they are most effective when used in conjunction as part of a coordinated search marketing campaign. Here are four ways that integrating both PPC and SEO into your search marketing efforts can help you capture more traffic than either one alone:

Cover all your bases.

Because achieving a significant improvement in your organic search ranking is a time- and labor-intensive process, it’s best to concentrate your SEO efforts on the few specific keyword sets that fall within the sweet spot where your potential to conquer the category and the potential revenue to be gained as a result are highest. However, that doesn’t mean you have to give up entirely on all the other keyword sets that your prospective customers use daily to search for the products and services you offer. This is where a well-executed PPC campaign can complement your SEO efforts by allowing you to target a broad array of keywords without diluting the focus of your SEO campaign. Furthermore, since it may take months or even years to see a measured improvement in your organic search ranking (depending on the level of competition within your category), targeting the same keyword sets with both your SEO and PPC campaigns can be a very effective strategy, since you’ll likely reap more immediate results from your PPC efforts while you continue laying the foundation of your SEO tactics.

Sharpen your strategy.

Again, because SEO is a long-term proposition by nature, you don’t necessarily get immediate feedback on how well your campaign is performing or whether you are focusing on the keyword sets with the greatest potential to deliver business to your door. With PPC, however, you get clear metrics on the performance of your campaign from day one. As you monitor these results over time, you’ll gain valuable insights into which keyword sets actually drive the most traffic to your site and achieve the most conversions, which can help you shape and refine your SEO efforts to achieve greater results.

Increase your visibility in highly competitive categories.

One of the greatest challenges of SEO is that you ultimately have no control over the result of your efforts. While there are plenty of time-tested tactics you can employ to improve your ranking, there is absolutely no way to guarantee how high you will climb or how long it will take you to achieve an optimal ranking. For some keyword sets where there is heavy competition, the reality is that you may never be able to reach the first page or two of organic search results, especially if you’re in a category where many of your competitors are engaging in underhanded black-hat techniques. When it comes to PPC, however, you are in control, and your primary limitation is your budget. So, for example, if you were trying to conquer the relatively broad keyword set “Charlotte dentist,” it could take you years of persistent dedication to blogging, inbound link building and other legitimate white-hat SEO tactics to land on the first pages of an organic search for those terms – if you ever do. However, if you have enough resources to dedicate to PPC, and you test and refine your campaign on a regular basis, you could find yourself leap-frogging over your competitors in no time.

Capture customers who don’t actually know they’re looking for you.

If you have a product or service that’s new to your market, many of the potential customers you’re trying to reach may not yet have the necessary level of awareness to be actively seeking out that product or service offering by name. Therefore, if you want to capture search traffic in the short term, you’ll need to get creative with PPC and target those who are looking for related services. For example, wellness coaching is a service that’s well known on the West Coast but unfamiliar in the East. If you were a wellness coach looking to break into the market in a city like Charlotte or Atlanta, you could execute a PPC campaign targeting keyword sets for related services such as career counseling or personal training. By doing so, you’ll be able to put your name in front of many people who might be a good candidate for your services, even if they don’t yet know it. Using this approach will help keep your sales pipeline flowing while you continue the foundational efforts necessary to conquer your long-term objectives of building market awareness and establishing a strong organic search ranking.

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