You’ve finally found it!
The secret 5 growth levers successful retailers and brands use to grow their loyalty programs.
A well-run customer loyalty program can be a game-changer for your business. A study by Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by more than 25%.
Not only that, but it costs a business 5X more to acquire new customers than it does to retain an existing customer. Implementing a loyalty program is a no-brainer, but getting people to sign up can be a problem.
What are the most successful loyalty programs doing to increase registration rates?
Let’s look at the 5 growth levers in turn…
ProTip: #4 is what nearly 90% of retailers fail at!!…
1. Remove barriers to loyalty program sign up
Consumers no longer want to fill out a paper form, download “another” app, or navigate multiple pages to sign up for a loyalty program. The faster the initial sign up, the higher the adoption rate. The goal of registration should be obtaining minimal viable information (MVI) at the fastest speed possible.
Simplify the onboarding process and give consumers an easy way to sign up for your program through digital technology that requires seconds to access and fill out a form, not minutes. QR Codes or Text-in technologies are easy ways to get forms into the hands of your customers instantly. Here’s a blog post we put together recently outlining the best ways to collect customer contact data in-store organically
2. Create instant incentives to register
When asking a customer to sign up for a loyalty program, don’t overburden them with information and allow them to ask the question: “What’s in it for me?” At this point, it’s already too late.
Consumers love instant gratification. Provide customers with a no-brainer incentive to sign up to the MVI model, and then focus on customer activation by spending time and resources on promoting the benefits of your loyalty program.
Try offering a straightforward $5 off your next purchase with registration.
3. Go mobile
A physical card represents something tangible that consumers can touch and feel, agreed. But there is a limit to the number of cards a purse or wallet can store. Not to mention, physical cards are easy to forget or misplace.
What are the chances your customer would misplace their mobile phone? Not very likely. Your loyalty program needs to be as convenient to access as it is to sign up. Mobile wallet-style loyalty programs might be the best solution for you and your customers.
4. Build your owned audience
This step is where a lot of businesses fall short. Time and resources go into creating and building a successful loyalty program. However, if your program adoption rate hovers around 10-20% of your customer base, you are ignoring a large number of prospective users. You need to focus on a secondary program to collect warm prospects on the fence and eventually turn them into loyal customers.
The best strategy to build your owned audience is to create a separate customer acquisition strategy and focus on collecting first-party contact data from customers in-store. It’s vital to build a pool of prospective customers for your loyalty program.
5. Create a retargeting campaign
As with any advertising campaign, you can expect a 1-2% conversion rate on each campaign, but you want to retarget the individuals who have shown some sign of interest. You want to retarget these pre-identified customers (See #4) to promote the benefits of your program and increase adoption once they’re ready.
By collecting first-party contact data in your CRM, it will be 30X cheaper to contact these pre-identified customers in the future using text messaging than to run traditional digital advertising campaigns.
Text messaging campaigns are the best way to get your messages into the hand of your customers instantly with a near-perfect delivery rate.
In Conclusion…
Any business can implement these 5 strategic growth levers for their loyalty program. It just takes a bit of planning and the willingness to test new technologies. You can also attack this list one step at a time without overwhelming your team.