While a fifth of consumers switched brands almost as soon as COVID-19 hit, according to McKinsey, “73% of loyalty members shopped more with their favorite retailers during the pandemic,” discovered a 2021 Clarus study.
Moreover, 90% of participants told Clarus they’d rather buy from “a retailer where they’re a premium loyalty member over another one offering a lower price.”
76% of participants are even willing to pay to join a loyalty program.
So how do you promote your loyalty program and gain all these benefits?
Let’s take a look.
Loyalty is key for longevity, so it deserves rewards.
Loyalty programs often give long term rewards, but consider making it worth their while right now. Don’t leave the decision to join to “some day,” which might never come.
If you offer your program during a purchase, give customers a reward they can instantly redeem.
If you suggest joining at other times, create urgency by offering an additional reward that expires within 24 hours.
Make your program tiered, so customers can accumulate points by:
Make the most of your most precious online real estate.
Design your popup to appear when customers are likely to sign up, like when they:
Personalized popup experiences are ideal, say, based on:
Popups are efficient in highlighting promotions, but don’t overuse them. Highlight your loyalty program on your top navigation menu, and let customers discover it on their own, too.
Email might not outlive us, but for now, email marketing is one of the most powerful tools we’ve got.
If you have a non-buying sector that’s highly engaged with your email marketing efforts – opens every email, clicks links, responds sometimes – consider a soft pitch for your loyalty program.
Similarly, if you see they mostly open discount-focused emails, they might be ready for the buying-incentivizing rewards a loyalty program offers.
Some of your customers are already loyal… they just haven’t signed up to your program yet.
They buy regularly.
They’ve referred friends who also buy from you.
So why bother recruiting them to your loyalty program?
Proactively letting them know about rewards that are available for the activities they do “for free” can add appreciation and tighten their bond with your brand. Giving them some of these rewards retroactively can take it to the next level.
Your loyalty program is the place to nurture this relationship and ensure their advocacy continues.
Email marketing isn’t just for initial relationship building with folks who’ve gotten that $10 coupon for their first purchase. It can be used to nurture the relationship with your valued loyalty program members.
Once you deepen this relationship, it’ll be easier for you to ask for their participation in case studies. It’s always more reliable when a customer says we’re great than when we say it ourselves.
When customers let you publish their stories, you can leverage their voice throughout your website, advertising and social media efforts.
You and your customers are there all day anyway, so sprinkle some promotions.
No one likes to follow a feed that’s constantly promoting products, but if you usually provide value and fun, the occasional promotion will be well accepted.
So post about your loyalty program when you have a concrete – maybe urgent – reason to do so. Say, when you introduce a new reward or run a time-limited discount.
You can also share celebratory posts (for example, when you reach 50,000 members) or customers’ own posts.
As mentioned above, no one is more trustworthy to promote your brand or loyalty program than your customers. They’re your prospects’ peers, they understand prospects’ experiences and hesitations, and they (usually) don’t have much to gain by sharing their stories.
So, encourage customers to share content related to your program, and tag you, including:
If you constantly get the same questions about your loyalty program, answer them on your feed every once in a while. Even better, provide personalized answers to questions you get from followers:
When your customers recommend you, you know you’re doing something good. And you know that the new leads they generate for you will come trusting, ready to buy.
Our recommendation is to provide two rewards per referral:
It’s a win-win.
Look for ways to connect friends, family members or stranger-but-like-minded customers through your loyalty program. This way, customers will have a deeper reason than discounts or store credit to refer their loved ones – they’ll have an opportunity to build social and family connections.
For example:
Getting feedback from current members will help you adjust your rewards to encourage more referrals – and to serve your current customers better.
Maybe the loyalty program doesn’t actually serve their needs, so they can’t recommend it yet.
Maybe the program is great, but they forgot they signed up because you haven’t implemented a nurturing email marketing program yet. They haven’t fully experienced its benefits yet, so they can’t refer others to it.
Make changes, report back to show customers you care, and get more feedback to keep growing.
Feedback from customers is the most important information you can get. If there’s a gap between what you create for them and what they need, no amount of promotion will help.
Combine their qualitative feedback with data-based tools to get a bigger picture, since not everybody will give you feedback. Closing your tech stack gap can also give you better tools to personalize and scale your promotions… as well as to analyze what your competitors are doing.
Understanding what competitors are offering and how they promote their loyalty programs will help you realize the industry standard. But just as importantly, combined with your data, it will help you see the gap competitors have left open.
It will help you be the one that closes the gap for your customers, and serves their needs best. Once you do that, they’ll likely do more of the promotion for you.
If you’re looking for more Shopify tips and recommendations, check out the PickyStory blog.
Good Luck!
PickyStory is the e-commerce conversion platform. It enables merchants to uplift their revenue in store. PickyStory offers a variety of deals like Bundle Products, Combo Products, Bundle Builder, Kits, Looks, and coupons.
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