How to choose the right loyalty partner for your brand?
Successful businesses have loyal customers and repeat orders.
Loyalty programs assist businesses to strengthen their ties with their customers and a good loyalty partner can help you do just that.
Loyalty marketing has evolved significantly in recent years. Many brands have recognized the value of transforming cookie-cutter offers and programmatic rewards into personalized, engaging experiences. In other words, humanizing the brand-consumer engagement.
The recent digital push has made it mandatory for businesses to develop omnichannel engagement programs. However, marketers need to engage expert agencies for faster adoption of custom loyalty programs.
However, choosing the right loyalty partner for your brand’s personality and consumer segments is critical for the success of not only the program but also the business.
What exactly is a Loyalty Partner?
A loyalty program is a complex and massive undertaking for which most businesses lack the necessary resources, experience, and expertise. This is where a loyal partner can help. A loyalty partner will:
- Create and implement your loyalty strategy
- Provide the necessary resources and technological requirements
- Lead the data collection through the loyalty program
- Redemption procedures that work in tandem with the company’s CRM
Loyalty partner is a catch-all term. Depending on your marketing budget, business objectives, range of business, audience type, and campaign size, you could work with a loyalty agency or a loyalty platform partner.
Why Is Choosing the Right Loyalty Partner the Most Important Step?
Your decision will have a significant impact on some of the most critical aspects of your business. The following are the most important aspects that it will have an impact on.
1. Impact on Campaign Success
The direct impact of your partner selection will have an impact on the success of your campaign. An experienced loyalty platform partner, such as RewardPort, will design the program with your brand guidelines, business goals, and target group psyche in mind. A lack of research, experience, and expertise can hurt the performance of your loyalty strategy and the brand image.
2. Customer Experience
The primary goal of a loyalty program is to significantly improve the customer experience. A strong brand and customer relationship are built on a positive customer experience. A loyalty program that is tailored to a specific demographic will have a high level of engagement. A program that fails to appeal to the audience, on the other hand, will have a negative impact.
3. Customer Retention Rate
An experienced loyalty partner understands how to retain customers through an engaging loyalty program. Consistent engagement and profitable value exchange between brand and customers can successfully retain customers over time. An expert partner designs the program for long-term engagement and significantly increase customer lifetime value.
4. The Effect on Customer Referral Rate
Customers who are satisfied and happy have a positive influence on their network of friends and family. A profitable and engaging loyalty program combined with a referral program can attract more customers and increase the acquisition rate. This is a win-win situation for both the brand and its customers.
5. Influence on Brand Value
Customer experience, perceived brand image, and customer satisfaction all have an impact on the monetary value of the overall brand, also referred to as brand value. A simple yet effective loyalty program will increase customer satisfaction, retention rate, brand image, and revenue, whereas a poorly designed and executed program significantly reduce brand value.
What Should you Look for in a Loyalty Platform Partner?
Hiring your ideal loyalty partner needs a little due diligence after the brand introspection. You want to be certain that the partner can forward your loyalty strategy and help you implement the brand vision.
For a structured process have a checklist for the following factors while assessing the partners:
1. Strategic Collaboration
Look for a mutually beneficial partnership. A solution provider may have limited responsibilities, whereas a strategic partner can have shared responsibilities. The loyalty partner usually has a broader responsibility for the success of the loyalty program ensuring better KPI achievement.
Loyalty providers must act as partners, not just solutions. Loyalty programs are industry and business model specific. This means that the provider’s team should be able to leverage their expertise to create a successful program that is tailored to your needs.
Marketer-friendly solutions are easy to launch, manage, and troubleshoot independently, but may require additional guidance. A dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) provides
ongoing support and data-driven strategies to ensure that your business goals are met as your brand evolves.
2. Program customization and agility
The relationship between brands and customers is constantly evolving, and your loyalty program should reflect this. Choose a loyalty provider that offers customizable, module-based solutions. You can keep your programs agile and flexible without sacrificing startup speed.
Marketer-friendly solutions make it easy to design, launch, and optimize programs as your business grows. No code, web development, or website redesign required. Test strategies or launch new campaigns quickly and effectively.
3. Provider of Complete Solutions
Similarly, you require a loyalty partner who takes a comprehensive approach. A loyalty program has an impact on many aspects of a business, from marketing to management. As a result, a loyalty partner who takes on full responsibility for a loyalty program comes highly recommended. This will not only relieve you of the burden, but will also ensure smooth execution, increased efficiency, and better results.
4. Capabilities for Data Mining
Loyalty programs are the most effective way to collect zero and first-party data. Look for a loyalty partner with the technological capabilities to efficiently mine data from your loyalty programs. Your loyalty partner must also be able to integrate CRM data with loyalty program data. This will provide you with comprehensive and rich customer data, which will significantly improve your marketing and business strategies.
5. Solutions Provided
Loyalty programs have progressed significantly. Loyalty strategies must now include dynamic elements in order to better gauge the pulse of the audience and provide quantifiable deliverables. Personalization, individualized experiences, gamification, and other features offered by loyalty partners are more suitable for modern-day businesses. Technology is constantly evolving, and you require a partner who keeps up with the times and routinely uses technology to amplify your loyalty program
6. Prior Experience
Experience brings with it a level of finesse and expertise that is unrivalled. Look for partners with extensive experience. The success of a loyalty program is dependent on several nuances that an experienced partner will never overlook or undervalue. Agencies or platforms that have executed several programs over the years understand the nitty-gritty and the importance of the undertaking and can provide solutions that will ensure a higher ROI.
The appropriate loyalty partner will not only further your brand’s vision for consumer retention, but also add value to the brand itself. The retention campaign results can reveal a lot about the product and service usage patterns and where it can absolutely delight your consumers. Thus, helping the brand with insights about product or service and communication improvements.
What are Brand Strategies to Increase Engagement?
Brand engagement refers to customer loyalty and attachment to brands. Consumer engagement, which increases business sales, is at the heart of marketing strategy.
Customers who are highly engaged are more likely to make larger purchases. Furthermore, highly engaged customers are more likely to share information about your company and products through their social networks. Their devotion generates word-of-mouth advertising, which is a surefire winner for any company looking to increase sales.
Brands make the right decision when they prioritize value creation over revenue generation. As a result, customers are completely satisfied because they are getting the best deal possible.
Brand Engagement vs. Brand Awareness
Both phrases are part of the foundational ideas of brand marketing. Brand engagement strategy suggests that any brand should pursue a number of goals in order to be successful. They consist of brand equity, advocacy, brand engagement, brand loyalty, brand identity, and brand image.
When developing your marketing strategy, brand recognition comes first. It calls for marketing initiatives designed to increase brand recognition. The ability of prospective customers to distinguish your brand from rivals and remember your items is essential. In other words, your brand should be the first to occur to people’s minds when they have a need for a product they haven’t used before. To do this, brands heavily invest in advertising on a variety of platforms.
Increase brand engagement as soon as you’ve raised brand recognition. In order to make a purchase, they must be intrigued by your business. So, allow them to communicate with you through a variety of methods and make them know that you value their feedback. More sales will result from a stronger relationship with your audience and more brand engagement.
How to Increase Customer Engagement?
You’ve probably noticed that major brands and businesses encourage their customers to leave product reviews on their official social media pages.
Customers can always share their opinions and experiences through testimonials. This is a critical component of a successful customer interaction strategy. If your services are good, encouraging consumer feedback will help your brand’s positive reputation spread organically and interpersonally.
Practice the Four-I Strategy
- Involvement: Make your audience an active participant in your campaign to increase engagement with your brand. To help clients feel more connected to your brand, your business should promote various benefits and rewards programs.
- Influence: People look for advice from celebrities and influencers they respect and want to imitate, especially in the social media age. Work with the people who your potential consumers most admire to sway them.
- Interaction: Two must dance the tango! In this case, the adage is entirely appropriate. Brands and customers must interact for any business to succeed. Additionally, contact will increase customer and brand trust.
- Intimacy: Engage in direct communication with, and outreach to, customers at various levels and via a variety of channels. By doing this, you’ll be able to understand what your customers are thinking and meet their wants.
Consider the Value of Mobile Apps
The online brand marketing strategies that businesses use have drastically changed as a result of the rise of smartphones.
Top businesses and brands not only have expert websites but also have mobile applications that are easy to use.
Customers may use these applications to get a bird’s-eye perspective of all the goods they can buy, give reviews, rate the goods, and ask inquiries. There are many of applications that also compare pricing for a certain goods.
Post high-quality material on social media for digital marketing
More international firms are using social media and search engine optimization to strengthen their bonds with current customers. You should first create top-notch interactive content if you want to encourage your users or consumers. Strong content will spread more often on social media and among friends, enhancing the reputation of your brand.
Why engagement matters?
There are more channels for communicating with customers than ever before. This means that businesses have several options for attracting and retaining customers. It also implies that competitors have access to the same opportunities.
Brands must actively work to connect and interact with consumers at every opportunity in order to increase consumer engagement. Be consistent with all of your consumer engagement strategies. Create great end-to-end customer experiences from the first interaction all the way through the brand journey by crafting messages that are consistent with the brand and relevant to the target audience.
Provide customers with a consistent and great experience, and you’ll gain their involvement, loyalty, and trust.
5 Best Loyalty Schemes for this Diwali
Looking for supreme choices of loyalty programs for your customers, then you have arrived at the right platform. At Reward Port, we assist the businesses to offer the best loyalty programs which can sway away the customers and aid in strengthening the bond of trust between your brand and the customers.
Festivities are a great time to express gratitude to your customers and acknowledge their contribution in the consistent growth of your brands in the form of rewards.
So, this Diwali delight your customers with any one of these five best loyalty programs :
1. Point based scheme
The quintessential type of the loyalty program, this scheme offers value points for every purchase executed by the customer. These points can be redeemed later for the subsequent transactions. Higher the points, higher the redeemable amount of money. The introduction of this program is definitely bound to foster the initial trust and worth of your brand in the minds of especially the new customers.
2. Tier scheme
The tier scheme is the excellent approach to reward the long term loyal customers of your brand. Upgradation to the higher tier provides greater incentives on product purchases. It requires the customers to accrue points through multiple purchases over a period of time and evidently, greater number of points shifts them to higher rewards tier.
3. Sweepstakes
Businesses can partner with our loyalty rewards platform and relax as we offer convenient and hassle free sweepstakes program for your customers. Sweepstakes is a straight-forward program for the customers to enter with a minimal to zero fees and there is every probability to take home a grand bumper prize along with them. Various other prizes offered to runner ups are also high- priced.
4. Partnership Program
Businesses can build partnership with various other firms such as those offering food products, beauty products or even various services based firms to delight the customers to the next level.
Studies have shown that the flexibility in the choices available under the umbrella of a loyalty program is the main reason the customers find a loyalty program attractive. With the points accumulated, customer can log into their account and redeem their points by shopping from a plethora of products available.
5. Gamified Loyalty Program
If the businesses desire to acquire an edge over their competitors, it is indeed achievable by the creative gamification of a loyalty program that can be offered as a spellbinding reward program to the customers, for instance the Spin and Win Reward loyalty program.
It is essential to emphasize that any of the loyalty programs extended to your customers should be in a comprehensible format with terms and conditions mentioned, to ensure greater effectiveness of the program.
Blockchain Technology Promises Major Benefits for Loyalty Reward Programs
What the internet did for communications, blockchain will do for trusted transactions.
So what is Blockchain?
Picture a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. Then imagine that this network is designed to regularly update this spreadsheet, and you have a basic understanding of the blockchain.
The blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location, meaning the records it keeps are truly public and easily verifiable. No centralized version of this information exists for a hacker to corrupt. Hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, its data is accessible to anyone on the internet.
Blockchain enable two entities that do not know each other to agree that something is true without the need of a third party. As opposed to writing entries into a single sheet of paper, a blockchain is a distributed database that takes a number of inputs and places them into a block.
Each block is then ‘chained’ to the next block using a cryptographic signature. This allows blockchains to be used as a ledger which is accessible by anyone with permission to do so.
Introducing Blockchain as a customer loyalty solution
Loyalty programs are often considered as one of the most efficient ways for businesses to retain customers. The Deloitte Center for Financial Services (DCFS), in a recent report, claims blockchain technology can improve customer loyalty and reward programs.
Its chief benefits are in allowing companies to join their rewards program in ways not previously thought possible and it would simplify reward programs by linking multiple programs that consumers are already a part of.
Blockchain implementations of customer reward programs will give businesses a secure and verifiable record of transactions, particularly for their rewards programs.
This technology’s record at solving problems is proven; blockchain in what made Bitcoin the first digital currency to finally solve the ‘double spending’ problem, in which customers can sometimes spend a single unit of digital currency multiple times.
Although modern customer reward systems now have built-in protections against this problem, its impossibility within a blockchain deployment makes blockchain an attractive collaboration tool.
Reward points will be transferrable across participating businesses. Retailers and other businesses could take advantage of common markets to enhance the usefulness of their reward programs to their customers. Travelers, for example, could book a hotel and receive automatic discounts at their nearby restaurants through their rewards app.
Customers will benefit from the linkage between different retailers’ reward programs as it will reduce the number of total memberships that customers already have to keep a track of.
Blockchain brings benefits
Blockchain has the potential to streamline administration and execution for program providers because of real-time transparency. A blockchain based loyalty program should reduce system management cost with smart contracts that report secure, tracked, transparent transactions to legacy systems, reducing costs associated with errors and fraud.
The blockchain can connect a largely disconnected realm of loyalty rewards programs, eliminate friction, reduce costs, bring redemption and credit to near real time, and improve business relationships.
Blockchain has proved it can deploy through digital wallets and social media and can interact with existing loyalty rewards platforms via smart contracts. An online protocol, programmed building blocks and smart contracts give blockchain technology the ability to act without intermediaries.
A widespread diffusion of decentralized architectures would create an immutable and time-stamp distributed database entry of every single transaction ever made, making each transaction and its record easily traceable, but also rendering them irreversible, preventing double spending, fraud, abuse, and any other type of manipulation of the transactions.
Mobile phones are part of the solution:
The only way to move forward with a blockchain- powered rewards system is through mobile applications. Blockchain will introduce tight security into the mobile app payments, thus making more people embrace the technology.
The blockchain technology calls for a full-proof ledger which will log all your transaction details, and the entire focus is on keeping the data secure. By providing an interface that can cut through the underlying complexity of blockchain implementations, consumers can get all the benefits of a flexible rewards program among multiple businesses without any additional hassle.
Applications of blockchain technology in travel:
As the backbone of digital currency, blockchain is already revealing its value in areas such as transparency, data security, logistics and process simplification, and even regulatory compliance.
The travel business is complex and fragmented. Merchants that sell travel are typically seen as a high risk because of a number of refunds and chargebacks that occur in the industry. But with blockchain, once a payment has been made, typically you can’t reverse it.
And this mechanism will make fraudulent cases easier to spot and less likely to occur. Blockchains are, after all, about decentralizing services and removing the middlemen to lower costs, speed up transactions, and add transparency
For example, with blockchain processes serving as the underlying authentication layer for biometric-equipped mobile and wearable devices, a passenger’s experience becomes easier, faster and more satisfying.
They can verify their identities, purchase travel products, and ancillary services before, during and after their trips. They can communicate with airlines in a variety of new and engaging mobile formats without pulling out IDs and expose personal financial information every single time
To extend the vision from a passenger’s perspective, imagine going from home to the airport for a flight, then from the destination airport to your hotel and straight to your room without standing in a single line or sharing your personal data. Managing frequent flyer and loyalty programs and tracking baggage can also be a piece of cake, using blockchain technology as the information “connector.”
The beauty of this vision is that it serves as a genuine win-win for both the airline and its customers. And by contributing to customer satisfaction, an airline is much more likely to retain and grow that source of revenue, not to mention the range of ancillary purchases that become easier with blockchain technology.
While blockchain is very much about moving values, it’s also about handling and securing data in better ways.
For blockchain-based loyalty programs to succeed, providers must establish an Omnichannel presence. In addition to traditional channels like email and contact centers, providers have to consider mobile and social media channels.
Blockchain certainly has a potential to bring changes to the industry but perhaps it would be fairer to consider it as a system facilitator rather than a replacement for a current system. Besides, the success of the undertaking would largely depend on whether enough companies actually adopt the technology meaningfully. Customer loyalty programs powered by mobile apps are a natural fit, and it is exciting to see how blockchain will spread into this area.