How to Create Genuine Loyalty With Loyalty Programs
Next week: How to Properly Gamify a Loyalty Program.
Shuffling through ~30 different membership cards to find the one we are “loyal” to at that moment in time does not define loyalty. Loyalty is gained by recognising the people that chose you over others.
Brands expect their customers to travel for longer or pay more to choose a your brand over a competitor. Customers expect their brands to do the same. The most straightforward way of meeting that expectation is through recognition.
Recognition is nontransferable and not expected. It’s experienced instead of consumed. It will be followed by respect which is on companies to earn not customers to give.
Loyalty programs should be designed for companies to express loyalty to their customers not the other way around.
So are companies willing to go as far as act by the words of Samuel Goldwyn who says —
“I’ll take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty …”
Implementing recognition to a loyalty program
Every company that decides to develop their own loyalty program has to have enough data about their customers alongside with a plan on how to use that data in a personal way.
Presenting personal data
Data collection is a part of our life nowadays. We are all public by default and private by effort. With all that amount of data there’s no excuse for showing users irrelevant information.
The focus on presenting the data should be on 1) personalization and 2) brand association.
Car repair workshop for example could use the customer's last checkup data to present a timeline with common failures given my specific car and its attributes. That's both relevant to me personally but also creates brand association.
Timing of the interaction
The timing has to make sense and the user has to realize why is he notified at that moment — otherwise it’s nothing more than spam.
Notifications should not be based on time but on triggers. Every notification from the brand towards the user should expect an interaction not just present information.
The ultimate goal for brand loyalty is of course that when the brand communicates the user listens instead of hiding the notification.
In the previous example that interaction could be about notifying the user about upcoming recommended check up time.
Benefit
Loyalty requires going the extra mile to prove that you respect your customer.
Offering a discount when the customer acts based on your recommendations is a way of combining the helpfulness from the brand with showing that the brand cares more about the condition of the client’s vehicle than the money they bring in. (At least effort should be made to market it that way).
Notice that the whole example is more of a service than a loyalty program.
The reward structure and point structure that we call a loyalty program should be built around a system that already expresses brands loyalty not the other way around.
After the car workshop has established their service they can now brand their loyalty program as “through collecting points you can track our loyalty to you and on top of that, we reward you for staying with us.”
Next week: How to Properly Gamify a Loyalty Program
If you found this article interesting and wish to stay in the loop about how well are companies using User Engagement Design, don’t forget to recommend this article and follow my blog
For more on User Engagement Design read my other posts
- What to Focus on When Improving User Engagement?
- 3 Phases of an Engaging Application
- Who is a User Engagement Designer
My articles on “Analyzing Gamified Solutions”:
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — DueProps
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Classcraft
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Memrise
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Habitica
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Google Local Guides
