5 Steps to Make Customers Act the Way You Want with a Loyalty Program
(My post is originally published on Antavo Ecommerce Marketing Blog.)
Picture this.
Customers find your webstore, look around, and make their first purchase. In a month, they come back and make another purchase. They leave reviews. Interact with other customers. Laugh at your videos. And buy more and more.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Now you might think “Yeah, this is, like, a fairy tale. I hardly get any customers like this.”
Actually there is a way for you to motivate people to act more as your ideal customer would. Let me show you how a loyalty program can help you with this.
#1. Write down your whys
Before you start doing anything, sit back and think about the following question: How do I want my customers to act more like my ideal ones?
You might answer:
“I want my customers to love my brand more.”
“I want my customers to consume more of my content.”
“I want my customers to spend more in my store.”
And so on. Just list your reasons, literally your business goals, and arrange them in order of importance. Keep this list at hand, because the next steps will be completely based on it.
#2. Define what your ideal customer would do
According to the reasons you defined in the first step, let’s investigate what your ideal customer would do exactly.
And don’t stop at simply writing a list. Let’s determine the number of actions and the timeframes within which customers should conclude them.
Let’s stick with the same examples:
“I want my customers to love my brand more.”
For me to reach this goal, my customers need to:
– Refer my brand to at least 5 of their friends in 2 weeks.
– Share my content at least once every week.
– Visit my store every second day.
“I want my customers to consume more of my content.”
For me to reach this goal, my customers need to:
– Download at least 2 of my ebooks in every month.
– Watch my latest product videos every week.
– Post 5 product reviews in 3 months.
“I want my customers to spend more in my store.”
For me to reach this goal, my customers should:
– Check out at least in every two months.
– Check out over a certain amount (it can be more than the average basket value).
– Put more than one item in their cart.
That’s it. You can expand this list as much as you wish.
Don’t forget to consider every possible action that can take place on any channel you own. Besides your store, think about your social media channel, mobile apps, or any other landing pages, etc.
#3. Reward customers if they do what you want them to do
Now comes the exciting part! In a loyalty program you can inspire customers to do what you want them to do. How, you may ask? Just follow this guide:
1. Take your list of desired customer actions.
2. Assign loyalty points to these actions, points that customers can collect by completing the actions in your loyalty program. For example, ask customers to refer 5 of their friends to your store in 2 weeks. Once they do so, they will receive 150 points.
3. Create irresistible rewards, such as company swags, coupons, relics, special events, and many more. We have an ebook about how to choose the best rewards for your loyalty program. Download it if you need more detail.
Create a reward scheme that will incentivize customers to collect more and more points so that they can redeem your awards. And they can collect points by completing the actions you ask them to do.
#4. Create a virtual currency
Welcome math to the picture. How many loyalty points should you give away for these activities? There are 2 ways to define an activity’s rewardable points:
Nominal point value. Some resources recommend thinking about loyalty points as cash, which means that 1 point = 1 USD. You can then calculate the price of your activities based on the revenue they brought in.
The problem with this method is that there are lots of other factors that can influence a purchase. You can’t really calculate how much cash one page visit or one product review brought to you in the end.
But there is a better solution.
Weighted point value. In this case the value is influenced by the importance and the complexity of the task that customers need to fulfill.
Here’s how to calculate it.
– Business index: How important is the activity to your business goals? Rate it on a 1–5 scale. (1 is the least important business goal, while 5 is the most important one.)
– Customer action index: How difficult is it for your customers to complete the activity? Rate it on a 1–5 scale. (1 is the easiest to do, while 5 is the most complicated.)
– Exchange rate: A multiplier that makes your loyalty points look better in your customers’ eyes. This helps to make them feel that they really get something for their efforts.
– Point value: business index * customer action index * exchange rate. The more important a particular activity is to your business and the more difficult it is for your customer to complete, it gets the more point value.
An extra benefit of using the latter option is that you can differentiate more easily between your activities and their value.
In the example we have used a fictive number as the multiplier (10), but you can change this number as you wish. Just fine-tune your points until you are satisfied with the result.
#5. Check before launch
Now you have everything to start. But before you launch, check your activities and their prices, bearing in mind the following questions:
– Can customers really complete the activities?
– Do you track that a certain customer has really completed the activity? Trackability is an unmissable factor in a loyalty program. You can’t give points for actions if you don’t know if they’ve really happened. (A loyalty program software like Antavo has such features.)
– Do you have simple tasks, too, ones that hook customers on the game? It’s great if they can experience victory early on.
By answering questions like these, you can ensure that your point system won’t have any flaws. You don’t want customers leaving your loyalty program, right?
Now it’s your turn
See how well a loyalty program can help you to reach your specific business goals?
You just need to think over what to reward, and then how to reward it.
If you want to learn more about how to define customer activities and then how to reward them, here is a free ebook with more details.
