How partner integration can double your loyalty programs success
Loyalty partnerships offer various opportunities for brands, from leveraging one anothers customer base to creating more value for their own and partners customers. When brands like Uber and Spotify, or Marriott hotels and Hertz car rentals team up to offer loyalty rewards, it’s to reap the benefits of these cross-pollination opportunities. It can even make your customers more loyal — a2008 study found that customers would feel even more affinity with one brand after cross-purchasing from a partner in an effective loyalty partnership.
In this post, we describe five steps to help you understand what’s involved in establishing successful partnerships for your loyalty program.
Setting Goals for Partner Integrations
Just as setting goals is the first step for setting up your loyalty program, it is the same for partner integration. Before choosing a partner, you should consider the objective of the partnership. Do you want to promote a particular new product, make more sales in general or do you simply want to upgrade your loyalty system? Latter does definitely cost less resources compared to boosting the revenue.
Another essential question you have to ask yourself when it comes to partner integration goals, is where you want to integrate your partner; will your customers benefit from your partnership during the reward or redemption phase?
Knowing what you want to achieve will inform your decisions in the next steps.
How to Select Partners
Your loyalty program partners should fulfill at least one of two criteria:
Are the customers of my prospective partner the same demographic as my customers?
Does my prospective partner sell products or services in a niche that’s related or complementary to my own?
Consider the two examples given above. Spotify and Uber are in different businesses, but their users share a similar profile — digitally-savvy people who use smartphone apps as part of their lifestyle. Marriott hotels and Hertz car rental are offering complimentary services to travelers.
Which Business Models to Integrate with Your Partners?
This will tie back to your goals defined at the start. If your goal is to promote a new product or service, then it makes sense to include only this product in any cross-promotion with your partner. If you are aiming to increase sales, then cover a broader product range. If you want to reach higher customer engagement, reward customers for repeat business while rewarding all kinds of social media activity and content creation when wanting a higher brand awareness.
Which Promotions to Offer and Where
You can now decide which promotions to offer and how to market them. This should link back to your goals as defined in step 1, and you will need to agree on marketing campaign activities with your partner to avoid duplication, reach highest exposure and ensure maximum return on investment. After covering “Technologies to use” in our next blogpost, we’ll have an eye on ‘Marketing’ in the post after, and deep dive into this section, so stay tuned.
How To Integrate Partners
To ensure that the partnership runs smoothly, you will need to integrate your loyalty program with that of your partner so that the customer has a smooth user experience. Technology is the most significant consideration here, and the ease of integration will depend on which loyalty platform both you and your partner are using.
When done right, partner integrations are a great way to accelerate the success of your loyalty program, providing access to new customers, and creating further value for your existing clientele. Here, in the last paragraph we highlighted technology as a key challenge in partner integration. Choosing a platform is a critical factor overall when setting up a loyalty program, so our next post will be all about technologies.
