These days, the best loyalty programs are more than just handing out a card and offering points back on purchases. In fact, loyalty programs have evolved into so much more. The best loyalty programs have one leading force behind it all: data.
The best loyalty programs have a customer-focused approach, which is why having a data-driven program is so important. Businesses want to earn their customer’s trust and the best way to do that is providing value they can’t get anywhere else.
The data collected behind the best loyalty programs allow you to:
- Learn your customer behaviour
- Better communicate with your customers
- Save money and increase sales
- Continue to evolve your loyalty program
- Attract new customers
Learn your customer behaviour
First, in order to understand your customers’ interest, you need to be able to examine their behaviour. The best loyalty programs allow you to gather important customer information, along with measuring, tracking and reviewing analytics and reports.
It starts with encouraging customers to fill out their profiles of your loyalty program. From there, you are able to build upon your loyalty program through tactics like:
- targeted campaigns
- customer referral programs
- customer bonding opportunities
better personalized rewards
better personalized rewardsDid you know 87% of consumers are more open to a business monitoring their shopping activity if it leads to more personalized rewards?
Through tracking your customer behaviour data, you get a better idea on how much your customers are spending, where they are spending, and the ROI on your loyalty program.
Plus, you are also able to see who your best customers are through engagement frequency and purchase frequency. And this information allows you to better implement customer retention tactics.
Better communicate with your customers
Continuing the conversation with your most loyal customers outside of the transaction is extremely important.
In fact, the best loyalty programs have the best line of communication with their customers. When customer’s sign up for your loyalty program, it’s important they check a certain box: opting-in to receiving communications from your business.
However, once you have the green light, targeted communications with your customers are key to customer retention.
With customer loyalty data you are able to send emails about in-store sales and promotions, loyalty account updates, in-store and online events, or even birthday specials.
To dig even deeper, you can send targeted communications like offering a special to your top 20 customers based on spend frequency or spend amount.
Not sure what to send campaigns about? Check out these 8 loyalty campaign ideas.
After you have sent a communication, the data mining doesn’t stop there. The best loyalty programs allow you to track and review the analytics from the email you’ve sent. Most importantly, you can better understand who is opening your email and what is garnering the most clicks.
Programs like the one offered by Ackroo allow businesses to review customer data right in their personalized dashboard. You have the power to check your analytics in real-time. Plus, this feature is at no extra cost to customers.
Above all, it brings an immense amount of value to ensuring communications have a strong ROI.
Save money and increase sales
The best loyalty programs utilize their data to help save money. How? By making better business decisions.
In fact, by having the proper data about your loyalty program, you are able to clearly see where you should invest time and money into your business. You have a clear view on which parts of your business bring in the most money versus where doesn’t.
Collecting customer data allows you to understand what part of your business brings the most value.
In addition, the best loyalty programs allow you to personalize the shopping experience for customers.
By using the data captured in your loyalty program, you are better informed on how to increase a customer’s basket size. How? You better understand what products to suggest based on their spending habits.
In fact, 57% of shoppers will spend more on brands that they are loyal to.
As well, encourage increased spending by offering a higher amount of loyalty points in return or a promo bonus.
Continue to evolve your loyalty program
The best loyalty programs don’t stay stagnant, they evolve.
Having a data-driven loyalty program allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t with your customers. It also allows you to better experiment with different campaigns and promotions, which above all leads to better business decisions.
In addition, an evolving loyalty program also keeps your customers engaged.
In other words, you want to keep it fresh!
Attract new customers
By now, we know the best loyalty programs utilize data to increase customer retention. Consequently, data also helps attract new customers to your loyalty program.
With the power of data at your fingertips, you get a clear picture of who is your best customer. In addition, you understand their shopping behaviour, their spending habits, and what products pique the most interest.
With this information, you are able to target your next best new customer through tactics like ad campaigns.
Loyalty is important to customers. For example, 71% of shoppers say loyalty programs are a meaningful part of their brand relationships.
In order to get a greater ROI on your loyalty program, you need to ensure that you are collecting the data behind it all. Data is what makes any loyalty program one of the best loyalty programs.
Want to know how to better utilize the data in your loyalty program? Curious how to access data within your loyalty program?
Talk to an Ackroo expert today.
