Keys to a successful loyalty program

Author:MengYe Chan

After making the investment into a loyalty program with the hopes of harnessing the potential of your most loyal customers and collecting data, what are the next steps to ensuring success on your loyalty program?

How do you run your CRM team do to gain maximum ROI out of your investment? Here are some tips we’ve seen from our most successful clients.

Hypothesize and analyse!

Along with a CRM solution comes a gold mine of data which can be collected. Other than giving information on your customers and purchase behaviour data, your CRM data can also be used to validate questions you’ve always had about the business! At Memberson, we recommend a data-driven approach to experimenting. Have you ever wondered why your top categories are performing and others not? Or what makes your customers come back twice, but not the third time? Data and using the right analytical tool can help answer those questions.

Optimise, optimise, optimise!

This is especially for mature programs. Are the incentives in place still speaking to the consumers today? A reward that was attractive during launch might seem stale given current competition. Have you looked into the conversion rates of your vouchers? Or the recent return rate of a customer? Keep a list of KPIs to track the health of your program and constantly review those to match the priorities of your organisation.

Some health indicators* we like to look at:

Points Redemption Rate
Points Earning Rate
Membership Renewal rate
Customer Return Rate
Membership Churn rate
Members to Non-member ratio ($ spending or store traffic)
Email Engagement Metrics (Member VS non-member)
Event invitation responses
Social Listening Metrics amongst members (Example: Facebook follows, key words used on social media, forums etc. Are your members talking about their experience with you?)

Customise

An experienced CRM manager with a keen eye would be able to spot sub-segments of customers within tiers. Make sure your program is flexible enough to recognise these segments and be able to offer different offers to each group. Memberson’s Reaktor engine enables multi-wave rules triggered by action or a pre-defined business rule. This gives businesses the liberty to customise campaign rules down to each customer level, capitalising on the optimal generosity offered to each customer.

Running a successful loyalty program is no small feat and takes constant discipline to track and measure results to understand effective levers and seasonality factors involved. These 3 tips are critical keys to getting the most out of your program. Implement them in your team’s workflow and you should be able to notice an outcome of more data-driven creative ideas that drive real results for your business.