How to create a successful loyalty programme

Far from being a gimmick, a loyalty programme is an effective way to increase your online shop’s turnover. An Accenture study has shown that customers who are members of a loyalty programme spend between 12% and 18% more than other customers. However, what’s the best way to create a high-quality loyalty programme? The answer (and lots more) can be found in this post!

1. Make joining the loyalty programme easy

To make joining the programme easier, think omnichannel! Your customers should be able to access a membership form whenever possible. To achieve that, we recommend:

👉 Inserting a form at the bottom of your online shop’s home page
👉 Sending a newsletter to encourage your customers to join your programme
👉 Sharing posts that mention it on your socials
(LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc.)
👉 Responding to questions from your FAQs, etc.

Do you have both online and physical stores? Then you can ask your check-out staff to promote your loyalty programme verbally or by distributing ‘traditional’ loyalty cards.

2. Create a programme that is worthwhile for customers

To ensure that your loyalty programme is a success, your customers need to earn points and rewards as often as possible. You can reward them as soon as a purchase is made in your online shop, but also in other situations too!

For example, you can reward your customers for simple things, such as:

• Entering their contact details in their customer space
• Registering to receive the newsletter
• Recommending a friend
• Leaving feedback or rating a recently purchased product
• Sharing an Instagram post, etc.

3. Turn your programme into a fun competition

To ensure that your customers get involved, add a genuine competitive element to your loyalty programme. In addition to being entertaining, the gamification of loyalty programmes reinforces the sense of belonging and the feeling of being part of a community.

To turn your loyalty programme into a fun competition, here are a few ideas:

• Offer a €10 discount voucher when they’ve earned 100 points (€1 = 1 point)
• Create “levels of loyalty” to challenge your customers and to encourage them to be even more faithful
• Offer a birthday gift to your most dedicated customers
• Send virtual badges to the best members, etc.

4. Share your values through your loyalty programme

Our fourth, and by no means, least useful piece of advice: share your company values through your loyalty programme. The idea is to enable your customers to do a good deed in exchange for rewards.

Take Body Shop, for example: the people in charge of developing their loyalty programme were smart. Their loyal customers were able to earn points and then donate them to one of the brand’s partner charities.

In the same way, customers will be more inclined to be loyal if they can do good deeds to help protect the planet. For example, the Ecosia search engine, uses advertising revenue to plant trees. This means that every time a customer clicks on an Ecosia paid link, they are contributing to reforestation.

5. Analyse the results of the programme

Lastly, don’t forget to analyse the results of your loyalty programme to maximise its impact. This will enable you to find ways of improving and, if necessary, changing your approach.

For a full analysis, these are the key e-commerce KPIs that you need to monitor:

👉 Number of members joined
👉 Number of active users
👉 Members/sales or members/purchases ratios
👉 Retention rates

Top tip 💡

The retention rate is the number of consumers whose loyalty a company manages to retain over a given period. It can be calculated using the following formula:

[(End customers – New customers) / Start customers] x 100

The bonus tip: create a loyalty partnership programme

To get your loyal customers to attract others, remember to create a loyalty partnership programme! The customers you attract in this way will be four times more likely to buy your products.

To do that, you can award points or a reward for each new referral! This will increase the number of loyal members and the number of orders you take.

Learn eight tried and tested e-commerce strategies for creating brand loyalty

Creating a successful loyalty programme means building emotional ties with your customers. And if your customers are scattered all over the world, you need to make sure that you translate your home page and your newsletters as well as your badges and rewards. The talented translators at TextMaster are here to help you.