It has been widely recognised for many years that a well-designed loyalty programme can make a big difference to an e-tail store’s durability and success.
Such a scheme can be highly effective at helping an ecommerce business to retain customers, by encouraging repeat purchases. Through its incentivisation of ongoing engagement, a loyalty (also sometimes referred to as “VIP”) programme can extend the duration and value of customer-brand relationships.
However, let’s take a moment away from the topic of what happens when your e-tail firm gets its loyalty scheme right. Instead, we’re going to touch on the actions that could help you turbocharge and revive an ineffective loyalty programme.
Consider these actions to extract more from your site’s loyalty programme
When it comes to putting together and maintaining a loyalty scheme for an online shopping portal, you might easily get trapped into thinking merely about the “obvious” perks.
You know the ones we’re referring to… the 10% discounts, free delivery offers, and an email sent to the customer on their birthday. These features are probably present and correct across all your competitors’ VIP schemes, as well as your own.
However, it pays to get more imaginative than this with your own store’s loyalty incentives. There might be many aspects of psychological and behavioural science that your site isn’t yet tapping into, and that could make a big difference to your loyalty scheme’s long-term prospects.
Here, then are a few steps you might think about taking:
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Segment based on motivation
The segmentation of an ecommerce site’s customer base can make a big difference to its ability to personalise its marketing and product offerings. This, in turn, helps to boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and conversions.
When it comes to the optimisation of your own store’s loyalty scheme, you might look to segment customers based on motivational context, rather than just purchase history.
For example, there might be certain “high-browse, low-buy” members of your VIP programme. You may need to nudge these customers in certain ways to help close that gap – for example, by offering risk-free trials or non-monetary perks.
You may also notice that some of your store’s shoppers tend to hoard the VIP rewards they accumulate, while others spend their loyalty points as soon as they have them. Again, these are groups that might need to be targeted somewhat differently to each other.
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Introduce layered benefits, not just discounts
As we touched on above, it can be easy to get wrapped up in constant thoughts of discount offers to present to your VIP customers. Certainly, discounts can give shoppers short-term gratification. However, on their own, such one-off money-off deals don’t tend to cultivate lasting loyalty.
So, to help your e-tail business achieve more of the latter, be sure to think of things that are likely to drive long-term engagement.
To give an example, people are likelier to complete a task when they feel they have already begun it. So, you might decide to pre-load your new customers with points or a certain VIP status, and provide visual indicators of their progress. This will help give them that sense of having “started” to accumulate loyalty points with your store already.
Consider, too, how customers love to feel they have some kind of especially “exclusive” status when they are members of a VIP scheme. You might capitalise on this by offering early product drops to these shoppers, or members-only content, or even personalised products.
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Take your loyalty programme beyond the confines of email
If your site’s loyalty scheme is almost purely email-based, you probably won’t be extracting its broader potential. Certainly, you will be missing opportunities to incorporate automation that could help make your store’s VIP programme more effective and less of a day-to-day burden.
You could, for instance, look to connect your loyalty scheme to on-site personalisation tools, so that the customer’s rewards balance can be displayed in navigation bars and checkout flows.
Loyalty data could be fed, too, into customer service platforms. This would allow your site’s agents to provide a tailored response to queries based on the given shopper’s behaviour, or what tier they are presently at in your VIP scheme.
Remember: it shouldn’t just be about loyalty points!
It isn’t, after all, such raw numbers that customers tend to remember about an ecommerce site’s VIP programme. Instead, what they generally recall is the shopping experience they have, and their interactions with the given brand.
So, in today’s data-rich world, you shouldn’t stick to only the most dull and predictable ways of running a VIP scheme. There’s just so much potential to design your site’s rewards in ways that play on progress, identity, surprise, and exclusivity.
For a more in-depth conversation about our areas of expertise in ecommerce, website design, and even programming services in Gibraltar, the UK, and Spain, please reach out to the Piranha Designs team today.
