4 Tips on How To Start a Loyalty Program

If you’re getting ready to build your first loyalty program, then you must follow a few proven steps to turn your idea into a huge commercial success.  Here are a few hints – based on the latest LOYALTY MARKETING & REWARDS PROGRAMS – GLOBAL MARKET REPORT 2022 – that can help you with that.

1. Build an ROI Case

First of all, you won’t persuade your board to invest in a loyalty program without a compelling business case. Communicate a business problem, propose a solution to meet your objectives, lay out how you define your key goals and success metrics, and support your case with financial analysis. There are many ways to build a sound ROI case. One of the best methods is to look at the benefits in terms of the costs of the loyalty program and to incorporate the risks and uncertainty factors. If you need support in that, there are many companies with wide experience in loyalty (such as Comarch) that can help you with that.

2. Carry out a Due Diligence Process

…especially in terms of whether a loyalty tech vendor provides essential integrations and personalization capabilities. A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Comarch reveals that tech integrations are what today’s loyalty program decision-makers desire the most. This is hardly surprising as incompatibility is a major obstacle for a loyalty program to become successful. 

“Integrations mean higher speed of operations. They simplify processes and ensure much faster deliverability of ideas. This is highly beneficial, but in reality very difficult to achieve. It’s even getting more difficult with time. Problems are popping up at different moments, and companies try to solve these with dedicated tools – which means adding more independent solutions to already complex MarTech ecosystems.

Our recommendation is to consolidate functions and processes related to loyalty and marketing around natively integrated, all-in-one IT platforms. It’s the only way to achieve true automation of processes and be able to focus on strategy and realization of new exciting concepts instead of manually managing and reporting various disconnected processes in multiple systems.” – says Łukasz Słoniewski, Head of R&D in Loyalty & Marketing Solutions at Comarch.

3. Prevent the creation of organizational silos…

…by making loyalty an enterprise initiative. Everyone in the firm needs to understand their role in supporting and building customer loyalty – this includes everyone in the marketing, IT, sales, product, and UX departments. It’s a company-wide effort, and it takes everyone working in unison to deliver a successful program to the market.

4. Reach out to Loyalty Experts for help

Many loyalty vendors provide support, guidance, and consultancy across the entire customer lifecycle. They can help you design, configure, implement, manage, and improve your loyalty program.  

“When things get tough, don’t just go out looking for a technology provider, but for a partner that understands the loyalty data analytics aspect and can create actionable insights, you can work on. Onboarding loyalty technology isn’t like onboarding a marketing automation platform. This loyalty program is about to be the face of your brand. This is going to be the impression of your company for each customer. In these circumstances, support from an experienced technological partner who won’t leave you to handle a complicated ecosystem of loyalty tools on your own becomes crucial” – says Christopher Sandstrom, Director of Marketing at Comarch North America.

If you want to learn more about how to build a loyalty program your customers will love, visit the Comarch Loyalty Marketing blog, where you will find practical guides, insightful webinars, eye-opening statistics, and much more. 

Also, click HERE to download your free copy of the LOYALTY MARKETING & REWARDS PROGRAMS – GLOBAL MARKET REPORT 2022.

In the meantime, good luck with your loyalty endeavors!