Five Ways to Inform Your Members about Loyalty Program Benefits

Educating your loyalty program audience is crucial for engagement, as it strengthens their relationship with your brand. Those who know how the program actually works are the ones most active, which means most precious for you as a program operator. How can you make your customers more conscious about what they gain thanks to being loyalty program members?

Here are five simple steps you can take to reach this goal.

1. Reveal your unique brand proposition

It might sound obvious, but this is where it all starts. For customers who have already expressed an interest in your brand and enrolled in the loyalty program, you should reveal a differentiating factor that makes your brand stand out in the crowd. You want your customers to know the unique features and genuine quality your brand represents, which means you invest in a loyalty program to promote these values. 

Your program design should accelerate membership benefits for customers who understand and appreciate these values. Try to consider what motivates them to choose your products or services. Is there something you give them that other market players can’t? Then find a way to incorporate this value into your loyalty program so the quality of its features and rewards meets the quality of your everyday work for your customers.

2. Always be transparent and open

A proven method to get your customers excited and willing to stay loyal to your brand is by keeping your program transparent. Communication is key. Reveal all important program rules to your customers, and be brief and as simple as possible with your marketing pitch. No one likes to read long, information-overloaded terms and conditions to understand how your loyalty proposition works.

There’s a thing you can’t overlook – it’s your customers’ trust. Don’t forget to provide program members with your contact details. Make it easy to reach out to you with any questions, issues, and – what’s equally important – constructive criticism. Being open to feedback and acting on the suggestions from program members will make them feel appreciated and come back to you again.

3. Keep customers informed about progress

In today’s world, customers’ attention is constantly distracted, so you have only a few seconds every time you want to explain how they can earn and burn their points to receive value. In order to maintain attention, you can provide your program members with reminders that they just collected enough points to redeem a reward of their interest, or are close to reaching a threshold. 

Another way to let your customers know about the developments of their participation in the program is to use gamification elements. Game-like mechanics such as progress bars and dashboards (showcasing all badges and rewards) show program members their current progress in a way that is visually attractive. They also suggest how far they have already gone and what is still to achieve, feeding a natural human desire to compete and overcome challenges.

4. Appreciate customer engagement

Simply reward your customers so they know your program actually works. There is no better education about the benefits of a loyalty program than the experience of being rewarded with something valuable. You can appreciate customers’ loyalty to your brand with a variety of monetary, experiential, and emotional perks. The best loyalty management software, such as Comarch’s Loyalty Marketing Platform, provides you with an extensive catalog of rewards to choose from.

You can use a tailor-made tier system to provide members with some extra benefits once they reach a new level of engagement. The key here is to give customers access to their account data and current program status, so they always know the pros of getting this far and what is ahead of them with a little more engagement.

5. Utilize mobile channels

Last but not least, it’s much easier to educate your members via mobile channels than others. Considering the great role of smartphones in daily activities, the customer is more likely to use a mobile device for understanding your program. Mobile also provides you with the biggest potential to show your members the rules and benefits in a way that is most visually attractive and entertaining.

Another thing is the education of those who are meant to educate. Call center agents and staff in store need to be well-educated themselves to inform customers about maximizing their perks of membership. Not only does this take time and money, it also proves to be less effective than other means of getting your customers’ attention.

Bottom line

With the costs of acquiring new customers increasing rapidly, you need to put as much consideration into your loyalty program as possible. Engagement is your ultimate goal, and customers who know how to maximize the benefits of participating in a loyalty program tend to make more purchases. Creating and showing your unique brand proposition, being transparent about your actions, always providing information on progress, using a tier system for rewarding your program members and utilizing mobile are trusted measures to achieve that. Think about how you can work on these elements in your loyalty management and turn your program into a rewards system your customers truly understand.