Who Participates in Loyalty Programs?

There are really two tiers to loyal customers. You have your early stage customers and your later stage customers. Let’s break it down.

Early Stage Customer Loyalty Can Come From:

• Surveys and Feedback
• Email Subscriptions
• Open Rates and Click-Through Rates
• Mobile Alert & Notification Responses
• Social Engagement

Later Stage Customer Loyalty Could Include:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Purchase Frequency
• Customer Spending
• Upsell/Cross-Sell Purchases
• Testimonials/Reviews/Referrals

It is important to be able to distinguish between the two categories as it will determine how relevant your campaigns are depending upon the customer. Being able to identify this allows you to feature the right tone, frequency, and benefits. If you continue to engage customers frequently, you can easily build customer loyalty. This can result in higher rates of purchasing and advocacy from your already-loyal customers and additions to the ranks of customers you already consider loyal.

Testimonials can do wonders. Check out some of the loyal testimonials from this Chicago based Maid Service. This is great example of how to show your customers overall satisfaction.

If you want to achieve this, you will need to leverage your customer engagement platform to paint a complete picture of what you know about your loyal customers including preferences and interests, purchase behavior and frequency, order details, and more. Campaigns like this enables you to gather more information about their hobbies and interests or reasons for purchasing. All of this information makes it easier to accelerate purchase cycles, cross-sell, and upsell.

Harness Insights

Knowing the attributes of your loyal customers makes life easier when trying to find additional prospects who could one day become loyal customers. This way, you are not starting from scratch with these prospects, but pursuing those customers with similarities.

Using a customer engagement platform is a great way to perform personalization at scale and can cultivate relationships and learn more about consumer behavior.  For my clothing store, I use a platform to learn the habits of my customers, such as what trends they like, what age group they are in, and what interests they have socially such as entertainment, leisure, and sports. The customer engagement platform has also motivated my staff to set up strategies, such as automated birthday campaigns, that help drive merchandise sales and enhance the value of being a fan.

Who Are Your Customers?

Getting into the minds of individual customers is vital to engaging and keeping them loyal. It pays to keep customers happy! Maybe you have a lot customers who aren’t loyal…yet. Don’t overlook the value of the non loyal customers. They will take a different type of engagement than your typical loyal customer. Look at the data that you have about loyal and non loyal customer behavior to determine if there are behaviors or activities that differ between the two groups and identify any commonalities amongst the groups that can help you communicate with them in a more personal way. This way, you can tailor your communications to your non loyal customers to guide them toward the behaviors and activities that build loyalty and help nudge them to the next stage of their customer lifecycle.

There may be non loyal customers that may not engage with you at all anymore. In fact, they may no longer be customers. Most consumers are willing to switch brands if it means getting more benefits. However, just because they have churned away from your brand doesn’t mean they are gone for good! You just have to win them back and focus on re-engaging them with relevant communications based on what you have learned about their behaviors. This includes insights you’ve taken from social channels and paying attention to negative word of mouth, such
as an online review.

Win Them Back

A Win back can be anything from a personalized email or letter telling them you miss their business, or a survey as to what would make them want to come back to your brand. People love deals, so maybe offering a discount or special code just for them to draw them back in. There are a variety of ways to win someone back and even convert them in to a loyal customer, you just have to give them some personal attention and learn about what they really want, not what you think they want.

Many times, marketers invest their hard work and precious dollars in campaigns and promotions aimed at getting customers to make that first purchase. But once those customers are in the door, they’re left largely to their own devices. By consistently engaging those customers over time with relevant, appealing offers, you can cultivate long-term loyalty that translates into higher revenues and advocates who drive even more business for you through powerful
word of mouth.

Why not try Extendware’s Loyalty Program extension for your Magento store? This extension allows you to incentivize customers based on order history, average order amount, and account age.