6 COVID-Approved Ways To Boost Customer Engagement in Loyalty Programs

COVID-19 uprooted a lot of lifestyles across every type of customer base. Travel, social interaction, and shopping habits were the biggest affected areas. Depending on your brand and industry, you probably saw changes in loyalty program activity as well.

While the drop in purchase rates means businesses and marketers need to get more targeted and savvy when selling, drops in loyalty program engagement levels are also a concern. Consistent, ongoing loyalty program engagement plays a major role in keeping the relationship between customer and brand alive.  If you're looking for ideas to ramp up customer participation in your loyalty program, here are a few ideas:

Social Media Activities

User-generated content is a major driver for brand awareness as most marketers well know. Several loyalty program member communities got their start on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Thanks to new loyalty platform tools, you can create social media campaigns and let loyalty members earn points for participating, such as posting to a specific hashtag or in a comment. You can also give members the open to link their social media handles to their membership profile as a way of earning points and to make it easier to participate in future promotions down the line. 

Completing Surveys

People began exploring different ways to use their downtime as their goals and plans changed for 2020, and companies are no different. This is a great opportunity to take a step back and look at ways to optimize your loyalty program.

Customer surveys are extremely beneficial to have during this process. Your customers are the heart and soul of your loyalty program, so it’s important to understand their likes and dislikes, what they wish your program offered, and if they want more specific types of features or promotions. You can get this information by creating and distributing customer surveys.

If you're worried about getting customers to participate in surveys, you can sweeten the deal by offering customers an incentive. Loyalty program points are always a good option, but you can also get creative: maybe a discount coupon, or an exclusive offer for a free product or sample with their next purchase. The more relevant and personalized the incentive is, the greater the chance the customer will be motivated to earn it. 

Interacting With Brand Content

When COVID-19 caused businesses, offices, and event spaces to shut their doors, the number of online webinars, video conferences, concert live streams, and online learning courses available increased dramatically as people began exploring different ways of filling their time and socializing while remaining socially distant. Businesses also took the opportunity to continue engaging with customers directly by launching new blogs, video series, digital games, or educational content on their brand sites.

These types of brand content are a great way to keep your loyalty program members engaged in your loyalty program even when they're not making a purchase. To spread awareness about your brand content and encourage customer engagement, you could offer small loyalty program bonus points for interacting with your digital content. For example, loyalty members could receive extra bonus points for watching your new 5-video series, attending a webinar, or completing games or quizzes on your site.

Completing Loyalty Program Member Profiles

Customer data is extremely valuable for personalizing your marketing communications and offers. However acquiring good, usable customer data can be difficult. This is why loyalty programs are a vital part of any B2B or B2B business. They enable you to get first-party customer data directly from the source and you don't have to be creepy about it. 

Here’s where loyalty member profiles come into play. Member profiles are great opportunities for you to find out more information on your customers beyond just their names and addresses. For example, you can also have sections where customers list their favorite products, what rewards they like, birthdays, wishlists, and more. Research shows that a large percentage of customers are ok with submitting their information if it means they can get more relevant offers and content; so the opportunity exists to capture data that is important to your brand through member profiles. 

Quick Tip: While you want members to complete their profiles, one process you should avoid is requiring customers to complete every aspect of their member profile during the initial enrollment or sign-up period. This can be a major barrier to entry at a crucial point when you're trying to acquire new member enrollments. A loyalty program best practice is to make the sign-up or enrollment process as simple as possible, with as few steps as possible to make it smooth and easy for the customer. You can still acquire that valuable member data by giving them point incentives to complete their profiles post-enrollment. 

Participating In Digital Promotions

Everyone loves winning a free prize. Digital promotions, such as sweepstakes, instant wins, giveaways, and photo or video contests, are a fun way to get your loyalty member base active and engaged.

Not only do they allow for widespread customer participation, but they also allow brands to get creative with their marketing, celebrate special events or holidays, drive excitement over new product launches, and more.  In addition to winner prizes, you can also let members earn different kinds of points and rewards for participating depending on what kind of promotion you run. 

Trying A New Product or Service 

In 2020 businesses revamped their processes and rolled out all kinds of new features and services in response to the pandemic. Contactless pick-up and delivery, buy online and pick up in store, and other similar offerings were seen in almost every industry. If your brand also began providing new services, you can give loyalty members bonus points for trying them. You could offer double points for first-time uses or a small point bonus for every transaction. You could even make it a “surprise and delight” and give customers extra points or rewards just because you saw they took advantage of your new service without prompting.  

Supporting Partners Or Vendors

One core theme that arose during 2020 was the collective message of “We’re all in this together. We support you.” One way this showed was the number of business partnerships that emerged as a result of the pandemic.

If your business partners with other brands or companies, you could encourage your customers to support them by doing bonus point promotions featuring specific vendors or distributors. Double points for buying products from a vendor or purchasing from a product collaboration is another idea.

Not only does this support you and your partners' business, but it demonstrates to your customer base that you value the people you're connected to and not only look out for yourself, which is critical. Forrester found that over 60% of US and European consumers regularly purchase with companies that align with their values, and that number is growing. Consumers are still paying attention to how brands act in the wake of COVID-19, so taking the time to support your partners is a worthwhile step. 

Putting It All Together

You might have noticed that several of the above points included rewards or points as incentives. This is because incentives are proven to motivate customer actions and behaviors. At the same time, you should be cautious about not going overboard when distributing free points. Too much of a good thing can lead to financial trouble later on; engagement tactics should work to support your loyalty program and brand, not give you more problems to solve. Looping in your brand and finance teams can help you strike a fine balance between offering customer incentives they like and keeping your program from losing revenue.

If you're looking for ways to continue driving customer engagement in your loyalty program or other ideas on how to optimize your loyalty program performance, get in touch with us today!