7 Ways To Promote Your Loyalty Program and Boost Awareness

The key to any loyalty program’s success is its customers. And customers love loyalty programs – one study revealed the average American consumer belongs to 16.7 customer loyalty programs. Clearly customers are open to joining loyalty programs. To attract and retain these customers, loyalty program providers need to be active and energetic about promoting their loyalty programs.

The problem is that not everyone understands the importance of promoting loyalty programs or the best ways to market and promote a loyalty program. If you’re finding your enrollment or engagement numbers are running a little dry in the desert, here are some ideas for how to promote your loyalty program more effectively.

Small confession: they don’t include having your loyalty program’s name spelled out in the night sky by fireworks. But they can be just as fun. Even better: they work!

1. Kick Off New Customer Enrollments With Free Loyalty Points

No one likes to start from zero. When customers enroll in your loyalty program, reward them with a little boost of free points or rewards to get them rolling. You provide them with an immediate benefit the instance they sign up and start encouraging customer engagement in your program early on. You can easily implement loyalty program engagement strategies to continue building the customer's early momentum and keep them active in your loyalty program long-term.

2. Promote The Loyalty Program On Your Brand Website

Take a moment and review your brand website. Can you immediately spot where your loyalty program is being promoted?

If not then you need to start the process of getting the word out. You want users who frequently visit your site to join your loyalty program, correct? One of the easiest ways to market your program is to put information about your loyalty program where it’s easy to find and access. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious (in fact, promoting your loyalty program should match your brand style, including look and feel) but it should be present. 

For example, you can add a loyalty program tab to your navigational main menu, show a notification when customers view products in their checkout cart, or display a promotional banner on product pages.

3. Reward Customer Engagement With Bonus Points

Have you seen the photos of teachers who add funny bonus questions at the end of tests or invite their students to draw a funny image to receive some extra points? It adds some fun for the students and puts a light-hearted element to a difficult event.

You can follow the same principle when promoting your loyalty program. In addition to the regular work your customers put in to earn and redeem, give them small fun ways to earn extra loyalty points through engagement. Did your website just roll out new products? Or has your brand recently launched a new social media account? Celebrate with your current loyalty members by offering them free rewards points for participating in your new venture. Invite them to share dedicated referral links with friends or family so they can earn bonus points. Or send a 25% coupon code only visible to your followers.

If you’ve recently launched a mobile app you can give your customers an extra loyalty program incentive for their first sign-in to the app. There are always little events to use for promoting your loyalty program. Plus your customers will enjoy these fun moments of loyalty.

4. Offer Referral Incentives For Loyalty Program Members

Referrals are hands-down one of the best ways to earn new loyalty program enrollments. When a current customer is referring your brand to a person they know and trust, it’s a signal that the customer in turn knows and trusts your brand. LinkedIn even revealed that 84% of B2B buying decisions began with a referral. Who wouldn’t want to reward this kind of customer loyalty? Offer referral incentives for customers who invite their family and friends to join your loyalty program.

TIP: Immediately asking for program referrals isn’t always the best choice for customers who have just signed up — it’s likely your brand hasn’t made a big enough impression on them yet. Wait until your customer has engaged with the loyalty program, and successfully earned or redeemed a reward first; then explore the possibility of referrals. 

5. Train Staff and Employees On How To Promote The Loyalty Program

Employees are often the best advocates for your brand. They’re the front-line to your customers and they can be very powerful ambassadors.

Create 'How-To' guides or training programs to help educate frontline employees and staff on your loyalty program. At a minimum, your staff should know the loyalty program features, the benefits of enrolling, and how customers can sign up for the loyalty program.

If your employees will play an active part in enrolling a new program member, then try to ensure the sign-up process is as straightforward as possible. Employees should be able to easily enroll new customers without it turning into a long or tedious affair.

Also, keep communication channels open with your employees. If they find success promoting your loyalty program in a certain way you'll want to hear about it. You can then empower them to share their methods with your other employees as well!

6. Create A Dedicated Loyalty Program Landing Page

One of the easiest methods of promoting your loyalty platform is to dedicate a landing page to promoting it on your main website. Having a dedicated landing page gives you prime space to provide more in-depth information about your loyalty program and how it works. You can use this page to feature a handful of common FAQs and highlight all the loyalty program benefits.

This is also a great method for distributing key information about the loyalty program to potential customers who aren’t committed yet. Laying out the requirements for signing up, how to earn program points, the loyalty program rewards or perks available, etc. can help their decision-making. This is also a great opportunity to showcase a customer testimony or two!

7. Recognize & Thank Your Best Customers

Speaking of customer testimonies, you should look for opportunities to recognize and feature different positive customer experiences with your loyalty program. Next to employee advocacy, customer testimonies are a powerful way to gain new recognition and promote your brand.

One of the best ways you can do this is to celebrate when new customers reach a high-level tier or VIP status within your loyalty program. Not only does this reinforce the idea that your loyalty program is working, it also shows other people that reaching a VIP status is possible! Publicly acknowledging your VIP customers' loyalty and support, like on your social media channels, is also a great idea.

There are several different methods for promoting your loyalty platform and you should experiment to figure out which methods work best for you. 74% of consumers said they select their retailers based on a strong loyalty platform. All you need to do is get the word out!

This article was originally posted in 2019. It was updated in 2024.