Your Loyalty Program Post-Launch Checklist

Once you’ve officially launched your loyalty program, you might be overly  focused on making progress. You make plans to expand and incorporate some exciting new ideas. You're tracking milestones to evaluate your progress and improve your program even more.

Yet every once in awhile it’s good to check back in on the basics. You want to make sure you’re not wandering too far down any complicated roads that could actually hurt your progress.

To help, we’ve put together some quick “check up” questions you can use to ascertain the overall health of your loyalty program.

1. Is The Sign-Up Process Still Simple?

Simplicity is key. No matter how your loyalty program grows after launch, your sign-up or opt-in process should remain easy, functional, and simple in nature.

Even if you’ve built your loyalty program to be the pinnacle of excellence in consumer rewards, new customers won’t go near it if signing up means jumping through elaborate hoops.

If you find your new sign-up numbers are less than you’d expect, take some time to revisit your sign-up process. Make sure there are little to no barriers to opt-in. Also, double-check your loyalty program benefits are clearly listed for potential members to review.

2. Are You Paying Attention To Current Loyalty Members?

Acquiring new customers is fantastic but retaining customers is even better from a long-term perspective. Take a look at your promotional activity and see if you’ve rewarded any current loyalty program members recently. If you haven’t then now is a good time to plan a little “surprise and delight” for your long-time members.

Don’t skip out on tailoring the reward as best you can to individuals! Custom rewards have a greater impact on long-time loyalty members. It doesn’t have to be centered around any events like calendar holidays or anniversaries. Surprising your customers — “just because!” — is a good way show them your appreciation for their program participation.

3. Are You Proactively Announcing Program Updates?

As your program grows you're probably wanting to build out new features and enhancements that will (hopefully) improve the customer experience. However, you need to ensure all changes big and small are communicated effectively to your customers. Consider changes in point values, new features, adding new rewards or removing old rewards from the customer’s point-of-view: what potential issues or confusion could arise?

Take the time to draft external communications informing your customers of any changes. Brainstorm a quick list of potential FAQs that could pop up and make sure you have clear and concise answers those FAQs.

Some easy outlets for informing your customers of exciting enhancements are through an email newsletter, internal messaging through your platform, or social media announcements linking to a new landing page dedicated to the details. Your customers will appreciate the head’s up and they’ll know you’re aware of their questions and concerns.

4. Are Your Rewards Still Valuable?

Every loyalty program needs to stay relevant to changing trends. As your customer demands shift or don’t shift, you must make sure that your program remains valuable to your customer. Customers remain engaged in your program so they can take advantage of unique and meaningful rewards you offer to them.

If the quality of your rewards starts to decline over time then customers will find fewer reasons to choose you over a competitor. Review your customer activity regularly and take note of what recent promotions and rewards really resonated among your customer base. Also, make sure to reach out for direct feedback from your customers through surveys. You can offer them a little incentive to participate in the form of a program reward.

If your loyalty program comes out with a clean bill of health then you’re on the right track! 

If you find that one or more of these areas need a little TLC, then we can help! Get in touch with us today. 

This post was originally posted on 3/2/18. It was revised and updated with new content on 3/10/20.