Your loyalty program members are your most loyal and engaged clients. That’s why it’s so important to celebrate their loyalty milestones or loyalty moments. Whether you offer them a reward or communicate with a personalized message, marking loyalty moments will encourage future engagement and strengthen the emotional bond with your brand.
Here are 3 loyalty moments that are worth celebrating:
Enrollment | Loyalty Moment #1
In loyalty programs, as in life, we often only have once chance to make a first impression. Enrollment is the first time members will encounter your program, and the moment they decide whether or not to continue.
That’s why it’s essential to set up a welcome cycle that communicates with new members and introduces all your program benefits.
Once a client completes the enrollment process (which should be simple!), start by celebrating their membership with a welcome email—an essential part of your communication toolkit. This email should say how much you appreciate the customer’s decision to join your program, and outline all the benefits of their membership. You can also include a bonus or gift to mark the occasion.
To ensure members fully grasp all the benefits of your program, put together a series of welcome messages to help them discover what’s available. By dividing the benefits up into a series of emails, you increase the chances that members retain and understand these benefits, as well as engage with your program.
Beauty giant Sephora uses a 3-step email cycle: The first introduces the program’s benefits. The second obtains more information about the member. And the third offers personal purchase recommendations.
Reaching a threshold | Loyalty Moment #2
Loyalty programs are designed to create profitable, sustainable emotional bounds between clients and brands. Loyalty moments strengthen this emotional bond with your brand. One of the performance measures of a program is its ability to change members’ purchasing habits. According to Bond Brand Loyalty, 64% of consumers admit to modifying their purchasing habits to maximize the benefits available to them through loyalty programs.
The goals and thresholds of all loyalty programs are the same: reach a new level, earn enough points to exchange for a reward, complete a challenge, and so on. Reaching a goal or threshold is an occasion to be celebrated, and an opportunity to get to know a member better and thank them for their engagement.
You can celebrate these thresholds with a communication via email or a surprise reward. You can also mark more significant achievements with a communication through the mail, a gift, or a personalized status via your website/app.
Remember that it’s important to include visual representation of the member’s progression in order to further stimulate engagement.
Redeeming a reward | Loyalty Moment #3
Redeeming points and earning rewards are directly linked to a customer’s level of engagement and satisfaction, and serve to create an emotional response. Rewarding a member is like sending them a gift. You want to ensure the interaction elicits a positive emotion and creates a moment of celebration.
Be sure to congratulate a member the day after they redeem a reward, which is also the perfect opportunity to reiterate your program’s generosity. Redeeming for rewards enables you to strengthen customers’ emotional link with your program, even if the reward is merely transactional. It is still an opportunity worth celebrating.
The PC Optimum program, for example, marks the occasion of a points exchange by email, congratulating members for earning a reward.
To encourage members to redeem rewards, you can also regularly remind them of the value of their points, or the rewards they can redeem with them. This is an excellent way to communicate your program’s generosity, stimulate sales, and encourage engagement.
Need more advice on loyalty? Contact our loyalty experts to learn more about our strategic and operational support services for businesses.
