How to create a loyalty programme | 5 ways to keep your customers coming back

Do you want to introduce a loyalty programme to support your business? Are you not sure where to start? Do you worry that it’s too late and you might have missed the boat?

If any of these are your problem, we’ve got excellent news for you. Firstly, starting a loyalty programme is a great opportunity to strengthen your business and build better relationships with your customers, and because it’s a well-established path, there are numerous lessons you can take from other businesses to polish and better execute the first iteration of your programme. Secondly, it’s never too late to start, because it’s such an established customer-facing convention, you could well benefit from early adopters who are already fans of your business.

Here are 5 tactics you can implement to give your loyalty programme an early head start.

1. Gather customer feedback and learn what your customers are looking for in a loyalty programme

Assuming you already have some following on social media, and some returning customers you recognise, you have a pool of customers that have shown tangible interest or loyalty to your business. As you’re looking to strengthen those existing bonds and replicate them, ask them what they want out of a loyalty programme.

On the Drimify gamification platform, you can easily customise Surveys to distribute to your current following to get quantitative and qualitative feedback on what they want from your loyalty programme.

Pro tip: Distribute your Survey to as many people as possible by not only sharing it on your social media, but creating QR codes to place in your physical premises, allowing one-time customers to participate too. By including a data collection form, you can ask for personal details and encourage newsletter opt-ins, creating leads you can retarget when your loyalty programme is up and running.

2. Offer compelling rewards and benefits that reflect their wants and expectations

This tactic is far easier to employ if you’ve carried out the first tactic and analysed your data. You should also look at the kinds of loyalty programmes your competitors are offering, and could even do some research on how well these have been received by customers. Afterall, not only is their business competing against your business, but you’re starting a loyalty programme to compete against their loyalty programme.

Ideally, your loyalty programme should be better – make it more personalised and tailored to the wants and the needs of the target demographics. If you’re starting your loyalty programme second it’s true that you’re technically behind – they’ve already been fostering loyalty for however long their programme’s been up and running – but if you think of it as being like a duel, they’ve fired first and you’re still standing. What do their programmes not offer that the customers want? Identify your competitive advantage and publicise it.

3. Gamify your loyalty programme for a more engaging experience

Gamification is a method of maximising user engagement by implementing playful mechanics in everyday tasks and interactions. Gamifying your loyalty programme offers multiple benefits:

• Communicate with customers and better educate them about your offering through enhanced focus
• Generate excitement by offering opportunities to win prizes through instant win games
• Customise game mechanics to encourage desired behaviours, such as to leave reviews or to engage with more of your content
• Deliver engaging, fun, playable experiences that can be enjoyed for their own value (human beings love fun challenges, look at crosswords and Sudoku in newspapers)

Pro tip: Nobody mastered anything in a day, and gamification is no exception. Not only will your ability to get the most out of gamification improve with continued use, practice, and applying learnings from project to project, but you can use the repetition of playable experiences and contests to make your programme part of a customer’s routine.

For example, on the Drimify gamification platform, you can use the Dynamic Path™ format to create a long form experience that unlocks new challenges or contests every month. You could also include interactive pop-up content like videos and text to educate them on new product lines or exclusive loyalty programme offers, or even incorporate calls-to-action to send them to your latest blog posts or podcast episodes. There’s a balance to be struck with a loyalty programme: you need to provide perks, excitement, interaction, and add value, and long-form gamification is probably the most effective vehicle to deliver this mix.

4. Use your loyalty programme to create a personal connection between your customers and your business

Modern gamification experiences offer powerful data collection functionality which you can use to enrich your data, and better segment your audience and personalise your email newsletters.

For example, if you run exclusive contests or instant win games through your loyalty programme, where members have a chance of winning specific products, you will see which contests they enter and get an idea of the sorts of products they’re interested in. This can then feed into the sorts of marketing material you send to them.

Additionally, every user action within modern gamified experiences are recorded and exportable, meaning any number of the pre-built game engines in the back catalogue can be customised to build a more complete profile of each of your members.

5. Continuously evolve and improve your loyalty programme

The best loyalty programme in the world, if left as is in the long term, will become obsolete and fail its members. A loyalty programme is a journey, not a destination. Unless you’ve somehow amassed a true monopoly (which is incredibly unlikely and in most territories illegal), your work when it comes to fostering loyalty is never done.

In the same way you could pick out opportunities to surpass your competitors’ programmes when you started yours, nothing is stopping them from coming back after you and doing the same when they innovate on their end. Keep an eye on your competitors, look at what similar businesses are doing in other industries or even in other countries – be a sponge and operate with a growth mindset to take the best bits from other programmes to make your programme the best.

Pro tip: The game statistics collected in your Drimify dashboard are the blueprint to improving your gamified approach to loyalty. With careful analysis, you can not only enrich your customer data, but finetune the gamification experiences you’re delivering to them. If the numbers say that a significant percentage of players are not completing a certain level, step, or game in your programme, you know there’s something that needs to be looked at in more detail and improved or changed going forward.

Additionally, Drimify is always creating new game engines and experiences for our clients to customise, so there will always be new ways to engage and reward your customers.

Key takeaway

It’s easier and cheaper to retain a customer than to attract a new one, so invest time and resources into creating a competitive and well thought out loyalty programme.

Whether you’re looking to start your first loyalty programme, or overhauling your existing one to be more competitive, the 5 tactics listed above will always be applicable and actionable.