Loyalty programs are a mainstay in the B2C commercial sphere. From reward miles to gas rebates to stamp cards, many major businesses use loyalty programs to retain customers and increase traffic. A familiar use case might be something like the McDonald’s coffee program. After a set number of purchases, the customer gets a free hot drink of a specified size and the score resets, right? Well, there are some issues with this process that can lead to human error, and advantage being taken of the system. What if you could automate your marketing and your loyalty scoring all at once though?
According to Harvard Business Review, companies that use loyalty programs often misapply them. The ideal goal for a loyalty program is for it to be sustainable and promote long-term loyalty. This means a value proposition that never stops giving. The aforementioned coffee campaign is a good example of that. Since multi-channel marketing can produce up to 250% higher purchase engagement rates, including a loyalty program that keeps customers wanting to engage should logically provide good support to any carefully crafted multi-channel marketing automation strategy.
But still, many companies struggle to adopt an automated customer loyalty solution, despite knowing that an automated process will accelerate their sales success rate by leaps and bounds. It’s only natural because they face quite a few challenges in adopting such a process, such as:
- Setting up an automated customer loyalty roadmap
- Finding digital tools that are required to build an automated customer loyalty campaign
- Streamlining digital tools to ensure a smooth transition between customer loyalty stages
Since marketers and salespeople don’t typically like to get into technical/coding stuff, building a solution from scratch is nearly impossible and time consuming for them. It requires a great deal of effort even with a full technological team behind them.
So, what’s the solution? It’s simple: you need to use a pre-built, automated solution that will allow you to set up your customer loyalty process the way you prefer it.
But before that, you will need to know the basics of a customer loyalty process. In this blog, we are going to demonstrate the four easy steps to set up a high-level, automated customer loyalty scoring process.
Step 1: Gather Personal Details
First, you need to gather personal details of your customers. Assuming you already have a business development model and a contact engagement model set up, you should already have all your customers’ details in a centralized database or CRM. However, if you are yet to have a solid business development process and automated contact engagement process, you can check out these blogs on why you should set up a customer outreach program, and how to do that. You can also find blogs on automated customer data management and storage.
Why is capturing customers’ personal information important? Because this information will help you to create highly personalized messages when you launch a customer loyalty campaign. Personalized messages are more likely to be opened by your customers than generic “Dear Sir/Madam” messages. People resonate with messages that are personalized for them. So, it is highly recommended that you set up a business development and contact engagement process before you proceed with an automated customer loyalty solution.
Step 2: Add Score
Through the use of automation tools such as trackers and triggers, you will set up a process that adds a score to each of your customers each time they make a purchase. The reason we have chosen this structure is due to the intended long-term, sustainable goal of a customer loyalty program. When a purchase is made, the attending staff member, or the customer themselves for online purchases, will enter an identifier, like their email address. Filling out this form will add a score to the customer’s unique customer profile. When the score added has reached a specific threshold, the reward notification will be sent indicating that they have reached a specific milestone, or that they are eligible for a reward. When the reward is redeemed, the score will reset back to zero and the customer can begin accumulating once again.
This allows for a long-term engagement between the company and the customer and ensures that the customer continues to visit your organization to fulfill their needs. It also allows you to track a customer throughout the process and keep engaging with them in ways that feel personal and build a relationship.
Step 3: Reward Notification
In this step, you are creating a behavior-based set of customer loyalty messages. For example, you want to send loyalty emails to each customer when they reach a specific score, say, 50. So, using a marketing automation platform, you will have to create a process where you schedule to send a reward message each time a customer reaches that specific score total. You have the liberty to choose the sending channel you want to use. It may be email, SMS, voice broadcasting, or fax. If you want, you can go for a multi-channel option too.
You also need to set up personalization criteria too. When you select the areas in your message to personalize, the system will take the message template, pull the contact data from your CRM, insert it automatically into the template, and send a personalized copy of the message template to each of your customers. Using this technique, you can send personalized messages congratulating your customers at each score milestone automatically. You will not have to do anything yourself. The system will automatically trigger the pre-built and scheduled messages.
Sending thousands of personalized messages to thousands of contacts in minutes – that’s impossible if you do it manually!
(Oh, almost forgot to mention the most amazing part here: you do not have to reset the score to zero once a customer claims the reward. The system will do it for you!)
Step 4: Check Campaign Performance
Finally, you want to know how your customer loyalty campaign is doing. You can easily find this information by checking your campaign performance metrics. You can see how many messages were delivered to your customers, how many customers engaged with them, how many of them took action, etc.
For instance, if you are selling a digital video game, you’d expect your customers to click on a link in a nurturing email and buy the game from there. At checkout, you would ask for their email address so that you could allocate them reward points. When the purchase is completed, they will receive a confirmation message letting them know their point total. Once they have achieved the maximum point total, they would be eligible for an amount off their next purchase. You can check the email deliverability (determining the quality of your email), email open rate (how your subject line performs), and click-through-ratio (determining the power of your content) for all of the messages sent along this process. Using these metrics, you can easily generate insights and use them either to restructure your loyalty program, make changes to scheduled emails, and develop better loyalty messaging.
There, your automated customer loyalty system is done! All you need to do is find the tools that are required to build an automated system and streamline those tools to work together.
“But we agreed that these tasks are difficult!”
Absolutely! That’s why SimplyCast is offering a 100 percent ready-to-go, pre-built, automated customer loyalty scoring solution for you.
SimplyCast predicted the growing demand for an automated customer loyalty scoring solution and used our in-house email marketing software, SMS marketing software, fax blasting software, voice broadcasting software, CRM software, and marketing automation platform to build a multi-functionality customer loyalty scoring solution.
We can customize the solution for you based on your business requirements. It is super easy to use. Our clear and intuitive user interface ensures that you can hit the ground running while using our solution. No coding or technical knowledge required. Let us handle those parts while you focus on customers and closing deals at scale.
Sound interesting? Why wait? Speak to our experts today.
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