Before diving into loyalty platforms, it’s best to understand two essential terms that can make or break your customer retention plan. Each person is driven by two types of motivators: extrinsic and intrinsic. A loyalty platform should include both these types of factors for a successful retention strategy. What are the differences between the two? It’s quite simple.
Extrinsic motivators — rewards, discounts, free products consumers receive once they do a certain action. Users are buying more products to become VIP members, giving feedback for a discount, etc.
Intrinsic motivators — actions your customers do, but without having any goal or reward involved. These actions are what brought them to the platform in the first place. It includes the enjoyment of interacting with other members, gaining knowledge through courses, the satisfaction of adding a code, and how relatable the brand is to the customer.
Most companies are relying on extrinsic rewards when it comes to loyalty platforms, which are indeed an important factor. But intrinsic motivators are what will make your brand stand out from the crowd. Now that we’ve clarified these two terms, let’s dive into loyalty platforms and their impact on your business.
You might already know why it’s better to keep customers rather than focus on acquiring new ones, so we’re not going to focus on that. We’d rather focus on how to keep your customers, and that’s where loyalty platforms come into play.
A loyalty platform can offer both types of motivators that people seek. You can reward customers by providing points, discount codes, and so on. User experience is a crucial element that could make or break your loyalty platform’s success, thus, offering intrinsic motivators.
Aside from customer satisfaction, with a loyalty platform, you can gather data, communicate with your customers, organize contests and run your loyalty program. Maybe you have a program based on points or a gamified experience. Or maybe you have a VIP program combined with a spend-based strategy. Gathering all your data from your loyalty program will become time-consuming and hardly specific at some point. This is due to you having to research deeply into what your customers are buying with the points given, or if they are even using those points. Having a loyalty platform will offer you all that information you’re searching for in just a few clicks.
Now you might ask: why would I need a loyalty platform when I already have a website and social media pages? Well, you will have all the flexibility you need. Having a well-developed platform gives you the possibility to analyze, test, and optimize it regularly. You can change the rules, rewards, tiers, timing, distribution channels, anything that would cover your marketing needs. Moreover, creating your loyalty platform gives you the option to develop and innovate its scalable architecture, a big plus, honestly.
You’re giving your customers a voice, thus increasing their satisfaction with your brand. Of course, there are plenty of ways to gather negative feedback from customers. Be it reviews, group posts (if your brand has a community group on Facebook for example), mentions on social media, and so on. But all these methods we’re presenting are manual and take a lot of time to centralize.
A loyalty platform can help you send your customers surveys regarding their experience with your brand (without worrying it’ll end up in a Spam folder). Then you can easily centralize the answers, having a clear vision of necessary improvements. Let’s say you just read a review mentioning that your website’s filtering options aren’t working. You might think that it’s just one, so it isn’t enough to invest towards changing it. Well, a loyalty platform can easily gather most of your customers’ views on your filtering options, helping you evaluate how necessary it is to fix it.
Last but not least, you can benefit from omnichannel distribution. The subject of having an omnichannel approach isn’t something to debate anymore, especially when it comes to loyalty platforms. The omnichannel approach to loyalty platforms consists of in-app messages, dedicated landing pages, ads (Google, Facebook), e-mails, chatbots, etc.
Whether you just want to gather more data about your customers, or you wish to build a strong community, loyalty platforms will be the way to go. Remember that customers will relate to a brand when they start having a sense of belonging, and when they feel heard. Listen, test, improve, and, in the long run, you’ll see incredible results.
Check out the loyalty platform we've worked on: https://www.grapefruit.ro/project/loyalty-platforms-love-at-brand-sight/