What’s Holding Back Your Customer Loyalty Program?

While the goal may be clear, customer loyalty strategies face some common challenges relating to both acquisition and engagement. The solution? Integrating your loyalty program with the rest of your business.

Common loyalty program challenges include:

1. Missed opportunities to acquire on-premise customers

How many of your on-premise visitors are in your customer database? Chances are most of the people visiting your business are ‘invisible’ to you because they haven’t yet transacted (even if they’ve engaged with your brand). Customer WiFi is one way to capture on-premise customer data and ultimately begin to understand and engage with them. When you use an API such as Local Measure’s, you can seamlessly integrate all those customer details into your loyalty database.

2. Not enough differentiation

All customer loyalty programs begin to look the same to consumers when competing brands fail to innovate. The most innovative loyalty programs offer rewards based on customer preferences, as 77 percent of consumers favor loyalty programs that involve personalization. Using customer preferences is one way to personalize rewards, but what about customer sentiment? If you know an on-premise customer is unhappy because they’ve left feedback through Local Measure’s feedback tool, and you’re using an API to send that information to your loyalty database, you can quickly make them an offer to recover that service issue.

3. Underestimating the potential value of your customers

A study by Harvard Business School suggests that a business’ highest spending customers are also the most likely to spend across competitors. What is the true potential customer value of this segment? By closely monitoring the on-premise experience of your highest-value customers, you can better understand what drives their purchasing behavior.

For example, when you marry customer sentiment feedback with your loyalty program, you can send relevant, personalized offers when loyalty customers are happiest, thereby increasing the chance of upsells. To make the offer relevant, refer to on-premise behavior from their last visit or other recorded preferences.

4. Only rewarding purchases

Customers want to be rewarded for more than just transactions. Interactions such as engaging on social media or completing a survey also deserve recognition. More and more, it’s expected that rewards and recognition will happen instantly, which means that your online channels need to be integrated with your loyalty database, so that information is available in real-time.

For example, when customers fill out feedback through Local Measure's Pulse, they can be automatically entered into a ‘Welcome’ loyalty campaign which sends them exclusive content, offers or experiences. Or, if a customer shared some photos from your restaurant, you could make note that they are interested in Food and Beverage, then send them a specific food related offer. These types of actions can go a lot further towards building an emotional connection with your brand.