Engagement is the soul of any loyalty programme. Specifically, a protracted, emotional, enjoyable engagement between you and your client. Engagement is crucial because it’s growing difficult to earn customers’ trust. Impersonal, business-focused marketing tactics won’t be effective on them anymore. Forbes noted that 58% of millennials don’t trust conventional advertising. When you can include good experiences into each phase of your interaction with your audience and keep their attention throughout, magic happens. Let me demonstrate how loyalty programmes like the Lancôme programme entice customers to spend more time with you and how you can maximise these strategies by focusing on specific client categories.
- Continue to update the loyalty programme
In all meanings of the word, continual motion describes our reality. Customers therefore require newer and newer stimuli to keep their interest. Your loyalty programme must meet this demand, just like everything else in marketing.
The issue has an easy fix. Offer your consumers fresh ways to accumulate points on a regular basis to prevent them from growing weary and abandoning your programme. They will always have a cause to return to your store and participate if you occasionally propose new activities.
This strategy works especially well if your business has a tonne of content. Giving your consumers points in exchange for watching your most recent material (including articles and videos) generates the interaction you want.
By including a content quiz in your posts and videos, you may increase the enjoyment that people get from their content consumption. You can offer incentives to your audience to read your fresh content each time you publish it. You can verify that they actually read it and didn’t merely click on it by using the content quiz tool.
Use case: Wake up sleepers with the Lancôme Loyalty Program
Customers that haven’t visited your website in a while are known as sleepers. You must win back this so-called “at risk” segment before they raise your churn rate. They might not have checked in on you for a number of reasons, including:
They fulfilled all of the tasks they set out to do.
All of the incentives they were interested in were redeemed by them.
They can’t acquire as many points as they need, making it appear nearly impossible for them to receive a reward.
Simply put, they lost track of you, your loyalty programme, and its advantages.
They simply didn’t enjoy the perks in your loyalty programme.
By adding new components to your loyalty programme and making sure customers are informed about them, all of these segments can be renewed. Here are some examples of how Lancôme energises clients:
- Make objectives to attain
The majority of your consumers actually enrol in your loyalty programme in order to receive benefits and discounts. Your customers have a basic sense of justice that dictates that if they put in the effort, they should ultimately succeed in their endeavours.
However, this does not imply that there was no involvement on the road to their prize.
Through gamification, activities can foster genuine engagement, which is the primary driver of client loyalty. According to Forbes, one-third of older generations and 40% of millennials actively seek out gamification features in loyalty programmes.
For this reason, setting objectives for your clients to strive for is crucial.
What sort of objectives do you have?
Rewards: The primary incentive for joining your loyalty programme is rewards. Offer a wide variety of prizes to ensure that you can satiate all consumers, from low spenders to high rollers.
Levels: In general, people strive to climb the hierarchy to higher and higher positions. This is a gamification strategy that encourages users to work more in order to gain respect. Customers enjoy being referred to as VIPs or golden customers.
- Hold competitions
For me, winning anything makes me feel lot better than purchasing it. Although the thrill of being the lucky winner chosen by drawing is something unmatched, it is not really about the money. Contests are so well-liked, in my opinion, because of their emotional value.
There are numerous varieties of competitions. You could, for instance, ask customers to contribute pictures of themselves using your items to an Instagram contest, and then an impartial panel of judges would select the winner. Sweepstakes and competitions are quite similar, with the main distinction being that the winners are chosen at random.
The fun doesn’t stop there, though. Offering a Prize Wheel is yet another technique to encourage customers’ competitiveness. The idea is straightforward: participants can exchange their points for entry tickets in the hopes of winning a significant prize. The Prize Wheel offers a variety of gifts and perks, including points, tiny trinkets, and discount coupons, so participants don’t feel bad even if they don’t win the grand prize.
The contests have the significant advantage of serving as in-store diversionary activities while customers wait in line. Simply make the enrollment process tablet-friendly, and impatient consumers will pass the time while waiting by using it to pass the time.
- Conduct additional credit activities
Special rewards that can sway your consumer include double or triple point events. They have a framework that is remarkably similar to promotions. These are transitory marketing where customers can receive additional incentives if they respond quickly. The distinction is that whereas the psychology of promotions is typically based on luck, in the case of these events, it is likely the advantage that draws customers.
You can specify precisely which purchases you wish to reward with extra points using Antavo’s rule editor. The most well-liked ones are as follows:
Buying more than a certain amount of goods
Purchases that exceed a certain threshold in terms of total cart value
purchases of a particular kind of product
Purchases made in a certain country plus the addition of any of the aforementioned elements
Your offering and your clients will determine what kinds of marketing you can use to your advantage. Investigate and test the methods and point modifiers that influence your particular target audience to act.
Use case: Attract wary people.
There are customers who add products to their shopping carts on every website but never proceed to checkout. This is the group that for whatever reason you weren’t able to persuade the first time. They can still be looking for the greatest deal or simply not have the inclination.
In fact, 68% of those aged 20 to 34 say they would like to work for a company that offers them more benefits.
Send a notification to your subscribers who have abandoned carts when you launch a campaign to let them know that you want to reward them with an irresistible deal. They will believe you are the best option because of the advantage you have promised, and the time-sensitive nature of your campaign will compel them to act right now.
They won’t think twice choosing you the next time they need a different product because they can utilise the points they have accumulated to lower the overall cost of their checkout.
- Let clients evaluate you
Writing reviews is a great way to make sure that your consumers remember to come back to you after making a purchase. Not to mention, by promoting reviews, you may reassure customers that you value their opinions and are willing to compensate them with loyalty points.
My recommendation is to allow your consumers to express their feelings in writing rather than just using a simple 5-star rating system. This was significant to Antavo while looking for a review engine to work with.
To excel in engagement, you must develop your ability to listen to your clients. The conventional barrier between you and your clients needs to be removed. The days of marketers just communicating in one direction at a distance, as if speaking into a tube, are over. The ideal strategy to engage your customers in an interesting two-way conversation is to request reviews. Additionally, their assessment will act as social proof to persuade visitors to choose you.
Conclusion
As you can see, implementing strategies to increase consumer engagement is not difficult. To get your clients to respond to your marketing objectives, you simply need to identify the appropriate incentives. Use the loyalty programmes like Yogurtland, Coke, or Lancôme as a starting point, but always try to come up with something new.
Communication is a crucial element that has the power to create or destroy your plan. It was noted multiple times before, but I feel like it has to be emphasised one more. Don’t forget to let your customers know about your loyalty offers using your marketing automation system.