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Due to this era’s unstoppable technological advancements combined with the highly unpredictable global circumstances of the current world we are living in, the eCommerce business is rapidly growing and becoming an extremely competitive type of business. This has also been intensified by the convenience of eCommerce business and the positively changing pattern of customers’ behavior towards it.
To illustrate better, according to statistics, the number of eCommerce websites has been sharply increasing ever since the breakout of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020. The current number of eCommerce websites is estimated to be between 12 and 24 million websites. It is no-brainer that with this skyrocketing increase in eCommerce websites, it becomes harder for eCommerce businesses to hold on to their customers, and easier for the customer churn rate to increase. However, as bad as this problem sounds, it is not unavoidable.
This problem can be avoided by depending on loyalty marketing and using eCommerce loyalty programs, which are proven to be very effective. In this article, we will provide you with some tips for creating successful loyalty programs and show you some of the best examples.
Table of Content:
10 Tips for creating the best eCommerce loyalty program
1- Define your objective and KPIs
2- Branding your eCommerce loyalty program
4- Use Tiered loyalty programs
What are eCommerce Loyalty Programs?
Generally, loyalty marketing is a marketing strategy that businesses rely on to acquire and retain loyal customers and to continuously increase their level of satisfaction and loyalty.
Particularly, loyalty marketing for eCommerce is one of the main marketing strategies that eCommerce stores use today to increase customer retention through the enhancement of customer loyalty. This is done through different loyalty programs and strategies.
Before diving deeper into loyalty programs, it is important to understand the general meaning of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty represents a positive relationship between a business and its customers. This relationship is based on the pleasant and memorable experience that customers have with the business and results in the customers’ willingness to return to the company and the likelihood of them repeatedly conducting business with this company.
The main idea of eCommerce loyalty programs is that they directly reward customers who return to their eCommerce store frequently. Such rewards may include points that customers get when they buy a product or a service, and that allow them to buy additional products or services for free. Rewards can also be in the form of gifts, special deals, or exclusive access to new products or services.
Top 10 tips and strategies for creating the best eCommerce loyalty programs
The increasing competitiveness in the eCommerce business has extended to reach eCommerce loyalty programs. Each eCommerce store today strives to offer better loyalty programs than its competitors. So, here are some tips to help you create the best eCommerce loyalty programs for your customers.
1- Start by defining your objective and KPIs
E-commerce loyalty programs mean nothing if they are not based on a SMART objective that is tied to logical KPIs. In other words, before creating your loyalty program, you should identify an objective that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, in addition to choosing KPIs that can effectively measure the success of this loyalty program.
For example, if your objective is to have 20,000 new buyers for the next year. Therefore, a logical KPI for this would be the number of buyers who purchase from your eCommerce store after they sign up for your loyalty program.
This will benefit you in so many ways:
- It will help you identify exactly what types of actions on your eCommerce store you want to incentivize.
- It will make it easier for you to decide the types of rewards and the suitable structure of the loyalty programs.
- It will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your eCommerce loyalty program.
2- Put effort into the branding of your eCommerce loyalty program
Just like you put effort into branding your eCommerce business as a whole, you should definitely put effort into branding your eCommerce loyalty program as well. In other words, brand your loyalty program the same way you would brand a new product or service in your eCommerce store.
For example you can:
- Choose an attractive name for your loyalty program, a name that is catchy and memorable so that it can spread across the web and social media.
- Design a unique logo for your loyalty program.
- Take care of the theme of the loyalty program as a whole and make sure to create a strong connection between it and the overall theme of your eCommerce brand.
3- Keep it simple and Communicate rewards clearly
Who loves a loyalty program that’s too complicated to understand? No one. Therefore, it is important that you keep it simple and make sure that your customers will be able to understand it and deal with it easily.
Also, make sure that your loyalty program is easy to find. For example, you can place an attractive customized widget for the loyalty program on the homepage of your store. You should also make sure that your loyalty programs appear on all of your different channels, such as mobile apps, social media platforms, email newsletters, and others, and connect between all of these channels. This will not just benefit your loyalty program but will also, in the long run, turn you into an omnichannel eCommerce business.
After finding your loyalty program, customers will want to use its rewards, which is another thing you should simplify for them. In other words, make it easy for them to activate their rewards or to redeem their points and use them.
4- Use Tiered loyalty programs
Tiered loyalty programs are proven to be very successful. The main reason behind their success is that they motivate people to constantly engage more with your eCommerce brand, and they also raise the switching costs for your customers. In other words, customers with a high rank are unlikely to switch to another brand because it will impose switching costs on them, such as the loss of their hard-earned benefits.
5- Use Personalization in your eCommerce loyalty program
Personalization is one of the best tricks to make your eCommerce loyalty program more successful. Every transaction in the eCommerce business is digital, which allows you to gain more data on each and every customer, which allows you to personalize the rewards in your loyalty programs.
6- Engage your customers in non-transactional activities
Getting your customers to purchase more is not the only objective you can pursue by launching eCommerce loyalty programs. There are other activities that you can include in your loyalty programs, such as encouraging customers to refer your website to their friends or pushing them to write positive reviews about your products or services. In other words, you can reward your customers for activities other than purchasing.
7- Show your customers that you care about them
Another way to differentiate your eCommerce loyalty program is by making an effort to show your customers that you care about them. For example, you can remember your customer's birthdays and make sure to reward them with extra points or give them an exclusive gift through the loyalty program.
8- Support a Cause
Don’t we all feel more respect towards a brand when we find it supporting a good and noble cause?
This is another way you can make your eCommerce loyalty program succeed. Tie it to a noble cause and make your customers feel that, by being a member of this loyalty program, they are participating in supporting the cause with you. For example, if you decide to support a charitable cause, give your customers the option to donate their loyalty points or rewards to this charity.
9- Use Gamification
Who doesn’t love a little challenge?
Employing games and challenges in your loyalty program helps make it more engaging, interesting, and fun. It encourages your customers to log into their profiles more frequently with eagerness to see what kind of games and challenges you have for them.
10- Make sure you stay consistent
When it comes to eCommerce, consistency is always one of the keys. Make sure that you stay consistent in your loyalty programs. In other words, for example, changing the mechanism of the program frequently or constantly modifying the methods of redeeming reward points may definitely confuse your customers or even frustrate them.
Therefore, always work on being consistent.
Final Thoughts:
It is important to highlight the fact that staying committed to loyalty marketing in eCommerce business and creating attractive up-to-date eCommerce loyalty programs is not as easy as it seems. It requires a lot of effort. However, there are tools that can make the process easier and shorter for you, such as the tool offered by ConvertedIn which will help you to:
- Gather your customers’ data, which may be scattered across different places, into one place, like a hub.
- Generate unlimited segmentation based on the input features of the customers, which will help you create better loyalty programs.
- Implement effective retention and conversion campaigns.
There are many more things a marketing automation system can help you with. Book your Demo now to discover all the benefits that you can enjoy and start this amazing journey.
