Three Critical Steps To A Successful Customer Rewards Program

You already know the value of a customer loyalty program when it comes to gaining and retaining customers, but many just aren’t sure how to best implement these programs for success. Whether you’re revamping a poorly set up and underperforming customer loyalty program, or starting from scratch, your loyalty program should follow three basic principles.

Three Steps To A Successful Customer Rewards Program 

Step One: Set a clear and concise end goal for the customer. 

Click-throughs, actions, and artificial advancement rarely occur if the customer doesn’t have all the information they need to encourage them forward. This is accomplished by having a clear and concise end goal, and that goal needs to align with the desires of your customer base.

So, if you’re wanting a customer to ultimately sign up for a subscription to your service, and you’re doing a promotion for a freebie for doing so, then the customer needs to know exactly what reward they’ll be getting at the finish line. Remember, using your own product or service as the reward keeps marketing and overhead costs down while also inadvertently acting as its own marketing agenda for the freebie.

Step Two: Decide which actions will merit reward.

You’ll need to know what your own rewards will be. In other words, what specific actions by a customer will pay out for you enough to reward it? It’s a step that many companies can get wrong by rewarding too many/few behaviors on too large or small a scale, or with a reward the surpasses or underwhelms the value of the customer actions being sought.

Subscription based goals leave a lot more creativity room for rewards that don’t involve excess purchasing from customers. A ‘Refer a friend program’ is a perfect example. These are clear cut wins-wins as the customer gets a discount to their own desired services and businesses get word of mouth promotion.

Step Three: Create early and interactive boosts throughout the advancement process.

Artificial advancement relies on the user being clear about how they’re moving forward and why, which is an encouragement step that many businesses fail to provide in customer reward programs. Randomly giving out points or advancement for no reason doesn’t serve you any purpose and just confuses customers on what’s expected to get to a reward.

However, bonuses are important to keep users engaged in reward programs that go beyond a one-step action. An explained bonus for new sign-ups or mini-actions within the program are examples of how you can advance the customer forward in logical ways towards an end goal.

While these steps sound simple enough, implementing them in ways that best serve your business and customers can be tedious and trying. Contact AutoAwards today for a consultation on how to make your dealer rewards program operate at full speed.