For many brands, loyalty programs are critical for building customer engagement over time. But in today’s consumer world, it takes more than just having a loyal program to stand out with your customers.
The challenge for any loyalty program is keeping members engaged because the early excitement of enrolling and participating can often wane. This can occur when loyalty program members repeat the same earning actions to try and earn the same rewards over long periods of time.
Enter loyalty amplifiers.
Simply put, loyalty amplifiers are engagements that motivate and excite your members through additional incentives.
Loyalty amplifiers drive interaction with repeat customers and help you achieve goals like member acquisition, education and onboarding, increasing your sales, point burn, retention and brand advocacy.
In this time of sameness among many loyalty programs, using amplifiers is a great way for you to differentiate your program and increase engagement through things like instant win games, UGC contests, sweepstakes, social media incentives, trivia and more.
This article will show you how loyalty amplifiers can elevate your customer relationships.
Loyalty Amplifiers Positively Motivate Consumer Behavior
According to our new consumer survey, How to Increase Loyalty Program Engagement with Amplifiers, it’s clear that there’s a lot of power packed in loyalty amplifiers.
Here are some key stats from our research that surveyed more than 1,300 consumers:
- Eighty-eight percent of consumers are likely to join your loyalty program if you offer them an incentive (e.g., the chance to win a prize, receive a discount or get bonus points).
- Nearly 80% of consumers who belong to a brand’s loyalty program would likely download that brand’s app in exchange for an incentive.
- In exchange for an incentive, 66% of consumers are likely to provide brands with more personal information and preferences to better personalize their loyalty program experience.
- Nearly 80% of consumers are likely to purchase multiple specific products in exchange for a rebate.
- Nearly 70% of consumers are likely to redeem smaller amounts of loyalty program points in exchange for rewards like the chance to win a prize, a customized digital product or a donation to a charity, instead of having to “save up” points for larger ticket rewards like free products or merchandise.
Let’s look at individual loyalty amplifiers that can help you boost member engagement.
Social Media Incentives Drive Customer Engagement
Your brand can leverage its engagement efforts through social media incentives, which help you tremendously with member acquisition, retention and brand advocacy.
Positive customer engagement on your social media pages helps you increase traffic to your site and creates buzz about your brand. Social media incentives create connections and helps you amplify your loyalty program by stimulating conversation with your customers.
You can create a great buzz on your social media pages and drive traffic to your site by offering members incentives such as discounts, loyalty points and giveaways.
Create social media incentives that encourage your loyalty program members to take an action, like logging onto your site to receive loyalty points. When you get your members to interact on your social media pages in exchange for an incentive, you acquire more members and increase engagement.
For example, Red Lobster wanted to raise social awareness for one day called #RockARedLobster. Its goal was to drive top-of-mind awareness of Red Lobster by inspiring seafood-loving fans to promote the brand on social media in celebration of National Lobster Day.
It was an invitation-only program that encouraged Red Lobster fans to share photos with #RockARedLobster showing their love of lobster on Instagram and Twitter in exchange for a chance to win prizes instantly.
IHG ran a social media campaign titled, “IHG Rewards Club – Priceless Experiences Await.” Its goal was to generate authentic consumer endorsements of the brand via its social media channels.
In partnership with Mastercard, IHG Rewards Club Members shared their respective stories and posted photos of their favorite travel memories for a chance to win one of four curated Priceless Experience vacation packages.
Trivia Excites Your Loyalty Program Members
When you’re onboarding and educating new members, trivia can excite them and fulfill a big marketing goal for you.
Trivia programs create friendly competition by encouraging your best customers to share their scores or results. Keep your trivia programs fresh by changing the questions on a daily or weekly basis to increase the frequency of participation.
Trivia tests consumers’ knowledge about relevant brand or pop culture content, gamifying the educational experience by asking questions in fun and engaging ways. Questions can be one-time use, refresh at each visit or set at intervals throughout the engagement period.
Once participants register, they receive trivia or survey questions and each question they get correct can earn them an additional entry. Responses are stored within a database for the brand to evaluate and analyze.
This can be incorporated into a loyalty program to earn without purchase to gain more insights into member preferences. Whether you’re testing consumer knowledge about a products’ benefits, or quizzing them about relevant pop culture references, trivia engagement makes your loyalty interactions fun and exciting.
Trivia helps you greatly with the education/onboarding of your new loyalty program members.
Instant Wins Offer Instant Gratification
Every consumer loves the chance to win something instantly or receive something new through a loyalty program.
Instant Win incentives can be tailored around engagement and repeat visits. You can drive repeat loyalty engagement by giving consumers a chance at immediate gratification.
Often, loyalty program members feel like they must wait too long for rewards and that they’re unattainable. This factor makes instant wins so powerful.
For example, T-Mobile Tuesdays is a first-of-its-kind loyalty program that rewards customers with new perks every Tuesday using its scalable offer platform.
It focuses on finding new ways to reward subscribers through innovative engagements and partnerships to enrich the reward experience. T-Mobile can segment and publish offers and micro-experiences by user, location and customer preferences. T-Mobile Tuesdays gives consumers exclusive perks and the chance to enter to win prizes every week. Its overarching goal is to reduce churn, increase customers and thank them.
Instant Win incentives help you immensely with member retention.
Gift With Purchase Attracts Consumers
If you want to increase sales, consider offering a value-add for your loyalty program members. This will help you stand out among your competitors and in the hearts and minds of your loyal customers.
Adding a gift with purchase incentive to your loyalty program entices consumers to look at your brand instead of the competition. Gift with purchase programs can be guaranteed rewards, cash, offers or charitable donations.
Many brands also incorporate a sweepstakes overlay to help drive traffic and give consumers a reason to come back between purchases. This strategy is particularly beneficial for products with low purchase frequency and high consideration.
Gift with purchase helps you increase your sales.
Sweepstakes Increase Loyalty Program Engagement
A sweepstakes program offers your customers the chance to win prizes and allows you to collect valuable zero- and first-party data.
Sweepstakes serve as a great way for brands to expand their social media presence, elevate customer engagement, and collect customer data.
And they provide you with numerous insights that help strengthen customer relationships. Sweepstakes motivate more frequent/higher engagement than just a simple single chance-to-win.
Sweepstakes remain one of the most popular ways to collect valuable first-party data and opt-ins because of their versatility. Entrants register for a chance to win, with one winner or winners selected at random either throughout or at the end of the incentive period.
A key element of a sweepstakes is these incentives can be offered strategically throughout the year to keep your loyalty program members engaged.
A good example of this is Redbox Perks.
Redbox always wants to motivate its loyalty program members to participate in the services offered amid competing entertainment options such as streaming services.
Redbox’s solution was a Summer and Winter Spin–a twice-year program designed to engage Redbox Perks members. When loyalty members access their Redbox Perks accounts, they receive a game board and a range of incentivized activities. Members complete each of the activities once to earn Instant Win Game plays and sweepstakes entries.
Sweepstakes help you with several loyalty goals, including member acquisition, increasing sales and brand advocacy.
User-Generated Content Contests can Turn Your Members Into Advocates
What is UGC?
It’s any form of content, including texts, photos, audio, images or video that is voluntarily created by individuals and shared in blog posts, on social media, brand pages, podcasts and review sites.
For your brand, the power of user-generated content is real.
UGC can turn your customers into brand advocates who create and share authentic content that influences purchasing decisions. And the expansion and adoption of new social media platforms have widened the reach and impact of UGC marketing campaigns.
Your customers create original content that they share on social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or by uploading their submissions on a contest site.
UGC is valuable to your brands because it’s a current stream of content created by your best and most loyal consumers. Social media users know what is relevant and you’re accessing these insights by asking them to use a specific hashtag or to submit it through an entry page.
If you gamify UGC, you can boost the proportion of advocates and amplify your existing ones. Advocates love talking about your brand and when you gamify UGC you’re giving them another reason to talk about you and share that content with others.
When you add an incentive such as a contest, participants share their content for a chance at winning a prize. Offering an aspirational prize (like a new car or shopping spree) is a great way to get your customers’ attention.
UGC contests help you with brand advocacy, acquisition and retention.
Loyalty Amplifiers Give Your Members More Value
Loyalty amplifiers are all about value and they lead to repeat engagement, retention and advocacy. They also create a spirit of exclusivity among your loyalty program members.
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Loyalty Amplifiers.
If you want to learn more about loyalty amplifiers, check out the next article in the series, How Sweepstakes Can Increase Engagement Among Loyalty Program Members.
ebbo
ebbo helps brands achieve their customer loyalty goals with full-service, end-to-end solutions and also creates original educational content straight from the experts to help loyalty marketers stay on the cutting edge of customer engagement.