A Loyalty marketing program boosts sales volume through loyalty based promotional campaigns. A lot of work goes into creating these campaigns. The most important aspect is personalizing the promotion for the recipient and providing an enriching experience. Generic promotions tend to get overlooked, while indiscriminate use of discounts boosts sales but stifles profit margins. Customized and personalized offerings always yield better results, and the same holds true for targeted marketing campaigns as compared to generic promotions. Yet, only 22% of loyalty program members say they are satisfied with the level of personalization they receive in the programs. 78% of the people crave for more personalization which is huge potential!
Loyalty marketing programs & Machine learning
A Loyalty marketing program can generate significant insights into customer behavior. Machine learning algorithms enables customer segmentation with the help of such data. Within the loyalty program, machine learning techniques can finely segment customers based on type of products purchased, value of purchases, frequency, trends, seasonality, social behavior, survey responses etc. Such user segments could be high spending customers, or people who engage with the brand on social media platforms, or people interested in a certain service offering. Based on the customer segmentation, the Loyalty marketing program can personalize email campaigns and highlight offers the customers are interested in. Machine learning can further segment these customers based on how they interact with such communication. This makes it possible to further personalize the customer experience. Thus, machine learning in loyalty marketing programs is an extremely effective mechanism to track customer behavior which helps engage and retain such customers using personalized campaigns.
Maximize ROI with minimum supervision
Loyalty marketing programs provide the flexibility to create campaigns and maximize ROI with minimum supervision. Campaigns can be structured by setting up rules based on the targeting criteria and automated for launch on a recurring basis or dynamically, based on real time data.
Earning more loyalty points is always lucrative for customers engaged with the customer reward program! Any campaign which gives customers opportunities to earn more loyalty points, creates a big hype.
Yon-ka Paris, a New York based beauty and cosmetics brand, implemented their campaigns to achieve two objectives based on this strategy.
1. Improve sales when the demand was low.
2. Reduce expenses
To achieve the first objective, Yon-ka Paris provided bonus points for purchases on certain days. The days were never the same across two months of the campaign, and customers were purposely notified of such promotions at the last minute, keeping them guessing and building excitement & engagement with the program. At the end of the campaign, Yon-ka Paris saw a 57% increase in repeat customers resulting in a 2.26X increase in their revenue.
Yon-ka Paris achieved their second objective by influencing customer behavior. Processing the monthly credit card fee was turning out to be a big expense. They wanted to get their customers to pay through direct bank transfers and reduce the credit card fees. All they had to do was initiate a campaign which offered free shipping along with additional bonus loyalty points if customers transferred money directly to the bank. With this simple strategy they were able to reduce their expenses considerably.
By sending frequent and relevant promotions, the customers look forward to communication from your side. With certain tweaks, the campaigns help businesses influence the buying and engagement behavior of diverse customer segments. 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue. Thus, targeted campaigns are an important part of a Loyalty marketing program.
