What Makes a Successful Loyalty Campaign?

In today’s hyper-competitive global market, customers are more fickle than ever. Yet businesses depend on the loyalty of customers to survive and thrive, so retaining a certain number of devotees is a major imperative for enterprises in all industries.

Indeed, research from Bain & Company shows that a 5% improvement in customer retention can increase profits by as much as 25%. Meanwhile, a study by Gartner found that 80% of a company’s future revenue comes from just 20% of its existing customers.

One way to boost retention is via marketing campaigns specifically designed to encourage existing customers to stick with your brand. But what does a successful loyalty campaign look like? We’ll answer this question, and many more, in the following article.

What is a Loyalty Campaign?

In brief, a loyalty campaign is supposed to target your existing customers and convince them (implicitly or explicitly) to engage with your brand on a long-term basis. This could be achieved in a number of ways:

Value Proposition

First, you need to remember that every brand’s value proposition acts as a promise to consumers. Your brand can maintain loyalty among them simply by honouring that promise. By listening to what your customers want and care about, and responding to these needs. Reminding customers that you have fulfilled this promise can be a major factor in encouraging them to commit to your business.

Emotional Response

Sometimes, building customer loyalty is as simple as producing an emotional attachment to your brand. Showing consumers that your brand cares about them, and wants to make them feel good, can go a long way towards promoting loyalty. You could do this through content that promotes a positive emotional reaction, or through subliminal design, as well as by sharing positive interactions customers have had with you.

Shared Values and ESG

Customers nowadays expect brands to align with their values. By embodying the values of your target customer base, and championing the ESG issues they might care about (such as sustainability, for example), you’ll be more likely to ensure that they are loyal to your cause.

Rewards

As we’ve covered previously, loyalty programmes are a way of directly incentivising customer loyalty by offering them rewards for performing certain actions. These rewards can include perks, discounts, and freebies, earned through points or tier-based systems.

The Secret Sauce

So, with all of the above in mind, we can reasonably conclude that the most successful loyalty campaigns fulfil to some extent the four key criteria we have outlined. They should engage with customers on an emotional level and tap into their values, while also fulfilling their value proposition and maintaining a high standard of product/service, while also offering some tantalising rewards for those who choose to stay.

Loyalty campaigns, therefore, represent something of an intersection between marketing and design. Obviously, like any good marketing, they should aim to engage consumers and provide timely and informative content that invokes a positive emotional response. But, from a digital design perspective, they also depend on well-designed platforms/apps to deliver them to audiences.

In an increasingly digitised world, where more and more companies are crafting digital products or moving their services and products online, it makes sense to tie much of the content and applications of loyalty campaigns to digital platforms.

As a result, the success or failure of this venture is invariably tied to the level of experience the brand has in digital design — or the level of experience in those third-parties they choose to collaborate with to execute their vision for an effective loyalty campaign.

Case Study: Virgin Active

Virgin Active managed to pull off a highly successful loyalty campaign by revamping its Global Member Experience — a health and wellbeing app designed to support customers with their fitness efforts through a combination of a digital loyalty engine. Future Platforms previously collaborated with Virgin Active on the revamp of the app — working closely with the brand to integrate brand-new features: prompting members to build proactive fitness habits through regular incentives for repeated visits to their gym centres.

As a result, data has since shown a major increase in users, with Week 4 retention jumping from 0.4% to 41%. Meanwhile, member engagement with rewards has increased since the app launch, with the reward redemption rate increasing from 20% to 45% week on week.

However, the app itself isn’t just a method of delivering rewards to users. It’s also been used to create a positive emotional response among users by creating stronger community ties.

For example, the experience’s member referral programme has been leveraged to encourage users to convince their social circle to get involved. Meanwhile, the customer data gathered by the apps can also be used by the brand itself to interrogate the behaviours and requirements of their members, and then used to build an even better service for them.

Future Platforms: Your Partner for Successful Loyalty Campaigns

Are you looking to craft a loyalty campaign that will help you better connect with your customers, and want a helping hand? Here at Future Platforms, we have a wealth of experience helping our clients get to grips with the ins and outs of loyalty campaigns and the digital services that help facilitate them

We’ll work with you to understand your business objectives, the challenges facing you, and the issues that truly matter to your target audience. After that, we’ll work right alongside you to create a winning loyalty campaign that will help you guarantee long-term consumer investment in your brand.

So, if you’d like to learn more about how, then don’t delay: contact our team right now to get started!