Personalised Customer Experience: Key to Any Successful Loyalty Program

Personalisation gives off the impression that you’ve put in that extra mile to actually get to know your customers. Here’s why personalised customer experience is key to any successful loyalty program and what you can do to ensure your customer’s ongoing loyalty!

Good loyalty programs don’t come cheap. What it is though is lucrative. But since it doesn’t come without its accrued expenses, you must build it with the optimal customer experience at the forefront of your consciousness.

Personalisation of experience is one of the most proven strategies of recent years. However, when everything’s too personal, sometimes it may become just slightly impersonal. So, what still does it for your digital consumers? What keeps them coming back? Experts would argue that it’s still that: personalised customer experience.

When we talk about customer experience, we talk about a bunch of aspects that coat the overall customer-product or customer-service interaction. It’s as little as a well-delivered spiel during check-out or as big as personalising emails to reflect the receipt’s name. For many, nothing tops the personal touch a product or service provides a customer.

Generalisation once dominated marketing as much as it did the shelves. This is way before the advent of a more intensive market research that goes beyond mere demographics to uncover what specific aspects trigger your customers. As technological advancements pop up, marketers are no longer encumbered by the “one size fits all” thinking that once drove customer’s loyalty. You can now mix and match your offers, adding a flair of personal touch to make customers drawn to the intimate nature of your products and services. Which is just right: with so many options available to them, it’ll be hard to keep customers loyal to your brand. 

Now, the case is for an “age of hyper-personalisation”, a response to the market demand that has skyrocketed through the years. And as the demand rose, so did the complementary technology. Now, personalisation of customer experience is no longer just an option, it’s imperative. And if you don’t intend to budge then you might as well just show your customers the door because believe us, that’s where they’re eventually going.

As a complementary marketing tool, loyalty products must work to drive commerce or sales. However, you can only do that if and when your loyalty program is relevant to your customers. Making sure that customers see the need for and the relevance of your program is of prime importance, so is tailor-fitting that program to reflect the needs and preferences of your customers back to them. 

Here are three ways for you to do that:

Personalising Emails and Notifications

Since people receive a bunch of emails daily, personalising emails will make it more intimate for your customers. This will ensure that your emails or notices stand out from the pack. Fortunately, there are ways to do this. One way is by engaging customers or users by addressing them personally in the email blast. Use the name or handle they use instead of generic, universal addresses (customer, reader, etc.). For the subject line, include your recipient’s name. This type of specific, named subject line is proven to be more likely to get a response than generic ones.

It comes as no surprise that Sephora’s Beauty Insider holds the crown when we talk about progressive, successful loyalty programs. They’ve been at it for years and is not showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon. Their weekly email blasts keep subscribers and users updated about the latest trends, limited offers, and product or event launches. The promos are irresistible enough, but still they managed to include a personal touch by specifying the recipient’s name in the email, which immediately arrests the reader’s attention.

Sephora Beauty Insider’s personalised address

(Photo lifted from Campaign Monitor)

Giving Targeted, Exclusive Recommendations

If loyalty programs cannot capture relevant insights into your customers’ behaviours, then it’s just strictly transactional in nature. However, think about Netflix and Spotify; both winning brands in their niches. The “related titles” these brands offer are analysed from a series of algorithms, all of which are determined from users’ activity and are predictive. Recommendations or curated content is simply one aspect you cannot risk to dismiss. Thankfully, there are ways for you to know exactly what recommendations to serve your customers. The influx of data from customers’ daily, digital activities can be utilised to make a curated list of products or services customers would love. For example, you can integrate a customer’s real-time purchase data with their historical purchase data. This will show you trends within their buying behaviour and help you make targeted recommendations. This shows a more authentic side to doing business and unlocks the “experiential rewards” customers hanker for. 

Offering User-Generated Rewards

When we talk about user-generated rewards, we mean those “gifts” or additional incentives customers get for doing something, like a bunch of social media actions. Since most loyalty programs are already linked to the users’ social media accounts, this is a great opportunity to reach more audience. You can give users additional incentives for sharing your program to their networks or for sharing a custom referral link to others who may be interested in the program. 

One Love Organics is quite generous when it comes to rewarding specific user-generated actions. For one, users can automatically get 500 points for sharing the loyalty program to their friends. Any invitees who decide to enrol to OLO Insider, the brand’s loyalty program, will also have a $5 coupon. Additionally, following OLO’s social media accounts makes one eligible to 100 points per platform. Good deal, right!

One Love Organics’ list of points

CONCLUSION

While the creation of personalised loyalty programs is not without its risks, it’s worth every penny you put into it. After all, return customers are much more lucrative and more likely to make return purchases than one-time buyers. So, know what you can about doing personalised templates for your customers today!