Why is a Compelling Email Vital to a Successful Loyalty Program?

Loyalty programs must be coupled with emails in order to refresh people about the value they could get from you. Here’s why compelling emails are vital to staying successful in the whole rewards landscape!

A good loyalty program needs a way to update their customers about the points they’ve accumulated and their options for retrieving it. Sure, most loyalty programs already have this portion ready and waiting for whenever their customers log into the program, but a little push and reminder (something that calls attention to these rewards) that can help inspire engagement wouldn’t hurt.

That’s where loyalty program emails come in.

The Radicati Group, Inc.’s study expects a bloat of about 2.9 billion worldwide email users by the end of 2019. For this reason and more, many marketers still have their sights set on email marketing as a way of future-proofing their digital marketing strategies. On average, a person receives at least 21 emails a day, most of which are marketing emails. That’s a lot of emails with varying content taking up your customers’ inboxes daily! But don’t be discouraged by these numbers just yet; the email format is an important complementary strategy to the whole loyalty program landscape. With so many already competing for attention (and email space) it sure could be fairly difficult to get your recipients to click. However, before you shove this strategy out of the window, you have to see why it’s important in the first place. So, what’s with email marketing and how does it compel your recipients to continue their engagement to your loyalty program?

Loyalty program emails help customers maximise the effectiveness of their points by reminding them of what they have. If you can get your customers excited for your email, it’s most likely that they’d engage and make that first connection (and hopefully, the subsequent ones). So, this first point of contact is vital to inspiring their next courses of action and your email’s final landing place, which could only be two—the trash or the coveted inbox. 

But with email marketing, you wouldn’t be just taking up space. It’s a good opportunity to lead customers back into your brand to shop and use your services. Compelling emails serve as an open gate ushering your customers; making sure they find something valuable with you that they wouldn’t find anywhere else. 

Jessica Mizerak would go as far as calling emails and loyalty programs the “ultimate power couple”; two halves of a whole that give customers greater incentive to inspire their continuous product purchases and use of services. And enrolment to a loyalty program cannot do this alone. You have to make use of devices that ensure that your customers get reminded of what they have. More often than not, your programs would sit idle, as on average, customers are enrolled in at least 14 of those. So active promotion is a must. One of the ways loyalty programs does this is by pounding on their email campaigns, may it be personalised or the standard (we’d bet greater success with the former though).

Email campaigns would refresh customers about your value to their lives. A mention of your value proposition keeps your customers engaged. This is because customers love knowing there’s something in it for them. After all, the primary reason for why customers enroll in loyalty programs in the first place is because they seek greater value for their bucks. So, aside from these reminders, what can you put into your email so that your customers can understand it better?

First (for the initial email), an explanation of your program. This would inform customers about the basics. An email sent out before you launch the loyalty program should do two things, according to Matt Fish of smile.io: it should both excite and explain. Make the update brief and direct to the point. No need to bombard them with overwhelming terms and conditions just yet. Show your customers how easy it is to join your program and highlight what’s in it for them. 

Next, be sure to walk them through your program’s rewards format and category. In general, there’s really just four categories of innovative programs: points, tiers, social media, and paid programs. So frequent updates are needed to bring something new to the table. Customers are drawn to the simple point system, since it’s the most common and the easiest. Gamification is on the rise, with nearly 40% of the millennial respondents on a report cited by Forbes saying there should be games in loyalty programs (to raise engagement furthermore). 

And finally, your consequent emails can easily walk your customers through your program, give them information about what deals they’re eligible to get, how many points they needed to move from one tier to a higher one (to keep them moving and hankering), some rewards that are ready for the taking, etc. 

CONCLUSION

All in all, email marketing attached to a loyalty program does one thing best: remind customers of the value they could get from your brand. In the next few articles, we’ll be discussing the types of loyalty program emails you can explore plus a simple walk-through about how you can start incorporating your own email to your program.