Businesses are increasingly focusing on building loyalty apps because of customer retention. Let’s learn about the outstanding features of the Loyalty app.
What is a Loyalty app?
Loyalty apps allow customers to interact with a business’s loyalty program through a smartphone app, as opposed to paper or plastic cards. How it works depends exactly on the type of loyalty app technology being used.
In the era of rapid development of digital technology, almost all human activities are gradually being digitalized. Realizing this trend, businesses have built customer care applications to retain customers and increase their loyalty.
>> Tween Chain – The first loyalty platform based on Web3 & Blockchain
Loyalty app brings convenience to customers
Loyalty programs have been around for a long time and have become popular. This is a unique form of customer gratitude from businesses. Customers can completely redeem gifts, publications, coupons, etc. when they own a loyalty application. In the past, customers had to go directly to the store to redeem their points, but today, with the superior technology of loyalty programs and the popularity of smartphones, customers can receive rewards. your offers anywhere and anytime.
Loyalty app brings a lot of value to businesses
Personalization and big data: Not only is it convenient for customers, but building a Loyalty app also brings a lot of value to businesses. Through this application, businesses can better understand their customers by knowing their geographic location, consumer behavior, and shopping habits. This is the basis for businesses to analyze and plan personalized campaigns and increase conversion rates. The huge volume of data collected from thousands and millions of customers will become the database system for businesses.
Invest in a loyalty program software that allows you to personalize your offers on the fly. What makes for a good personalization? When talking about customer loyalty programs, personalization should cover three areas: rewards, eligibility, and duration.
Rewards personalization: You should expand beyond the standard point-based model with material rewards. Instead, try out rewarding customers with discounts, free samples, gift cards, cash payouts, or free delivery. Track customer trends, send surveys, and monitor customer attributes to learn what incentive would work best for a particular customer segment.
Eligibility rules personalization: Another critical point is to define who precisely and on what conditions should get the offer. Opt for loyalty program software that allows you to quickly impose and change up redemption rules based on new customer trends, product and order attributes, and budget constraints.
Timing personalization: You can push customers to action by creating urgency with expiry dates or strategically placed countdown timers. Also, calendar-driven rewards programs for occasions such as holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries are just a brilliant and natural way to entice customers throughout the year.
Increase customer loyalty: By providing rewards and incentives for subsequent purchases, loyalty apps increase customer retention and encourage them to return. Through loyalty applications, businesses provide many incentives to customers, which help motivate them to buy and spend more money, thereby increasing sales. These special offers also help increase sales, increase revenue from existing customers, refer new customers, and increase the customer lifecycle.
>> Tween Chain – The first loyalty platform based on Web3 & Blockchain
The indispensable features of Loyalty App
1. Easy registration/login
Like many other applications, the registration/login feature in Loyalty App also requires simplicity and ease of use. Loyalty apps offer several popular registration methods, such as:
- E-mail (Gmail)
- Social media accounts (Facebook)
- Phone number
- Customer card number (in case the business has implemented the membership card program)
The note in this step is to avoid asking customers to provide too much information because that will be an obstacle for customers to download and use your app.
2. Loyalty app helps keep personal information safe
If the business already has information from the sales management software, please link it immediately so that customers do not need to provide it again. For new customers, businesses should collect information such as names, dates of birth, phone numbers, and emails. Pay attention not to exploit too much information to avoid causing discomfort to customers.
A cool way to encourage customers to complete their personal profiles is that businesses can offer small rewards. In addition, companies can also create a short survey to collect information.
3. Loyalty app’s bonus points feature
This is arguably the most important feature of a loyalty app. If your business already has a reward system, the best thing to do is integrate it with the loyalty app. Depending on the choice of the business, there are many types of rewards:
- Discount code
- Vouchers
- Product giveaway
- Convert to cash
To redeem the above rewards, businesses can also offer many ways for customers to accumulate points. Here are some common and simple forms:
Ordering: This is the most common form, and customers will earn points based on order value.
Writing product reviews: This form is commonly used on major e-commerce platforms like Shopee or Lazada and reviews sites like Foody and Tripadvisor.
In addition, there are many other forms, such as logging in every day, playing games, or performing tasks… For example, Shopee wants to increase the prestige of its e-commerce platform, so it applies 200 coins for each review that includes both photos and videos.
4. Ordering and payment features
Online shopping has long become a shopping habit in the digital age, especially in the F&B industry. Customers are too familiar with delivery applications such as BE, Grab, and Baemin to choose their favorite food or drink and place an order.
Recognizing the convenience of customer care programs, instead of depending on the above online delivery platforms, F&B chains also build their own applications, typically at The Coffee House. Customers of The Coffee House can easily order drinks, accumulate order points, and checkpoints, or redeem rewards with just one app. This not only saves customers time but also increases their loyalty.
5. Push Notifications feature
Push notifications are one of the standout features of the Loyalty App. The difference between push notifications and text messages is that the notification content has fewer words and a higher click-through rate. And when clicking on the push notification, the user will be redirected to any loyalty app instead of being redirected to the messaging app like when clicking on a text message.
Similar to other apps, push notifications to help to remind customers to access loyalty apps. They help spread the message from the business to the customer. The content of push notifications often includes promotions, shopping suggestions, shopping cart reminders, etc.
Although the push notification feature brings many benefits to enterprise loyalty applications, this feature should not be overused, as customers may consider it spam and disable the feature or even remove the app. In addition, the content on push notifications also needs to be engaging; interesting, “trending” content will encourage customers to visit more frequently.
6. Purchase history, points accumulation, and spending list
This feature is useful for both businesses and customers. Thanks to this feature, customers can easily check and compare transaction histories. As for the business side, they can understand the shopping habits of customers and, from there, build highly personalized campaigns and ads. (For example, what products to advertise and at what time…)
For supermarkets and retail chains, spending lists are an extremely handy feature. Just like purchase history, the spending category feature helps businesses recommend related products to customers.
7. Loyalty App integrates game features
According to Colloquy’s 2017 Loyalty Survey Report, only about 46% of regular customers are active, and the remaining 54% are almost inactive. Because of today’s fierce competition, businesses need to update special programs to attract customers.
Games are a suitable choice because entertainment through games is an extremely popular way to have fun. The game feature in the loyalty app introduces new offers or features to customers. Customers who play games on the app spend more time on the app and return more frequently. Thereby increasing the ability of customers to buy.
8. Analysis feature
This is not a feature that affects the user experience, but it is an important feature for administrators. Businesses need to understand how their application is performing and how users are using it. Based on that information and data, managers can plan strategies to attract and retain customers.
9. Self-service customer portal
Apart from development efforts, running reward programs requires operational help from customer agents. Somebody has to answer dozens of customer questions related to terms of conditions and rewards. To reduce the load of this task, your rewards system should provide customers with an easy way to monitor their performance and redeem rewards. A customer portal, or a digital wallet, integrated with your online shop or app, where the customers see their progress and previous rewards, is a smart solution. Because there’s a high chance people will be visiting it often, marketers can use this space to advertise other, relevant offers.
10. Scalability and maintenance
The beginnings are always the hardest, but in the context of a loyalty program, the opposite is usually true. The launch is the easiest part, followed by a tidal wave of requests, questions, inevitably complaints, and support tickets. Manual redemption and addition of points or withdrawal of a batch of coupons or points is yet another pain in the neck for your customer support agents.
There are several features of a good customer loyalty program that can help you to shoulder the burden:
Transparent authorization workflow and user access for quick program adaptation.
Audit logs for data integrity and insight into customer/user activities.
Single customer view for enhanced personalization and support.
Customer cockpits with points/rewards displayed to take the heat off customer support agents.
In addition, Loyalty app also integrates other additional features, such as maps and navigation. This feature helps to display store branches, thereby helping customers find you more easily. To increase user efficiency, you can send push notifications to customers when they notice customers near your store.
Loyalty apps are becoming more and more important in the battle for market share. Surely, through the information that Twendee has provided above, readers have also grasped the indispensable features of loyalty applications. I hope this article was useful to you.
>> Tween Chain – The first loyalty platform based on Web3 & Blockchain
loyaltyloyalty app
What do you think?