Ideas to Socialize Your Loyalty Program

Are you concerned about customers loyalty?

Are you considering to implement a loyalty program?

A loyalty program isn’t just about rewarding customers. It’s a great way to get to know your closest consumers and a great initiative to encourage a constant interaction with clients. It should be part of the overall communications cycle between your brand and the consumer.

Marketers very well know that the cost of new customer acquisition is significantly higher than the cost of customer retention—up to 7x more 

Loyalty programs are ongoing campaigns that use rewards to create repetitive behavior among your customers. Participants take actions on a regular basis, and the addition of those actions is what benefits the company and the loyal audience.

Since user actions must be easy and achievable, it’s better to provide small rewards on an ongoing basis rather than just one big prize for an action that only a few can complete.

Marketers are convinced that social media is a perfect environment to carry out loyalty programs. Social media in themselves, encourage many of the kinds of behaviors that loyalty programs have sought to drive for years. What with “like” buttons on Facebook, and a strong focus on responding to customer service problems, social media marketing might even be viewed as some kind of next generation of loyalty program evolution.

Here are four easy ways to integrate social media into your brand’s loyalty program (by Michela Baxter Loyalty Director HelloWorld)

1-Increase Program Awareness with Social Sharing

The ability for consumers to share content across channels makes social media capabilities a natural extension to loyalty programs for advocacy and increasing brand awareness. As such, building social sharing into your program's design makes it easy for loyal consumers to act as megaphones for your brand. You'll extend your brand's reach across social networks with messages that can be personalized by consumers, serving as a powerful third-party endorsement.

Adding Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and other social-sharing buttons to your Web site can help encourage social engagement. But don't include every network. Focus on the platforms where your brand has a meaningful audience and support, and enable shares of content worth talking about, such as videos, promotions, and reward items. Providing incentives (points, sweepstakes entries, or exclusive benefits) will increase the likelihood of sharing. Just be sure the value of the incentive matches the scale of the sharing ask to ensure participation.

2-Drive Cross-Channel Interaction with Social Actions

Having consumers interact with your brand across multiple channels is a sign of deep brand engagement. If you want to increase cross-channel communications with consumers, try incenting them with a points system.

A simple way to create a points-based engagement campaign is by having consumers enter secret words found on social channels. These words can be found in images or posts and encourage consumers to visit and explore your page, boards, or feed to uncover them. A weekly or monthly cadence can drive visit frequency and indirectly encourage page or account follows while complying with social channels' terms of service. Then, these rewards points can be added into a rewards system on your brand’s Web site.

3-Generate Authentic Content with a Program Overlay

Whether it's a tweet, a Pinterest board, or a Vine video, incorporating user generated content (UGC) into your loyalty program will let your consumers tap into their creativity to express themselves and create authentic content for you. And because the content is personal, it is inherently more sharable by your consumers and other fans and followers. Introducing UGC into loyalty programs is a great way to engage your members, boost a social channel's following, and test and learn.

Generating sharable content through Pinterest is a great solution for home, fashion, beauty, travel, and food brands that want to connect with young and affluent female consumers. For example, Belk wanted to educate bridal consumers about its wedding registry and acquire data for remarketing purposes. It used its presence on Pinterest for a "Share Your Wedding Style" sweepstakes that encouraged brides-to-be to pin their favorite bridal style images for a chance to win a $5,000 Belk gift card.

4-Gain Insights with Facebook Login

CPG, electronics, and other brands that don't directly own the relationship with consumers face the daily challenge of identifying and understanding their consumers. Building Facebook login into your loyalty program's registration can help answer questions about who your consumers are and what they like beyond your brand. Through data analysis, you can gain permission-based account information and generate consumer insights beyond the brand page data that Facebook provides.

DALMASTRO is an award winning multi-cultural advertising agency and video production company, specializing in SEO, branding, digital content marketing, social media management, graphic design and web development. If you are thinking about implementing a social media integration with your loyalty program, we can help you develop and  execute a well-rounded loyalty program that will generate engagement throughout the cycle of communications with your customers.