Key Benefits of a Simple Digital Customer Loyalty Platform
Digital loyalty programs allow businesses to have greater insights with their customers, helping to create strategies to suit each customer, whilst customers are enjoying their rewards.
For the businesses
Loyalty programs have been widely used for at least the last three decades and all successful businesses are aware that it is a vital way to reach more customers and encourage them to visit with them more often.
The global loyalty management market was valued at $1,931 million in 2016, and is expected to reach $6,955 million by 2023. The reason why companies spend money on their loyalty programs is that they know that by increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
Clearly businesses need loyalty programs to grow and increase their revenues. However, the most important question is: how?
Paper Loyalty Cards
Paper loyalty cards have been popular with customers and businesses for decades. However, there are several flaws for both sides of the relationship that prevent them from reaching their potential:
1. Customers tend to lose or damage the cards, before they can ever redeem the rewards which make them fairly pointless for consumers and businesses alike.
2. Businesses found it difficult to make use of the treasure trove of information about their customer’s habits that the cards offered.
3. Paper loyalty cards aren’t linked to a specific person, so they can be passed around.
4. They have a negative impact on the environment.
Own Brand Apps
Creating an app is not an easy process: it costs money (Anything from $800 - 270,000$) and can require heavy resource overhead to reach true effectiveness.
Afterward, the business needs to employ marketing efforts to ensure that their consumers actually download the app. However, this is usually quite difficult, as users tend to prefer `all in one` apps.
Research suggests that well executed own brand apps only yield (on average) circa 6% total customer uptake...Resulting in capturing a very small cohort of existing customers who were likely to visit anyway!
Complex Tech
A short time ago, customers and businesses were forced to use barcodes and QR codes. However they caused long queues, slow ordering processes and discouraged customers from making purchases, which is anathema to how a loyalty card scheme should work. It must be simple, useful and fundamentally beneficial.
For the Customers
The relationship between businesses and their customers has always been based upon mutual benefit. In the past, this may have been ever so slightly weighted in favour of businesses, because the amount of choice that consumers had was limited by a host of different factors, such as geography. However, things such as globalisation and digitalisation have dramatically increased the breadth of choice that consumers have, meaning that businesses have to work incredibly hard to keep their customers.
What the businesses can do for their loyal customers:
1. Instead of paper loyalty cards that are easily lost or damaged, businesses have to provide a digital, user-friendly loyalty platform which guarantees that customers will never lose their hard earned rewards.
2. Humans are conservative by nature: we don’t like change for the sake of change, so they should have a method that everyone is already familiar with.
3. It must be a system that allows customers to see all their favourite shops in one app.
For the World
Sustainable & Responsible
We are a generation that cares far more about sustainability than the ones who came before us. Every business needs to keep this in mind and ensure that they do their utmost to care for the environment, help to reduce consumption and keep it as low as possible.
Paper consumption is one of the biggest issues that we face in 2020 and beyond, as the amount of paper we consume has reached 25.03 million tonnes in 2019, meaning that around 2.000.000.000 trees are cut down annually!
Obviously, paper loyalty cards are not the only thing that is responsible for these massive numbers, yet we should do everything that we can to reduce our impact on the environment and switching from paper loyalty cards to digital will definitely help.
