Loyalty programs can prompt meritorious financial results via guest engagement and creation of astounding incentives to embolden more frequent clients and increased spending. Every triumphant loyalty program begins with a robust foundation of effective enrollment. This is the cornerstone element that fuels growth and initiates a steady stream of profitable long-term results.

Setting up a credible loyalty program is essential and a proper strategy to continually acquire new guests is equally important. Unfortunately, many online businesses disregard the importance of managing the foundational elements hence make their loyalty program to languish.

A good loyalty program should be able to build a significant amount of loyal customers who visit frequently and spend higher amounts than the occasional guest. According to statistics, a top performing loyalty program has a customer base that generates approximately 25% to 30% of all the customers’ checkouts.  Reaching such a level is a truly daunting task, it demands constant attention on building a membership base. You must adopt a multifaceted strategy to beat competitors and sustain a proper membership growth.

For this reason, we have compiled a set of laudable options that will help you encourage more clients to enrol into your loyalty program. On average a customer enrols into 13.7 loyalty programs, but only remain active in 6.7 of the programs. So how do you ensure your program remain in the positive echelon?

CREATE A SIMPLE AND MEANINGFUL LOYALTY PROGRAM

Customers are known to be very rigid with their habits. For this reason, it will be in your best interest to come up with a program that will marry the existing behavioural pattern of the customers. Make the enrollment process as simple as possible. In most cases, customers run away from complex systems. Most of them are on the go and have little time to enrol. Some customers hate complex process so much that they prefer forfeiting their rewards in a bid to avoid the tedious enrollment tasks.

Remember enrollment is an impulse decision for your clients and you have a brief instant to impress. Let your program answer the question “why should I join?” in a flash, come up with a wow elevator pitch and make use of a catchy name to energize your slogan and reinforce the key benefits of the program. Make it easy for your client to easily articulate, understand, and readily remember all the benefits.

Explaining your loyalty program on the website will make customer get a better understanding. Give a vivid impression of what the customer will earn. Whenever they spend and how they will redeem the loyalty points. Develop an explainer page and explain all the values of the loyalty program and all the benefits the customer will derive from the initiative.

BE TRANSPARENT

Studies have shown that an easily understood loyalty program records a higher level of participation. According to one study by Colloquv Loyalty, an astonishing 81% of those interviewed said a simple loyalty program motivates them to continue participating. So how do you make a bigger percentage of your customers to participate?

One way of achieving credibility and simplicity is making your program as transparent as possible. Let all the members know virtually everything they should to actively participate. This entails making all details about earning and spending points clear enough and easily accessible.

PROPER CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENTS

The simplicity of your program should also be reflected in the registration process. The signage for your program should be well placed to excite, inform, and stimulate actions. Leverage all guest interactions points to relay a simple, consistent message so as to encourage more guest to join. If the signage is used appropriately for you concept it will capture the attention of many guests.

Moreover, your program should only collect only the relevant information about the guests. For example, if your program utilizes phone number as the customer ID, it means all you require is the name and the phone number. Including irrelevant details will make the enrollment process long and complex.

PAMPER YOUR CUSTOMERS

A good program will make all member feel they belong to a class of special people. Making all members feel their opportunities are equal to those of other shoppers, will allow them to continue participating. Once you members enjoy the loyalty program, it will be the best chance to turn their enthusiasm into advocacy. Their genuine fondness will be a potent influence on other customers to enrol into your loyalty program. At this point, you can ask them to refer friends, and even reward them for their actions.

Additionally, provide reasonable returns to all the participants if you want them to spend reasonably. The best way of engaging new members is keeping the hurdle to the initial reward low. This will make it attainable for all guest and build excitement about your program.

Another, fascinating trick to make more guest enrol is incorporating a welcome incentive for your guests. Set up a welcome promotion that will be emailed or texted to all new members, so as to gain a credible basis to impress guests and make them enrol. Making this promotion fast, easy, valuable, and highly effective will enormously increase the number of guests participating in your loyalty program.

Moreover, you should remember we are living in a digital world and things are changing very fast. For this reason, you need to come up with lots of ways through which members can earn points. The reason customers enrol in many loyalty programs and only remain active in few of them is that they quickly get tired of earning points through purchases. They want a program that will present a bunch of creative options to earn points.

RUN CASHIER AND SERVER CONTESTS

This will be a magnificent strategy especially if you perform in store enrolments. Create a competition for your staff and place a precious reward for the person who registers most new members. These contest should be conducted quarterly or bi-annually so as to make it more fun and provide a regular boost to your enrollment process.

EMPLOY PROPER MARKETING

Although massive advertisement is effective, you should employ other techniques to constantly remind consumers about the loyalty program. Use all assets at your disposal including checkout process, website, and product page to keep your program at the top of your customers’ agenda. If new guests understand the value of the loyalty program, constant prompting will end up increasing the enrollment rate of your program. In the modern world, you do not have to employ a cashier to request everyone who checks out to enrol. Be creative enough and employ reminders all over your websites. If you find a room to mention your loyalty program on the homepage, do it. This will give you an edge over your competitors. It might be the key to an increased rate of enrollment.

Typically, if most new guests feel appreciated, they will feel obliged to subscribe to the email list so as to receive next promotions and latest brand news. Once they leave their email, the next step will be persuading them to be members of your loyalty program. In most cases, email is an important channel of communicating the value proposition of your loyalty program.

Another intriguing marketing strategy is incorporating social media into your program. When you promote your loyalty program on your consumers’ favourite social media platform you boost its presence and reach thereby encouraging participation. It gives you an opportunity to create conversations with the customers and better your enrollment rate.

You can also create a blog for your loyalty program. Although blogs are used for many other reasons, they can be an important channel to promote your program and encourage enrollments. A blog will give you the freedom to explain your program and demonstrate its value to customers.

PERFORM ANALYSIS

Despite the strategy used to encourage enrollment, it’s imperative that you conduct an analysis of your sources of enrollments. Understand all your tactics and determine those that result in better enrollment rates. Take your time and resource to track all participant with surveys to determine what works best and what doesn’t. Some of the best ways of measuring the success of the loyalty program include; repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value, and the net promoter score. You can also gauge success using the redemption rate which gives a ratio of issued points and those that are converted. If your program is good enough, many members will participate and spend their loyalty points.

This will be important to help you tailor your loyalty program to meet the need of your customers. Surveys, give you a deep insight into the success of your loyalty program making it easier to focus your budget and energy on things that bring desirable results.

CONCLUSION

The above tactics will help you increase the enrollment rate of your loyalty program. However, it should be noted that when enrollment rate of a program is put in a balance there is no silver bullet to guarantee immediate success. For this reason, you will have to apply different strategies before finding the one that will work best for your program. In most cases, a combination of tactics is all it takes to record any conspicuous growth in enrollment.