Your participants (customers, end users, members, consumers, or respondents) are looking for perks—an extra benefit for staying with you. Put simply, your participants’ benefits can make all the difference in the success of your organization. If you want to acquire, retain and engage your participants, you must offer value-added benefits that are relevant. You need to offer real value so they welcome your continued contact. Our team encourages thinking beyond demographics and includes attributes such as interests, lifestyles, and life stages. Innovation, differentiation, relevance and making an emotional connection with your participants are essential to program requirements to help your loyalty program stand apart in a crowded market.
Loyalty is a composite of a number of qualities. It is driven by participant satisfaction and involves a determination by the participant to make a sustained investment. It is reflected by a willingness to recommend the organization to others and a commitment to the organization demonstrated by a resistance to switching. (Prus and Randall, 1995). Participants, at different stages of loyalty, will demand differentiated intangible offerings such as the level of service (Palmer et al., 2000; Knox and Walker, 2001; Rowley, 2005). It is an accepted fact that loyalty is a function of the interaction between expectations and actual experience (Dahlsten (2003). Participants react most positively to three loyalty program qualities:
Simplicity, Transparency, Trust
The people who’ve tried to define loyalty have usually approached it from one of two different directions – attitudinal and behavioral. Although each of these directions is valid, they have different implications and lead to very different prescriptions for businesses. The attitudinal definition of loyalty implies that loyalty is a state of mind. By this definition, a participant is “loyal” to a brand or an organization if they have a positive, preferential attitude toward it. In terms of attitudes, increasing a participant’s loyalty is virtually equivalent to increasing the participant’s preference. It is closely tied to satisfaction, and any organization wanting to increase loyalty, in attitudinal terms, will concentrate on improving its product, its image, or other elements of the participants’ experience. The behavioral definition of loyalty, on the other hand, relies on a participant’s actual conduct, regardless of the attitudes or preferences that underlie that conduct.
In building participant affinity, royal equals loyal. We strive to create programs that deliver the VIP treatment. Loyalty is an emotional reaction and making participants feel special is highly correlated to achieving loyalty.
Loyalty program participants may have a much higher share-of-wallet at the firm with the loyalty program than non-participants have. Loyal participants may select themselves to become participants in order to benefit from the program. Participants generally like the idea of being loyal to successful brands or organizations, but much depends on how value is delivered and attained. Be careful, loyalty initiative should be seen as a bonus and not seen as bribery. Loyalty programs are more about gaining participant insights than offering discounts or granting rewards.
We work with your organization to personalize relevant content to targeted groups which then generates higher engagement, conversions, and yields. We understand what’s needed to delight participants and deliver relevant, personalized and contextual communications and offers at just the right time. We also invite participant feedback – soliciting and analyzing feedback is crucial if you want to continue to deliver great results. The most strategic and successful loyalty programs look beyond simple points and redemption practices and instead design a system which offers participants a wide variety of options and incentives which permit the collect useful data about preferences, interests, motivations, lifestyles and purchase choices.
Omni-channel communication now represents the biggest upside. Permitting loyalty participants to update their accounts or enabling organizations to deliver consistent information such as earned points, offers/incentives or redemption processing across channels which include the website, chat, e-commerce, contact center, mobile, social networks, email, direct mail, newsletters, statements, events, in-store kiosks, and POS can seem like a daunting technical challenge, but it is not. Our technology department has worked to provide these channels with seamless integration. Our dedicated team manages the platform development, all of the logistics, the user interface, the procurement, the customer services, the account management, and the point balance thus allowing you to focus on your business and other marketing activities.
Please contact All Digital Rewards now to learn all we have available for you to create that bond with your participants.
