As an ecommerce business owner or marketer, you would already know that it is very costly exercise to acquire new customers to your website. In spite of knowing this, many ecommerce businesses neglect the importance of retaining these customers and make them loyal to their business.
If you are not rewarding your repeat customers to build loyalty, you are making the mistake. Great sites reward their repeat customers and they have some mechanism in place.
Based on years of experience working with ecommerce marketers, I have put together simple tips for to set up loyalty points for your business.
Tip 1: Set up a points based loyalty system on your ecommerce website
First step in rewarding your customers will require an efficient system with your ecommerce website. You need to set up loyalty program that will allow you to set up point based loyalty configuration based on your business and its offering.
A point based loyalty program allows your repeat visitors to earn points based on their actions. Make it very simple. For example, every dollar spent on the site earns 1 loyalty point. When you earn 2500 points, you earn $25 gift voucher.
My Recommendation: Don’t make it hard for your customer to figure out the value of their points. Make your points easy to convert like 1 point is worth $1 or 10 points is worth $1 or 100 points is worth $1. Don’t make it 37 points is worth one dollar.
Tip 2: Allow to earn points on All purchases
I have worked with many sites in the past and I learned that allowing points on the specific products and categories discourages users to leave the site or make them hesitant to buy products without loyalty points.
You must make sure to have clear messages on your ecommerce store informing shoppers they will earn points with their purchase.
Tip 3: Make Points Valuable and Worth Earning
While this may seem like a no-brainer, make sure your Loyalty program is actually valuable. If your program has a lot of restrictions on how points can be used or redeemed, you’ll greatly limit participation. Be careful that you do not require very high thresholds and spending behaviour just to earn points. If it feels unreachable, then it’s not valuable.
Tip 4: Give Points for Actions not Just Purchasing
For the courageous and marketing minded, you can issue points to customers who are completing specific actions like sharing on Facebook or sharing your links on Twitter. Or maybe you award points for customers who review your products or comment on your blog posts. This can be the centre of a community building marketing push or just an ongoing promotion for your ecommerce site.
Tip 5: Show progress and send reminders
One of the best ways to motivate behaviour is to create a sense of progress. If a user can win new levels of rewards, they are much more likely to make an attempt to do so.
The best way to go about this is to send reminders to user that by earning 50 more points, they could buy $50 gift voucher. Your system should support this mechanism and you have to design the whole program very carefully.
Conclusion:
There’s no rule-written or unwritten-that demands that ecommerce retailers create a loyalty program.
But it sure is smart. Loyalty programs are proven to increase conversions. As conversion optimisers, we spend much of our time creating smaller improvements to produce higher in conversion.
