Email and loyalty programs are two peas in a pod. The main venue of communication for most loyalty programs revolves around email, with increasing focus on social and mobile channels. When you take your email to the next level and use marketing automation to increase personalization, you increase the overall effectiveness of your loyalty email and reach customers in more meaningful ways. As you get started with marketing automation in your loyalty program, we’ve explored three marketing automation scenarios that can increase the relevancy of your marketing efforts.
1. Loyalty Program Welcome Email
A new customer should get at least one, if not a series, of emails to welcome them to the loyalty program. This is the very first active communication the user receives from the company and it should set the pace for what is to come in tone and relevance. So many companies shy away from a strong orientation, and it is likely the time when your customer is feeling best about your product or service.
2. Loyalty Program Activity Email
When a customer engages in the program and receives progress towards the reward, an email messages can be delivered to further engage the user and express appreciation and state progress towards the goals of your program. We do not recommend you do this for every transaction if you have a high transaction business. Rather, do this weekly or bi-weekly based on your open rate tests.
3. Cross Promotional Emails
Loyalty engagement is an invitation to bring your customers to new levels of growth. Take the opportunity to engage in cross promotional activities and further resolve customer purchase habits. Expose new brands, drive related content, and use the platform you have to engage!
4. “Where Are You?” Email
From time to time your loyal customer will not demonstrate loyal behaviors. When that happens, it is best to engage slowly with soft messaging to stimulate dialog with the customer. For example, if you have not seen a record of a customer in 30 days, send a reminder of the products or services they use most at your company. After 60 days, be more direct in noticing that they have not shopped in a while. After 75 days, you can step up with even more direct customer survey attempts, and messaging to reengage. Be sure to look at a wide spectrum of engagement metrics for email, so you are not just basing your assumption off of purchase rate. If the customer is opening and clicking on your email, there might be something else going on that does not require a barrage of “where are you?” emails.
Marketing automation for loyalty programs can be a great way to explore marketing automation, and create real value for your customer loyalty program. Need help picking a platform or getting started? Don’t hesitate to call New North, to help with your loyalty program!
