10 Personalization Benefits Every Loyalty Program Needs | Blings.io
Yosef | Dec 3, 2024
Yosef | Dec 3, 2024
Loyalty programs are like sending out “thank you” cards after someone takes you out to dinner—on a much bigger scale. Providing recognition and rewards to your customers after purchase has proven benefits, but not all programs deliver to their full potential. To get the most out of a loyalty program, you need it to meet each customer’s unique needs and interests, which you can achieve through personalization.
While the average consumer is a member of more than sixteen loyalty programs, they’re only active in just over half of them. A loyalty program that doesn’t keep your customers active and engaged isn’t delivering benefits for your customers or your business.
Personalized communications, deals, and rewards show customers that your loyalty program is a sincere effort to meet their highest expectations. With the right personalization benefits, this strategy can open up new opportunities for engagement, enhance your brand image, and result in greater customer lifetime values.
Why Loyalty Programs Need Personalization
65% of a company’s revenue comes from repeat business. Getting extra leads and sales is a huge motivator for businesses, but a successful loyalty program is a major piece of the customer retention puzzle. There are other reasons why personalized loyalty programs are so valuable:
Engagement
Personalization ensures that your loyalty program is serving content and promotions that appeal to each customer’s interests. If customers aren’t getting what they want out of your program they’ll disengage and stop opening messages or logging in. Personalization demonstrates that you understand their needs and gives them a good reason to click.
Retention
Customers who engage with your loyalty program stay connected to your company and are encouraged to make additional purchases. Personalization increases engagement and demonstrates that you really understand your audience. It also makes it harder for competitors to lure customers away and leads to higher retention rates and customer lifetime value (CLV)..
Satisfaction
Enjoyable experiences, relevant content, and good deals make for happy customers. In addition to covering those areas, personalized offers can allow you to address specific feedback or requests you’ve received, which can really make a customer feel heard and valued.
Data Collection
By increasing engagement with your loyalty program and prompting additional purchases, personalization can help you gather more (and better) data about your customers and their behaviors. In turn, it can support even more insightful personalization efforts.
3 Challenges of Personalizing Your Loyalty Program
1. Scaling
Traditionally, producing personalized content goes something like this:
You take unique customer data.
Integrate it with the main content.
Publish it in some distributable format.
Present it to the customer at the right time to get them to engage with it.
Not all personalization solutions will have the capacity to perform these functions for the customer bases maintained by large-scale enterprises. Enterprise customers with millions of end users may believe it’s impossible to launch and distribute personalized campaigns on such a scale.
2. Real-Time Data
Putting your personalized content in front of customers can be tricky. If you wait for them to log into your app or website and discover it on their own, the content might no longer be relevant. Pushing it can work, but only if you pick the right channels and the right approach. Plus, you need to ensure that the content maintains its quality when it lands in the customer’s inbox—for example, if you send a video, will it look blurry when the user watches it?
3. Engagement
The way to engage users is through dynamic, relevant content that reflects their interests and answers their questions. High-quality data is essential for making personalized content optimally engaging; personalization that uses inaccurate or outdated data can be off-putting to customers. Therefore, you need to seek out a personalization solution that works in real time.
Every Challenge Has a Solution
When it comes to personalizing any content—especially non-static formats like video—scalability and distribution can be major headaches for businesses looking to enhance their loyalty programs. Although some video personalization options still face roadblocks with scalability, data security, and even personalization options, Blings AI-driven solution enables you to automate video marketing for loyalty programs at scale in a way that many alternatives simply can’t.
Using a single video template, you can create a video tailored to each user (personalized using product or user data) and distribute it at any scale. The Blings template is super lightweight, enabling instant loading time for the entire video, including interactive elements like CTA buttons and quizzes.
For example, you could send the user a personalized SMS reminding them to use loyalty points before the expiration date. When the user clicks a link in the SMS, they’ll be directed to a tailored video personalized with their name and most-purchased products, plus an enticing CTA encouraging them to redeem their points. It’s personalized video marketing that will make your loyalty program memorable and engaging.
10 Personalization Benefits Every Loyalty Program Needs
1. Onboarding
When a customer enrolls in your loyalty program, you can start things on a positive note and spur engagement by providing onboarding resources. Personalizing your onboarding content will hold the customer’s attention better, helping them absorb the information about how to take advantage of your loyalty program.
Video is a highly effective way of conveying instructions—especially if you’re teaching customers how to use a loyalty app—and personalized video is often the optimal content format for onboarding.
2. Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization includes using advanced, often AI-powered data analytics to personalize real-time content. Customer behavior and browsing conditions (both digital and real-world) are typical factors in hyper-personalization. Pulling this off requires live data monitoring and powerful software solutions, but it can be just the thing to deliver the right message at the right moment to drive a purchase.
Gamifying your loyalty program by awarding customers points for carrying out certain tasks or meeting goals or benchmarks encourages customers to have positive and fun interactions with your brand. Personalizing your communications related to gamified features can entice users to try them out.
4. Personalized Ways to Earn Rewards
Don’t tie rewards to purchases that some customers may never make. Tailor them the user’s favorite products to ensure your loyalty program is doing everything it can todrive sales. Using intent data, you can adjust reward amounts to nudge customers toward completing purchases they were already considering.
If you’ve implemented gamification features, you can personalize the point-awarding activities on whatever the customer is most likely to engage with based on their data and purchase history.
5. Personalized Offers and Rewards
When it comes to special offers and rewards, there’s no reason to offer a fixed menu to your entire customer base when you can leverage your data to provide unique loyalty benefits to everyone.
You can also ask customers for feedback on what benefits they want or let them customize their own. Although, remember that too many options can be detrimental to the customer experience. Still, you can use real-time personalization to adjust the degree of customization offered to users according to the preferences inferred from their behavior.
It should be easy for customers to see where they stand in your loyalty program. A hub or dashboard in your app can give customers an overview of their point totals, active offers, and other benefits. A great way to use personalized content here is to connect the dots between important or time-sensitive information. For example, if a reward that they might be interested in is expiring soon and they have enough points to redeem it, the dashboard could convey this in a short message or video.
7. Loyalty Tiers
Most customers will eventually settle for some consistent frequency of engagement with your loyalty program, and some will always be more active than others. There can be good reasons to create separate tiers for customers at different levels of participation: it is easier to segment offers based on how much interest customers are showing, and it incentivizes purchases and interactions with the possibility of tier-level advancement and the enhanced benefits that come with it.
8. Great Recommendations
Retailers have been offering recommendations based on purchase history for a long time, but AI technology has opened up many possibilities for innovative and exciting new ways to help customers discover new products. Data-driven personalization makes recommendations even more relevant, and presenting them through engaging loyalty program content can boost their chances of driving sales.
9. Personalized Video
Video is the preferred content format for the majority of consumers, and personalizing it can be one of the most effective ways to encourage them to click and watch. Although creating high-quality personalized video has historically been too time-consuming and expensive to scale, solutions like Blings have introduced new advances in AI and patented MP5 technology.
Using Blings, you can create an infinitely scalable, hyper-personalized video in real-time. This means you can utilize video personalization as much as needed to build awareness and interest in various features of your loyalty program.
An excellent way to remind customers of the value your loyalty program provides is to show them periodic recaps of the rewards, offers, and other benefits they’ve claimed. You can personalize these recaps to help them recall their most positive customer experiences and draw their attention to other benefits that they might have overlooked.
The Right Solution to Create Engaging Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs have the potential to strengthen customer relationships and increase sales, but getting customers to adopt them isn’t easy. While personalization can make these programs more welcoming and engaging, it brings many challenges of its own, and video—the most engaging content media—has been notoriously expensive and difficult to personalize.
The right solution can help you overcome these challenges, and Blings does this by automating and scaling the production of high-quality personalized videos that can include unique CTA buttons and other interactive elements. Through a compact but high-resolution patented MP5 format, Blings videos can easily be sent across all of your customers’ favorite distribution channels.
Schedule a demo to see how hyper-personalized video can turn your loyalty program into a hit with customers.
