It can be more expensive for your business to try and find new customers than to keep the ones you have, so it makes sense to have a strong customer retention strategy. Loyalty programs are one tool that can help to keep customers from straying to your competitors.

They can be a good way of keeping already loyal customers onside and hopefully convincing those that aren’t so committed, to change their minds.

Here’s our advice for building your own loyalty program:

Plan

Think about what your company wants to get from the program (aside from customer retention). Do you want more testimonials? To nurture brand advocates? etc. Define your goals.

Research what your customer wants too. Look at market trends, consumer satisfaction surveys and complaints etc.

Look at what your competitors are doing? Can you improve on their model? Or offer something different?

Econsultancy recommend using the acronym KISS when designing your loyalty program: Keep It Super Simple, so that customers can easily understand and use the system.

Choose your Incentives

There are a number of different systems you can use to reward your customers, from point-based to tiered.

You can offer more than one type of incentive.

You want to offer an incentive that makes it worth committing to you. But at the same time, you do not want to devalue your products. Square found that “customers have greater satisfaction and are more likely to continue engaging with a loyalty program if the reward is worth at least 50 percent of your average ticket value, and 10 percent of what they spent to earn the reward.”

Spread the Word

Make sure that customers are aware of your program. There are a number of ways to do this: including advertising offline and online, using your social media accounts, email marketing, promoting it with receipts, etc.

Live Chat and Your Loyalty Program

Live chat software can help to make your loyalty program a success:

• You can start proactive conversations to tell users about your program or bring it up during conversations initiated by them.
• Analytics, metrics and post chat-surveys can help you to plan your program and measure its progress when implementing it.

Make Them All Feel Like Kings and Queens

Loyalty programs can be a great addition to your customer retention strategy, helping to increase consumer satisfaction and hopefully reduce churn rate. Live chat can work well alongside them, adding to their effectiveness. A quality live support software such as Xeno makes this process easy with chat history so that you can track trends, a wealth of analytics and simple to build pre-chat surveys.