KISS: The Key to Successfully Launching Your Loyalty Program

Investing in customer loyalty has been proven repeatedly to drive return on investment for businesses of all shapes and sizes. But with an abundance of options available to you, where should you start deciding on your business’s loyalty system? 

Your customers

Loyalty programs can be immensely complex data-intensive behemoths. Still, while there is a lot of complex functionality available to you, it should always remain straightforward to explain the core value. Simple enough for an existing loyal customer to explain to another potential loyal customer in a few casual words.

Examples include:

1. You should pick up a loyalty card for Mary’s Coffee; you get a 9^th coffee free.
2. If you download their app, you get 10% back in credit on every purchase.
3. If you go there regularly like us, they add you to the VIP list for extra treats.

As a business, your loyalty program is a way to build relationships with and understand your customers. For customers, it’s about what it does for them, so this should be very simple to explain and understand.

At LoyLap, we call this concept the base loyalty system, the foundation for building your program. From here, a loyalty system could gain multitudes of complexity, but for customers who now understand your program’s core value, the message they will communicate to friends and family is that your loyalty system is worth using.

Your team

One of the best ways to get the word out to customers about your program is through your team. They are your loyalty program ambassadors and will be one of the biggest drivers of customers signing up. To convincingly discuss the loyalty program with customers, your team needs: 

• to understand how it works
• to have clear key messages to use
• to be able to answer customer questions

While customer interactions for many businesses may be frequent, they are often short. Meaning communicating the value of your program, just like for customers explaining to one another, needs to be possible for your team within a few words. When introducing a new program, this will be much easier and more effective if you start simply.

Your marketing communications

There are, of course, many other ways to promote your loyalty program beyond your team. However, with an ever-shrinking consumer attention span, it’s crucial to be able to communicate your program’s value at a glance. From an instore poster to your point of sale display, from a social media post to an email, you have only a matter of seconds to get your message across. When your message is simple, this is easier to do.

KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid)

So KISS – start simple and add to your loyalty system as your team and customers become familiar with the base loyalty system and start yearning for more.