Implementing a good rewards program can help you build better customer engagement and improve the purchasing experience. Your Shopify loyalty program is a great tool for creating recurring revenue for your business. This article will explore how a customer loyalty plan can provide long-term value in Shopify stores.
What is the significance of customer loyalty?
If you landed here, it's likely because you have been toying with the idea of creating a strategic customer loyalty program for your wellness brand on Shopify.
I have a question for you: Do you want customers who run to your business because they trust and value what you offer? Or do you prefer ones that come only when they get discounts through a third-party app? If your intention is the former, then it’s high time that we take a considerate approach to create customer loyalty.
Instead of merely providing discounts as an incentive for purchasing from us, let us think about building community with customers to nurture lasting relationships and make our brand win over their hearts forever. In this article, we'll review how loyalty program strategies can help create community-hungry repeat customers instead of discount-hungry ones!
In this article we will review how leaning into Loyalty, intelligent promotion funnels and using discounts only as a secondary tactic can help increase customer engagement and lead to better repeat purchases than just offering subscriptions alone. Plus how a real client of ours has implemented loyalty into their customer acquisition to help you realize the potential.
First, why start a loyalty program for your Shopify Store?
As a brand - how are all your touch-points communicating the feeling you want to leave your customers with to keep them coming back? As a business, customer loyalty and retention are two essential elements. Companies need to keep their customers engaged and satisfied with their services so that they return while growing their audience touch-points across mediums to stay engaged long-term.
Can you build a loyalty program easily on Shopify?
Yes! There are many easy ways to incorporate a no-brainer loyalty program into your business. Specifically, designing loyalty programs with LoyaltyLion (our top recommended App partner) can help get your brand out of margin-chopping launch periods and sell out your next product launch or cash-flow campaign. The ability to add tiers, add custom earning rules, and integrate paid loyalty program beyond just a popup experience is crucial to integrating all critical customer touchpoints.
What is the overall strategy of loyalty programs?
A great loyalty programme provides customers incentives, such as points or rewards, for continued customer engagement. This helps increase customer satisfaction and commitment to the brand. Also, loyalty programmes can provide valuable data to help make informed decisions on better meeting customers' needs. They can also tailor marketing messages and promotions to each customer segment. Finally, they offer an additional cost-saving measure as discounts in exchange for points accumulated through purchases help reduce loyalty program members' overall costs in perception. It's important to note the use of the word perception, because we know that loyalty members tend to spend morewith your brand overall than non-members (and we'll show you receipts to prove that in just a bit).
Plus there are so many ways you can leverage your loyalty program to bring fresh ideas to your campaigns that don’t hinge on hurting your bottom line by discounting products.
Loyalty Programs help you:
- Uncover what your brand stands for and how to express it through all customer touchpoints post-purchase
- Create a system that aligns with your business goals and helps customers feel the impact of their purchase long-term to reduce churn
- Understand who your customer is and what they need from you to feel fulfilled and become a repeat purchaser
- Bring your brand story to life in a way that resonates with customers and drives brand advocacy
- Create higher average order values for customers who redeem discounts more likely to add on more products to their purchase or engage with the brand to build their point redemption cache
Why your Shopify store can't thrive without a loyalty program
A loyalty program is essential for any Shopify store to ensure its long-term financial success - especially in 2023. By offering customers rewards and discounts for making multiple purchases, a loyalty program encourages customers to return to your store each time they shop. Furthermore, research has shown that customers who enroll in loyalty programs tend to spend more on each purchase than those who don’t. This increased spending can be attributed to the fact that customers are motivated by rewards and thus will be more likely to make repeat purchases in order to reach their goals. Additionally, implementing a loyalty program can help build long-term relationships with customers, encouraging them to remain loyal and engaged with your brand over time.
How do you attract customers to your loyalty program?
Abrandedloyalty program is an effective way for businesses to increase customer loyalty and capture more repeat sales. Having a strong, recognizable brand associated with your brand loyalty program can differentiate it from other programs in the marketplace and help customers remember it.
The brand design for Bare Biology's Flourish Rewards program in Loyalty Lion
Here are three points to consider when creating a branded loyalty program:
Perceived Value
When developing a loyalty program, creating cohesive and consistent visuals is essential for a brand to build brand equity with customers. Visuals such as logos, mottos, and colours can be used to consistently represent the concept of your loyalty program, making it easier for customers to recognize the brand and its association with the program. Furthermore, by creating attractive and engaging visuals, customers will develop an emotional connection to your loyalty program and become more likely to choose it over other programs. This can then lead to increased customer loyalty and more repeat purchases.
Cohesive and Consistent Visuals
Creating a cohesive and consistent visual for your loyalty program can help customers recognize your brand and strengthen their connection with it. This is because the visuals associated with a loyalty program – such as logos, colours, messages, etc. – create an emotional response and symbolize the brand itself. As customers are continually exposed to these visuals through your many mediums of promoting the loyalty program, they will develop a greater understanding of the brand’s identity and values and easy recall and recognition.
Better Brand Equity
In addition to this recognition factor, having a well-designed loyalty program can also help to boost brand equity. Brand equity refers to how much value customers place on a particular brand compared to its competitors. By providing customers with rewards that are specific to their loyalty program, businesses essentially demonstrate that they are rewarding them for their commitment. This ‘reward effect’ helps customers associate positive feelings towards the brand, leading to higher engagement and trust over time – resulting in increased brand equity.
Plus, having a loyalty program means you'll have a plethora of more first-party data to utilize.
What is First Party Data and How do Loyalty Programs help with it?
First-party data is the information a business collects from its customers through website visits, purchases, and loyalty programs. This data is highly valuable because it belongs to the business, meaning the company owns and controls all aspects of its use (compared to third-party data where you have bought and don't own it). Access to this first-party data allows businesses to gain deeper insights into customer interests and preferences to develop more effective and personalized marketing strategies. It also enables them to obtain more accurate predictions of consumer behaviours in order to target better offers and promotions and optimize their operational efficiency. Having first-party data can be advantageous for e-commerce businesses, as they can tailor their content, products, services, and experiences based on this rich source of information; allowing them to build trust with customers while driving revenue growth. Furthermore, having early access to first-party data helps them protect their brand reputation by ensuring that all communications are aligned with brand values.
Loyalty programs are the best first tactic to enable businesses to collect customer data related to their purchases which can be used for targeted marketing purposes; allowing them to understand customer preferences better and adjust their products/services accordingly. This further helps build deeper relationships between businesses and customers since brands continue to provide experiences tailored to individual needs, thus further strengthening the overall bond between them.
What is the best Loyalty App for Shopify?
Shopify Plus (Brands over $1MM)
As an e-commerce business owner, you are probably looking for the best loyalty app for your Shopify store. LoyaltyLion is our #1 recommendation for store owners. It is a comprehensive loyalty platform that works seamlessly with Shopify and Shopify Plus, allowing your customers to reap greater rewards for their purchases and actions.
LoyaltyLion is the perfect loyalty app for Shopify merchants, as it offers the most comprehensive and customizable features of paid loyalty reward programs available. With LoyaltyLion, business owners can easily create a customized rewards program that best suits their company’s unique goals.
Shopify and Shopify Advanced (Brands over $500k)
We recommend Rivo for their built exclusively for Shopify platform. Unlike LoyaltyLion, you are not locked into an Annual contract and you can add features as needed. There's also lots of triggers available in Shopify Flow, so if you want to make additional emails for customers, and landing pages there's a bit more play. However don't expect a white-glove onboarding approach like LoyaltyLion. This is a great option if you want an install and do-it-yourself approach.
Basic Shopify (Brands under $500k)
Yotpo rewards (free) and Smile.io are a great place to start. However you may notice you outgrow their capabilities or the tradeoffs of sitespeed and integration dysfunction become deal breakers as you scale.
How does LoyaltyLion compare to the competition?
Compared to other loyalty apps available on Shopify, LoyaltyLion stands out due to its ease of use, extensive customization options and detailed analytics and reporting capabilities. Unlike competitors who limit the number of reward levels or types of campaigns you can create within your loyalty program, LoyaltyLion gives you full control over your customer rewards structure to tailor them precisely to your needs. Additionally, their sophisticated real-time analytics allow business owners to track customer engagement in order to optimize their rewards program further. Overall, LoyaltyLion is the ideal choice of loyalty program tactics for Shopify merchants looking to increase customer lifetime value quickly and efficiently!
How does LoyaltyLion Works and why is it better?
LoyaltyLion is a loyalty platform that works with Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants, like Bare Biology, to increase customer lifetime value across all touchpoints. LoyaltyLion is an excellent choice for Shopify merchants and store owners in the health and wellness category as it has all the features necessary to quickly and efficiently design successful campaigns. They offer various features from rewards and points programs, bonuses for their subscribers, refer-a-friend programs, VIP clubs and more.
How to utilize Loyalty to acquire & keep health & wellness subscription customers
Most customers cancel their subscriptions after month one. Sound familiar?
Typically the health and wellness products and lifestyle space see high churn from customers gaming the system to get a one-off discount on a product they do not intend to use with high enough frequency to become a subscriber. So they cancel wellness subscriptions after month one.
What is subscription churn, and why is it an important metric?
Subscription churn refers to the rate at which customers cancel their subscriptions. Churn and subscription management are vital for any subscription-based business since it directly affects your bottom line through lost revenue and customer lifetime value (CLV). The higher your churn rate, the more customers you lose over time and the more money you need to spend on acquiring new customers.
Over most industries, churn is a significant problem for Wellness, Lifestyle and Beauty verticals as it can result in lost revenue and decreased customer engagement. Implementing a loyalty programme is one of the best strategies to reduce subscription churn, create long-term relationships with your best customers, and create new avenues to target those most likely to try your newest launch, buy an inventory clearout, or share on social platforms expanding your reach.
How LoyaltyLion Helped Bare Biology Retain Their Customers
For Bare:Daily Flourishment: That's the feeling all Customers have when they're consistent with their health and wellness routine. So we amplified that into the brand name and its expression throughout the customer journey. That feeling when you know you're nourishing yourself from the inside out from a small daily consistent action.
Arq partnered with LoyaltyLion to provide them with a holistically branded customer experience through the Flourish Rewards Programme.
Using LoyaltyLion’s platform, Arq helped Bare Biology create their custom rewards points program, “Flourish Rewards” which allowed customers to earn points for every purchase they made on their website and complete specific actions such as writing reviews or sharing products on social media. Customers can then redeem these points for discounts or other rewards, such as free shipping or discounts on their next order at checkout. As we launch new products, instead of offering an immediate discount for our loyal customers, we offer a double point bonus event where they can earn 2x the points per purchase for future purchase redemption. Customers get exclusive access to products first (before they might sell out!) with targeted promotions as well as exclusive perks and events directly with the brand.
Loyalty programmes can be a potent tool for any business looking to increase customer engagement and CLV over time. For Bare Biology specifically, the Flourish Rewards Programme has been instrumental in the subscription process, helping them expand its customer base while retaining existing ones simultaneously on the subscription value-based loyalty program and growing its social following.
The Impact of LoyaltyLion on Bare Biology
Since implementing the Flourish Rewards programme, Bare Biology has significantly increased customer engagement and lifetime value (CLV). According to research by LoyaltyLion, customers who participate in loyalty programmes spend up to 70% more than regular customers, which has been confirmed for Bare Biology. We have seen that redeeming members of points based, on average spend 67.5% MORE than non-redeeming non-members.
Overall, 3.8 million points have been accumulated by the members that have joined since December. We’ve seen >58,000 points redeemed by customers in discounts on their orders, leading to customers trying new supplements in their regimen and completing a second and third purchase.
Also, loyal customers are more likely to recommend brands or products, further increasing your customer base and CLV. Bare has seen that with our integration with Okendo Reviews, customers left more reviews to get points for their opinions and results for products with pictures, video and more, helping increase trust for first-time shoppers across all categories.
Furthermore, having a loyalty programme gives you valuable insights into what your existing customers really want since it lets you track how they interact with your brand online store over time. This helps you target them better with specific offers or promotions when needed.
We’re using LoyaltyLion to further deepen our email marketing efforts into personalized, targeted flows for our at-risk and churned customers into win-back campaigns and ways to target customers who have cancelled their subscription after one month with more ways to stay engaged in the brand. We’re also exploring how to reinforce the benefits and savings that successful loyalty program members could achieve sooner in their experience with the brand in our welcome series emails and in our cart showing how many points a customer could earn just by signing up with their first purchase.
Find our case study on our website and see how Arq can help you bring your CLV initiative to life to connect deeper and easily convert.
![3 Month Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 Prep Strategies for Shopify eCommerce [+ Free Checklist]](http://www.arqdesign.studio/cdn/shop/articles/3-email-flows-you-didnt-know-about-for-Klaviyo_1_1.webp?v=1702422665&width=1840)
