Top 4 Loyalty Features in Asia

One key objective that all businesses want to fulfil is converting their customers into brand advocates. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. It requires a loyalty strategy that turns first-time buyers into repeat customers, and ultimately, brand loyalists.

Your loyalty programs should have all the right features that allow you to:

• Enrol members with Easy & Quick Onboarding
• Make your customers happy with Robust & Customisable Rewards
• Do targeted marketing with Contextual target messaging
• Bring your customers back again and again with Re-engagement via SMS

Let’s dive in to each of these features.

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Easy and Quick On-Boarding

Onboarding members to your program should be easy, quick, and seamless. In loyalty programs, the challenge is to make the consumers stick to the program in the long haul. Unfortunately, most consumers don’t stick beyond a week or a month. Hence, the challenge you have is to get them to stay and continue in the program.

Fuss-free onboarding plays a key role in making this process easier. New members are notoriously quick to cast aside the loyalty programs when they don’t find any immediate value in them. Most of the members are swift to delete the app, leave points unredeemed, and forget all about the program.

Hence, in order to attract consumers, privileged experiences like members-only access to events while prompting the consumers to sign up may prove more effective than acquiring points in the long run. Especially when it comes to savvy Asian shoppers, they are nothing if not efficient with prices and discounts.

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Robust & Customizable Rewards

Each business is different, and so should your loyalty program. In other words, your loyalty program should be customized to your industry, business objectives and needs of your target customers. For example, the loyalty program of a café who wants to acquire more customers to buy their regular coffees will be different from that of a family restaurant, whose objective is to provide memorable experience to every customer.

Concurrently, your rewards should also differentiate your brand in the eyes of your customers. The last thing that will appeal to your customers is the same rewards that they are getting everywhere else, especially for Asian shoppers, who visit stores not just for the products but also for the experience. Hence, your rewards program should be robust enough to cater to all segments of customers. The customers who visit more often or are top spenders get more rewards so that they are constantly motivated to not only purchase from you, but also become your brand advocates.

A flexible, yet robust loyalty program presents an ocean of opportunities for your brand and empowers you to reward, manage and engage your customers in numerous ways.

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Contextual Target Messaging

Contextual targeting is a bold and simple marketing strategy that has been a favored targeting format for a while now. Once the consumer is hooked to the program, the next challenge is to encourage usage.

The Asian markets have embedded loyalty programs in smartphones. Through contextual target messaging, direct brand apps, and other messaging apps acquisition and subsequent engagement become conveniently familiar to consumers. App-based programs have also become more beneficial than static store cards, like instant access to reward information, instant rewards, and real-time promises.

By consolidating buyers’ history with relevant and locational information, the prize program supports use by drawing in customers with customized rewards, balance updates and member offers when they are generally open to reacting for example when in or close to a partaking shopping center.

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Re-Engagement via SMS

Out of sight is out of mind. This statement holds true for loyalty program customers. Sometimes, the reason is that they must expend too much effort to use this loyalty program. Hence, your consumers need adequate information and reminders to engage with the loyalty program and your brand.

However, trying to engage your consumer by making them log-in to a website or by downloading an app is not efficient and instead can drive them away. These options are neither convenient nor recommended. Making the reward readily available to the consumers on their smartphones can enhance user engagement and efficiency. Rather than forcing the users to access their reward information, a simple SMS to their device can do the job.

Almost 75% of consumers find SMS easy to access their rewards and are more likely to continue with their loyalty program. The SMS can either be a gentle reminder to redeem their reward or prompt them to take a business action to drive purchase.

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Conclusion:

The above features empower brands to take control of enrolling customers into their loyalty program and use automations to bring them back to their stores. In this way, brands can maximise their revenue, and turn customers into brand advocates.