Beyond CRM: Why Loyalty Programs Should Be Your Business’s Core Strategy

You can easily get lost in a jungle of technology if you don’t stay focused on why you started a loyalty program.  After all, you start a loyalty program to maintain relationships with your best customers, learn more about them, and perhaps even provide them with a higher level of service, or give them perks for their repeat business.

However, with cheaper computing power and crazy amounts of inexpensive digital storage, it can become easy to begin treating your loyalty platform like a general customer relationship management (CRM) platform and forget why you even started a loyalty program. 

CRM vs Loyalty Dilemma

There is certainly a cross-over between general CRM and loyalty.  You can set up automated messages, conduct promotions, and send huge volumes of emails, SMS, and push notifications via a “set it and forget it” system of rules and offers.  But, with loyalty, you want to go beyond the “one and done” type of spiff and get customers or even better, members, connected to you transactionally and emotionally so they think of you first.

How to make customer loyalty your business’s holy grail 

Building Customer Relationships with Loyalty Programs

Connecting with customers emotionally and even transactionally goes beyond reaching out to them daily with a barrage of messages.  This is strategically collecting relevant data in a program that attracts your company’s main target market and gets them to enroll with you.  Then, the journey continues by learning your member’s likes/dislikes from a product or service perspective and providing experiences that give them something they can’t get from your competitors.

Once this relationship is established, growing your connection includes relevant messaging and can sometimes include not speaking to them.  As we all know, in every relationship, at times, there is a need for some space.  And then there is the understanding of when to re-connect. 

Making Loyalty Your Organization’s DNA

The other differentiator with a good loyalty program in addition to good data and timely communication is driving the concept throughout the entire organization.  Unlike a promotion that has a start and end date, a loyalty program should become a way of doing business.  It should be a part of an organization’s DNA, from the board room to the showroom, retail floor, or wherever your associates meet with your customers. 

There should be a uniform tone and genuine appreciation for your customers/members at every connection point with your company.  Make no mistake, this is hard work.  The organization’s view and love for its customers should be apparent and consistent in strategy meetings, planning sessions, goal setting, customer service, emails, phone calls, text messages, and face-to-face interactions. 

In the best of all worlds, a customer/member should receive the same positive experience from every touch point or communication within your organization.  This is hard but worth it.  When your organization sees repeat business that starts happening organically because you have proven yourself worthy of repeat and consistent purchases, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do this sooner. 

Balancing Delight with Purpose

So, where is this going?  Many organizations start with a genuine concept of initiating a loyalty program to surprise and delight their best customers.  However, once the platform is in place, the lure of quick hits via promotion after promotion and email after email can quickly reduce those altruistic goals into the offer of the weak, I mean week. 

Be strong.  Learn how to craft a journey for your members that is mutually beneficial for you and for them.  This is done by knowing what will make your customers want to enroll with you, and then collecting only the relevant data that enables you to help them.  Judiciously use this data to enhance shopping patterns, break down barriers to purchase, and insert some fun along the way.  Be careful not to take advantage of your members’ willingness to join you and share their information with you.  

It is easy to start pulling levers in your platform and sending out “one-offs” buy the truckload.  Resist.  Loyalty is a marathon, not a sprint.  Craft your journey.  Know where you want to take your members.  Help them do more business with you.  Listen to them.  Adapt your offerings based on their feedback.  As their appreciation grows, so will their purchases…and your bottom line.  

Over time, then, you’ll find your organization moving out of the technology jungle to the greener pastures of profit and prosperity.  You’ll experience growth and opportunity for your employees and a marketplace where customers can’t get enough of you.  Yes, loyalty can definitely get you there, if you keep in mind why you wanted loyal customers in the first place.

Elevate your loyalty strategy with Capillary’s cutting-edge customer loyalty software. Create personalized communications and make informed decisions with our powerful predictive analytics. Experience the difference – book your demo today!

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Kyle is a Client Success Director at Capillary Technologies. He has over 20 years experience in marketing, account management, field marketing and program development, specifically concentrating on loyalty and retention marketing. He also has an MBA. His experience comes from industries such as retail, e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, publishing, hotel & restaurant and quick service restaurants (QSR). He loves helping organizations build relationships with customers and seeing the positive benefits from those relationships.