How to Increase Customer Retention with Omnichannel Loyalty

A consumer survey revealed that 75% of customers choose a retail brand based on their loyalty program.  

However, it’s not enough to just offer tiered or exclusive programs that customers can access as a special reward – everyone’s doing that. If you want to captivate modern consumers and keep them loyal to your business, you need to take your loyalty programs to the next level.  

But how exactly can you do that? Aside from West Palm Beach SEO, omnichannel loyalty is the key!

Omnichannel loyalty takes your traditional loyalty programs to the next level by creating meaningful touchpoints at as many stages in the customer shopping experience as possible.  

In other words, it allows you to increase customer retention by creating a high-quality shopping experience.  

What is Omnichannel Loyalty Program?

An omnichannel loyalty program focuses on boosting customer engagement and making them feel valued instead of trying to get customers to buy more through traditional point systems.  

A great way to do this is by gamifying your customer rewards experience in a way that encourages customers to interact with you even if they have no intention of buying now.  

For example, your customer can earn points by fulfilling certain tasks like taking surveys or rating products. They can then use the points they’ve accumulated across all touchpoints once they’ve made a purchase.  

This makes loyalty programs more interactive so customers will naturally want to engage more with you. In the process, consumers develop a connection with you.  

According to Harvard Business Review, customers who have an emotional connection with a brand or business have a 3x higher lifetime value than those who don't.  

Emotionally connected customers buy more from you, follow your advice, recommend you more, are less likely to be sensitive towards price increases, and tend to pay more attention to your emails and marketing campaigns.  

3 Steps to Set Up an Omnichannel Loyalty Program

Brands that use omnichannel loyalty programs experience a 50% increase in their transaction volume. If you want to boost your gross merchandise value, omnichannel loyalty program is the answer.  

It can help you achieve this by attracting a diverse base of repeat customers across multiple channels through incentives.  

Here are the key steps involved in setting up successful omnichannel loyalty programs:

Step 1: Integrate Omnichannel Systems in Your Business Systems

Omnichannel integration is a process of integrating technology with your existing business systems. This allows you to deliver seamless and rich end-to-end experiences, from managing orders, inventory, and customers.  

It also enables you to connect your loyal programs across all touchpoints for a fast and easy setup.  

Benefits of omnichannel integrations include:

• Easily accept in-store returns and exchanges, whether the products were bought online or from other branches.  
• Allows you to bring online customers in-store and upsell or cross-sell at pickup.  
• Makes it easy to set up customer emails.  

Step 2: Integrate Your Social Media Platforms

Social media integration gives your audience more opportunities to engage and interact with your business.  

You're creating more ways for them to share your content and promote your products and services. The best part about it? It's easy to do so they're more inclined to do it!

It’s also extremely beneficial for you because it means that you’re going to get more engagement and identify potential customers.  

Social media is great for capturing customers' emails, enticing customers to join special customer loyalty programs, announcing sales, and many other marketing gimmicks that eventually lead to a purchase.  

To create a seamless omnichannel experience, your website, email, and social media should work together. Here are some social media integration strategies for your site and email that will help boost customer retention:

• Add social sharing links to your blog posts. As much as possible keep it simple. You don't need to add a social share button to every single social media platform you have. Don’t spam your site with them either. It’s best to keep them focused on sharable pieces of content only, like videos and articles.  
• Optimize your pages and social media posts for West Palm Beach SEO. It will help boost their visibility on both search engines and social.  
• Include a feed of social media posts on your pages. You can also use branded hashtags to showcase posts from your followers and fans.  

• Add a social login option because 70.99% of users prefer to log in using their Google account, 20% preferred Facebook, and 9.3% preferred Twitter.  
• Include social sharing links to your email footer.  
• Send out email blasts showcasing some of your most engaging social media posts.
• Send email blasts to promote your social media giveaway or contests.  
• Use shoppable posts to promote your products and services.  

• Set up a social media shop or social media commerce to accommodate social media sales.  

Step 3: Store and Track Customer Data

To create compelling omnichannel loyalty programs, you will need to collect data from different channels. Study and use it to personalize your rewards.  

The first step in creating effective customer loyalty programs is to know your customers’ behavior online. This will allow you to get to know them better and serve them with exactly what they want.  

Here are the different types of customer insights or metrics you should you be collecting from users:

• Pain points – Find out what your ideal customers' problems or pain points are in interacting with your brand online or with our products.  

• Interests - Identify what types of loyalty programs your customers are interested in.  
• Customer preferences – What types of rewards do your customers prefer to get from your loyalty programs? What will entice them the most to join?
• Brand awareness KPIs– Determine the number of times your brand name has been mentioned across social media channels, measure the number of users your brand has reached on social, and check how many people comment and share your social posts.  
• Build Audience KPIs – Find out the number of followers and likes on your social media pages, your email subscribers, and how many people visit your website per day and from which channels they come.  
• Conversion KPIs – Track how many conversions you have gained through social media, email, and paid ads.  

Once you’ve gathered all the necessary information about your ideal customers, you can now use it to personalize offers that will nurture them into loyal customers.  

Omnichannel Loyalty Program Ideas for Various Channels

To create a successful omnichannel loyalty program, you need to have a unified account that holds all the information about your customers, no matter which channel they choose to interact on.  

This will make it easier for you to provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints.  

1. Omnichannel Loyalty Program: eCommerce

For your eCommerce site, you want to have a loyalty program landing page and another page dedicated to members where they can review their progress or "points" and what they can redeem with it.  

It’s important to optimize this page for West Palm Beach SEO to boost its visibility. This will help your presence online. When people know about your loyalty programs, they’re more inclined to do business with you.  

In fact, 75% of customers will switch brands for a better loyalty program. Make sure you sync up the data from both online and offline transactions to get a full view of your loyalty program member’s activity.  

2. Omnichannel Loyalty Program: In-Store

You want your brick-and-mortar to be a part of your omnichannel loyalty program.  

To do this, you need to have dedicated software and hardware solutions that will allow you to collect data about in-store purchases and integrate them into the central loyalty program’s database.  

You also want to offer various forms of in-store customer loyalty engagements and gamification. Here are some ideas to help you get started:

• Put an actual prize wheel in your store that loyalty program members can spin to win.  
• In-store treasure hunt where you require customers to scan a hidden  QR code to get bonus loyalty points or exclusive rewards.  
• A series of challenges prompting customers to do various things like download a mobile app, sign in a couple of times each month, buy from the app, order online pick up in-store, and many more.  

You can also set up tablets in your store that has a Store Assistant Portal where your staff members can easily identify program members and manage their points.  

3. Omnichannel Loyalty Program: Mobile

Develop a mobile app to make it easier for users to claim and redeem rewards on the go. They can even use it as a membership card to redeem in-store and access exclusive member content.  

The only problem with this is that apps can get expensive to develop. The more complex your app is, the longer it'll take to create and the more money it will cost you.  

A great alternative would be a mobile wallet solution. It’s easier, quicker, and more affordable since it relies on the existing functionalities found in Apple and Android phones to provide digital loyalty cards, event passes, and coupons.  

Optimizing your loyalty programs for mobile makes it easier to send push notifications and special offers that will draw customers in and drive them to make a purchase or interact with you to redeem points.  

4. Omnichannel Loyalty Program: Value-Driven

It's crucial to align your brand’s core values with your shopper's beliefs and convictions. Aside from sharing what you believe in through campaigns and marketing messages, your loyalty programs should also reflect them.  

You want to be present in the lives of your customers even when they're not looking to make a purchase at the moment. This is the key to forging long-term relationships and brand loyalty that goes beyond transactions.  

So, how exactly can you achieve this?

You can do this by giving away bonus points or rewards for people who choose to buy products where some of the proceeds go to charity, trade old things for recycling, and other positive actions.  

Doing this enables you to generate good faith in your brand. When you reward positive actions through a loyalty program, people also feel good about themselves and feel more confident doing business with you.  

As a result, you nurture one-time buyers into devoted brand advocates.  

Take Your Business to The Next Level with Omnichannel Loyalty Programs

Omnichannel loyalty programs provide you with an opportunity to engage and interact with your customers regardless of when and how they shop.  

It features new and innovative ways to engage customers, including card-linked loyalty programs, gamification, virtual coupons, and many more.  

Moreover, it gives data-driven insights that allow you to analyze consumer behavior and shift quickly to meet their ever-changing needs. It is the key to keeping your customers happy and loyal to your business.  

Digital Resource is an SEO and marketing company in West Palm Beach that specializes in helping small business gain traction online.  

If you want to get more customers and grow your business, book a free consultation to know how we can make it possible for you!

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