How to create a loyalty program

Start with why

What do you want to achieve with your loyalty program? Are you in for pure transactional loyalty? Are you going all in for emotional loyalty? Or do you want to create a rewarding mix of the two? If you are getting your objectives (and target groups) right, it’s easier to find the right focus for your program.

Choose the right tech

This paragraph could be a long Wikipedia article or a Reddit thread, but in our modern loyalty world you must rely on what we refer to as MarTech (a marketing technology). We know – there are thousands of MarTech products and providers out there.
It’s a quite confusing landscape – so you better do your research or ask for help if you are feeling overwhelmed. If you want a clue: Look for safe and solid API-solutions with seamless integration and flexible functionality. And look for experienced loyalty players.

Go for privacy and trust

You need to collect first-party data and manage it in a privacy-safe way. If you stumble here, you will run into serious trouble. GDPR and privacy law will not soften in the future. Build your loyalty program on a safe and GDPR compliant platform. Look for secure and specific API keys and demand restrictive IP whitelisting.

Find the right level

Loyalty should be easy and fun. You know: creating and monitoring campaigns with your kind of rewards. Sending the stats to your manager – and tweaking and analysing your loyalty campaigns to reward your business even more. You need a smooth-running loyalty solution. If it’s too complicated, you will eventually loose drive and focus, and it will be more exhausting to get true ROI for the loyalty efforts.

The key is to start simple and then build your program as it matures, rather than trying to launch and run a highly complex program from the start.

Pick a rewarding partner

We know. We want you to do loyalty on your own. But before you invest in a loyalty platform, you should consider the credentials of your loyalty provider: How many years have they been in the market? Is loyalty their core business? Can you trust their loyalty tech? Is the loyalty platform really plug-and-play? Are there any business cases supporting their bold claims? Are there real people there you can discuss with – and get fast help from? Are they operating in your market – your category? Yes, loyalty is also about chemistry – so do your (due) diligence.

Of course, there are more details and nuances. We’ll be happy to serve you more loyalty – you can find more rewarding articles here.