Seven Strategies For Promoting Your Loyalty Program

2. Target Your Existing Customers

Whether you're launching a loyalty program for the first time or wanting to promote an existing one, the ideal place to start is with your existing customers.

For your existing customers, the best way to promote the program is to focus on the value proposition - what benefits the program offers, how it can meet their needs, and the ways joining will improve their overall experience with your brand.

When encouraging your existing customers to enroll, you don’t just want to rely on a single tweet or email to get the job done. Instead, your objective should be to create clear, consistent, and targeted messaging that speaks to the customer as an individual.

You want to create personalized communications for distribution across all your relevant channels, multiple channels, and touchpoints so you can reach your different customer audiences and achieve the end goal of motivating them to enroll in the program.

Run Enrollment Campaigns

Running specific enrollment campaigns aimed at existing customers is one way to encourage them to join up. Enrollment campaigns can take the form of promotions like sweepstakes or contests, where individuals can enroll in the program as a method of entry to potentially win other prizes.

Use Segmentation & Targeting

Using customer data for segmentation and retargeting is another way you can focus on promoting to existing customers. Do you have repeat customers who still haven’t joined the loyalty program yet? You can develop targeted marketing campaigns or promotional offers specifically for these individuals.

5. Include Your Loyalty Program Within Your Brand's Marketing Initiatives

For your program to thrive and grow beyond its launch, it should be integrated into your brand marketing efforts, including email, social media, print, and more.

Some brands choose to treat their loyalty programs as separate entities with their own promotional strategies. But in actuality, it's crucial for your brand marketing and loyalty program marketing to work in tandem. While your program will have its specific communications and messaging for members through email and social media, it must also be a featured inclusion in your brand’s overall marketing strategy. Doing so will ensure your loyalty program is being promoted effectively. 

Here are a few ways to promote your loyalty program with your brand's existing marketing. 

Email

Ideally, your loyalty program has a banner or promotional CTA of some kind within all your brand emails, from special announcements for holiday shopping deals to abandoned cart reminders. You don't have to make the loyalty program the prime message of every email; this is a chance to simply and concisely remind customers of the program’s value and encourage them to join if they haven’t already. 

Product Packaging & Print Materials

One often overlooked opportunity to spread the word about your loyalty program is in the print materials and packaging you’re already producing. Ship-to-home order packaging can be a major promoter for your loyalty program: the boxes, envelopes, and shipping tape can help advertise your loyalty program. This also includes any print messaging included within the shipment, like a thank-you note or postcard with a promotional offer.

You can also print promotional messaging for your loyalty program right on product packaging and in-store signage using tools like QR codes. This lets customers easily use their mobile devices to learn more about the program and enroll.

Social Media

Including a loyalty program in social media strategy is crucial for two reasons. Firstly, social media is key for building a brand community through consistent customer engagement. Publishing posts, photos, videos, blogs, and other content across social generates more customer interactions and excitement, which helps to steadily build up a brand community.

Secondly, social media accounts can work to promote your program in several ways:

• You can dedicate your Twitter account(s) pinned tweet to promote the loyalty program 24/7. Pinned tweets could display newly launched rewards or highlight member perks.
• You can also feature social posts from loyalty program partners or loyal customers showing their support or appreciation for the program.

6. Make Your Loyalty Program Part Of The Sales Process

Similar to how people can assume their loyalty program is being promoted adequately when it isn’t, you might believe your loyalty program is already part of the sales process when it isn’t.

It’s not surprising when this happens because the sales process can be tricky to nail down as an exact science. B2C and B2B industries, for example, have very different sales and buying processes.

To make loyalty (and thus your loyalty program) part of your sales process, you need to go back to the essential purpose of a loyalty program: building a long-lasting relationship between brand and customer based on mutual value exchange and affinity.

Understanding exactly how your program needs to appeal to your customers and add beneficial value to their lives is key to understanding how, where, and when it can be most effectively promoted during your sales process.

How To Incorporate Your Loyalty Program Into Your Sales Process

B2C Brands

For B2C brands such as those in the retail or CPG industries, the sales process typically includes the frontline staff or employees. to market your program effectively to customers, your in-store staff and customer service employees need to be knowledgeable about the program and how it works. They need to know key details such as:

• How the program works and the ways customers can enroll
• The processes for earning points
• Various member perks and rewards are available

It is especially important that you help frontline employees understand why the loyalty program is valuable to your business itself and how it can positively impact how well your business performs.

If a team member doesn’t understand why the program is valuable and worth participating in, it is unlikely they will actively be a program advocate to customers.

B2B Brands

For B2B companies, your sales process gives a future client their first impression of your company and how it works. From the start you want to demonstrate that your business will help them succeed by knowing and understanding their various pain points, needs, wants, goals, interests, and roadblocks. The key to incorporating your loyalty program into your sales process is conveying how participating in the program will help the customer address or solve these items by:

• Let them earn valuable incentives or rebates
• Help them with business development via Co-ops or MDF funds
• Offer rewards for special product training, education, or certifications
• Provide exclusive access to events, offers, or promotional opportunities

For the end customer to understand the value of your loyalty program, your internal sales team must understand too. Your sales reps will be more confident promoting the loyalty program as a differentiator during client meetings if they are knowledgeable about the ins and outs of how the program works.

Educate Employees On Loyalty Program Benefits

Brands should ensure staff members at all company levels receive educational training on the loyalty program; not only frontline store employees, but also customer service agents, marketing employees, and IT teams. It helps to have resources available such as:

• How-To guides for common topics such as earning points, redeeming for rewards, checking or updating member information, accessing a member account, etc.
• Program info such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and most common topics of discussion for customer concerns or service inquiries
• Top selling points or pitches to help employees drive customer enrollments
• The procedures for order returns, refunds, or cancellations, and how to troubleshoot different types of customer issues

For both B2C and B2B brands, it’s helpful to create an official onboarding process that covers the various details about the brand’s loyalty program as part of the employee training modules when new hires join the company. This will help ensure that each individual on your team is enabled to be a loyalty program advocate from day one.

7. Create A Plan To Promote Your Program

A significant amount of work goes into the planning, designing, and building of a loyalty program. You can ensure that hard work doesn't go to waste post-launch by putting together a promotional plan for your loyalty program in advance.

Creating a formal promotional plan has a significant number of benefits:

• You have time to design tailored and creative marketing campaigns that attract your customer audiences
• You can create branded messaging to promote the  loyalty program across all your marketing channels and touchpoints
• You’re able to maximize the chance of program enrollments by ensuring there are no gaps or missed opportunities to market your loyalty program

One of the most important benefits of creating a whole plan is that you can be strategic about promoting your loyalty program in different phases or stages. Similar to soft launches or trial runs, promoting your program in stages allows you to stagger out how, where, and when your advertising initiatives go into play. Doing so enables you to be more flexible and easily adapt or change any promotional activities as needed.

What To Include In A Loyalty Program Marketing Plan

The exact elements of your promotional plan will depend on your company, brand, products, customer demographics, and marketing capabilities. Some typical elements of a loyalty promotional plan can include:

	Creating triggered promotional communications for email, SMS, and push notifications
	Including program QR codes or signup links product packaging and other printed materials like in-store signage or physical receipts
	Calling out the possible member point earnings or savings on product pages and during the checkout process
	Creating limited-time enrollment offers, such as bonus points or a special reward
	Running enrollment campaigns using promotions such as sweepstakes, contests, instant wins, and more
	Publishing social media posts that advertise the program and link back to the program site or explainer pages
	Creating promotional banners to feature on the website and in postpurchase communications like order confirmations, shipping notices, etc.

Once you’ve launched the program and your promotion plan is underway, keep careful watch on enrollment rates and program performance. You can tweak or modify different parts of your plan based on what’s working, and drive higher program adoption rates. Remember that focusing on continuous engagement and participation is what leads to more long-term, loyal customers.

Conclusion

Whether you're launching a program for the first time or already have an existing program, effectively promoting your loyalty program is pivotal to its success. By employing these seven strategies—ranging from personalized marketing to leveraging social media—you can elevate your program's visibility and appeal. Remember, a well-executed promotional strategy not only highlights the inherent value of your loyalty program but also ensures that members feel appreciated and motivated to return. Ultimately, the more effort you put into marketing your loyalty program, the more loyal your customers will become, leading to sustained growth and profitability for your business.