5 Email Marketing Campaigns To Drive More Engagement In Your Loyalty Program

Customer engagement is key when it comes to improving your loyalty program’s performance.

You want your customers to understand how they acquire points, to spend their points on the awesome rewards you offer, to get involved in the referral process and to really advocate for your brand. 

One key factor that determines how effectively your customers are engaging with your evolving program is communication. 

Why?

Your brand’s loyalty program is its competitive advantage, and as such, you want your customers to keep in mind its value to them when it’s shopping time. The best way to do this is to make sure you’re consistently communicating this value to your customers. 

And what’s the best way to communicate a business asset to your customers? 

Email.

With over 4 billion people using email as a communication channel, you want to make sure you’re using this method to effectively share news, updates and reminders about your loyalty program. 

In this post, we share 5 cool email marketing campaigns you can run to drive more engagement in your loyalty program and improve its performance. 

1. Program Promotion Campaign

The loyalty program is an important marketing asset which can really make a difference for your brand if used strategically, with clear goals in mind. Just like for any marketing asset, its promotion is crucial for getting it in front of your target audience - your customers. 

The program promotion campaign should aim to accompany the launch of your program.

This would be a dedicated email in which you’ll introduce the program’s name, how the customer will benefit from it and how they can start to use the program - now!

The language in this email should be clear, concise and easy to understand. 

Consider adding a short video explaining how customers can access the program, how they can interact with the different actions and how to check their balance and use their earned rewards.

You can also link to your rewards page where they can check all the FAQs about the program. 

2. Welcome to the program campaign

There’s nothing more frustrating to a customer when they are part of something, but they don’t quite know what that is. Don’t risk this with your loyalty program; you could potentially burden your customer support team with a lot of unnecessary questions.

Instead, make it a point to welcome every new customer to your program automatically. This email campaign is dedicated to presenting the program to new customers joining your community and making sure they’re aware of the great benefits you’re offering. 

Make sure language is clear, concise and motivating for the customer to make the next move - start engaging with your brand!

Moreover, if you’re rewarding customers with points for signing up, make sure they know of this head start too. 

3. Personalize all emails with loyalty data

Personalize every email you send to your customers by including their loyalty data in it.  With 88% of this survey respondents favoring emails that feel like they’re written for them, personalization can do a lot when it comes to improving customer engagement rate.

Another benefit of email personalization with loyalty data is the consistent reminder of the customer’s assets in your store as well as the cool benefits they can enjoy for engaging in a referral process or becoming part of your VIP program.

Information like customer point balance, unique referral url and VIP tier is a great start. 

For this, take advantage of a direct integration between your loyalty program provider and your email marketing provider. It makes your job as a marketer a lot easier if you don’t have to engage a developer to do this for you from scratch. 

4. Program-specific campaigns

Each of your programs in your loyalty strategy has its own goal and place in the customer experience with your store. With that, you should make it a point to dedicate a campaign to each of your programs separately. 

Points and rewards specific campaigns - remind your customers of all the cool ways they can earn points in your program and what they can spend them on. If you’re running a bonus point event, make sure you have an email marketing campaign accompanying this event. Depending on your program’s rewards structure, you can create a dedicated email campaign presenting only the rewards that are available to customers.  

Referral program specific campaigns - you can get super creative here. One campaign would be to simply remind customers of the referral program benefits and the ways they can send a referral depending on your display strategy. Remember, ease of use is key for excellent customer experience.

Another way could be to add a dedicated space in your email templates which you’ll populate with a clear and simple call-to-action by inserting the customer’s unique referral url. This way, in each email you sent, there’ll be a convenient reference to the referral program.

VIP program specific campaigns - offering awesome perks to your VIP members? Make sure they understand the value of this offer and are motivated to come back to the store and take advantage of these benefits. Present them visually; an eye-appealing email campaign design has a far better engagement rate than just a simple reminder. 

Whether you run all programs simultaneously, or are launching them gradually, consistency in communication is key.

Remember, your programs should evolve, and each new item you introduce in them should be properly presented to your audience. 

5. Targeted email marketing campaigns

Segmentation is a key tactic in email marketing for improving click-through rates and driving more revenue. When it comes to segmenting your audience based on loyalty data, you can do a lot of email marketing campaigns to achieve various objectives. 

• Motivate customers who are just a few points away from the next reward to take action and obtain it. 

• Run surveys to get more information and feedback on how people perceive the program - for example, send an email to people who haven’t spent any of their point balance to learn why.

• Send targeted emails about the benefits members in the various VIP tiers can obtain. Remind them of the perks in their next tier. 

There are a lot more scenarios you can tackle with customer segmentation based on loyalty data. The tactic itself is useful because the emails you send are personalized and the message makes sense for your customers who actually match the segmentation criteria. Plus, depending on the campaign you do, you can get a lot of useful information about how customers perceive your program and improve. 

Wrap up

There should be a consistent and meaningful communication established between you, as the brand offering the loyalty program, and the customer for whom the program is designed. While you can always use your loyalty program provider’s built-in communication options, you shouldn’t stop there. Go beyond the mere notification system and give your program life, identity and establish it as the competitive advantage that it is for your brand.