Creating a Successful Omnichannel Customer Loyalty Programme

In today’s dynamic and cut-throat competitive environment, customer loyalty is not easily earned and retained for long.

March. 5, 2024

While most brands fall into the trap of trying to lure customers through attention-grabbing gimmicks, promotional discounts, and freebies, they fail to realise that customers are not necessarily satisfied with just one-off perks. Your customer’s trust and loyalty are well and truly earned when you go above and beyond in offering products and services that directly address their pain points, providing them with effective, personalised, and convenient solutions.

Today, providing an exceptional customer experience consistently is the pre-requisite to gaining and maintaining long-term customer loyalty. With 76% of customers disengaging with a business after just one bad experience, the onus on companies to ensure customer retention by designing and delivering memorable, personalised, and hassle-free customer journeys is greater than ever. You need to get it right, every single time.

76% of customers disengage with a business after just one bad experience.

With the advent of technology and rapid digitalisation, the dynamics of customer loyalty are changing by the day. Traditional customer loyalty programmes tend to only reward customers with tangible benefits once a transaction has been made and primarily target returning customers, thereby limiting opportunities to deliver a highly engaging and evocative customer experience. Today, most companies have both online and offline stores that need to be integrated to provide a seamless shopping experience for customers. Omnichannel customer loyalty programmes achieve exactly this and bring much more to the table.

What is an Omnichannel Customer Loyalty Programme?

In layman terms, an omnichannel customer loyalty programme is a type of loyalty initiative that enables brands to provide a highly engaging, interactive, and holistic customer experience by integrating across all sales and marketing channels – be it physical stores, websites, or mobile applications. This drives meaningful engagement through each and every touchpoint that a business has with its customers, providing instant access, personalised rewards and recommendations, and incorporating innovative elements like gamification, fitness, and entertainment to provide novelty for users.

74% of customers choose a brand based on the appeal of its loyalty programme. Furthermore, 71% of businesses attribute the improvement of their customer experience to their omnichannel customer loyalty programmes that, on average, have increased their transaction volumes by over 50%. The message is loud and clear – omnichannel is the way to go.

Benefits of an Omnichannel Customer Loyalty Programme

There are numerous benefits of creating an omnichannel customer loyalty programme:

1. Seamless customer engagement: By leveraging an omnichannel loyalty programme, you can streamline the touchpoints in your customer journey, offering your users a smooth and seamless engagement at every step of the way through a combination of in-store, online, and mobile channels. Be it sending special discount offers on SMS or registering for a VIP scheme via QR code in store, each touchpoint can be personalised and simplified with the aid of technology to make your customer’s life easier and exciting.
2. Enhanced brand awareness: Many companies use social media campaigns and in-store or online gamification to attract customers to join their loyalty programmes by offering incentives to gain large amounts of loyalty points or high-tier benefits. This helps to enhance their brand awareness among a wider audience and drive a positive word of mouth.
3. Personalised relationship with your customers: Personalisation is one of the most pivotal ingredients of customer engagement and retention. Through omnichannel customer experiences, you build an intimate relationship with your customers by tailoring your content, offerings, and overall engagement to their needs and desires. Personalised relationships add a human touch to your brand, enabling your audience to connect and resonate with you.
4. Incentivised data collection facilitating user insights generation: Beyond enhancing customer experience, omnichannel loyalty programmes enable you to easily collect, analyse, and draw critical insights from user data, helping you make informed decisions. Recent research reveals that 91% of customers are more likely to engage with brands that provide relevant offers and customised recommendations — and 83% of them feel comfortable sharing their personal data for this purpose, contrary to popular belief.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Omnichannel Customer Loyalty Programme

Crafting a unique and holistic omnichannel loyalty programme can feel daunting and clunky at first. However, there is a method to the madness. This step-by-step guide can help you get you started:

1. Identify your customer's major shopping channels by analysing existing user data and the purchasing patterns of your target customer demographic.
2. Map out the omnichannel customer journeys you want to create by adopting a user-centric design thinking approach. Break down each step of the journey and analyse what works and doesn’t work from the lens of your customer. While looking at your competition can provide valuable insights and practices to learn from, it is important to maintain an unwavering focus on your own customer.
3. Personalise the experience for each user based on their expectations. Certain segments of your audience might want perks like free concert tickets or travel miles, while others might be more receptive towards health and well-being benefits. Each customer has their own taste. Understanding and capturing their unique needs along with tailoring your loyalty programme’s offers and rewards accordingly can go a long way in gaining traction and boosting customer retention.
4. Lastly, always leverage data and listen to user feedback. No matter what, your customer is king. It is important to have open channels of communication with them and ensure that you are on the same wavelength. Using a data-driven and iterative approach helps you understand where you need to preserve and where you need to pivot to grow your loyalty programme from strength to strength, sans speedbumps.

Customers crave exclusive and powerful experiences that transcend beyond what they pay to attain a service or purchase a product. They want a wow factor. When you make them feel treasured and special, they reciprocate with their loyalty which takes ages to build, but a matter of seconds to break. This is all the more reason why having an omnichannel customer loyalty programme that offers a one-of-its-kind experience to your customers should be at the forefront of your customer experience strategy.