Loyalty & Rewards programs are one of the best ways to activate and engage your customer-base. But just having a loyalty program is no longer a differentiator, it’s table stakes. It’s the quality of your loyalty program that is your differentiator. Loyalty programs are for built for keeping your best customers happy and increasing the number of fans your brand has.
Why is a mobile app so important for your Loyalty program?
Mobile apps are the key to fully unlocking your brand’s program, acting as your loyalty headquarters, where users can view offers, pay, check their status in real-time and more. Getting your members using your mobile app provides you with richer customer data while providing them with better experiences.
First party data that brands can get through a L&R program include customer demographics such as age, gender, location, and income; purchase history and preferences; and customer engagement metrics such as frequency of visits, time spent on the program, and redemption rates. This enables you to provide highly customized and targeted offers which are more likely to be accepted, building a flywheel effect. The data can also be used to build out a product roadmap.
People are already checking their phones throughout the day, so accessing their loyalty accounts via app is a natural action. We check our mobile phones around 100 times per day, making the home screen the best real estate a brand can own. The app enables your customers to have instant gratification after a purchase, or playing a game, or filling out a survey. Seeing their rewards status move, tiggers a positive emotion.
Building a positive emotional connection with a brand creates trust, loyalty and engagement. It is essential for a long-term relationship. Consumers are more likely to purchase from brands they can connect with on an emotional level, making it a key part of any successful marketing strategy. Speaking of marketing, mobile push notifications are one of the most effective forms of creating engagement. They have click rate of 28% compared with email at 1.5%.
How to know if your competitor’s promotion attracted quality users
The beauty of competitive intelligence is seeing what works and what doesn’t for your competitors, saving you time and money in your decision making process. Everyone wants quality users, or users who are going to be return customers. To understand what brands and promotions are able to execute well on this, you need to analyze the relationship between Downloads (new users) and Daily Active Users (DAU). Here’s how:
1. Line up Downloads with DAUs
In Apptopia’s Market Explorer, or any tool (even Excel) you have access to, line up your competitor’s downloads against their daily active users for whatever time period you wish to study.
2. Pinpoint the dates of each promotion or campaign and determine what the promotion was
You can either look at when they ran known promotions or locate the spikes in downloads first, as these are likely to be when promotions ran. You need to know what the promotion was so that when you see the results, you know if it is something your brand should try or not. Sometimes the app update notes will actually spell this out, other times you can understand what the promotion was by looking at user reviews in Apptopia Review Intelligence during the period of time. If there is any uncertainty still, Google News and/or the company’s social media profiles will almost certainly let you know what each promotion was.
3. Did the users stick around?
Daily active user numbers almost always start to decline after a promotional period ends. You want to check 30, 60 and 90 days after the promotion, how many DAUs the app has compared with how many it had right before the promotion launched. A campaign successful at creating quality users will see an increase from before the promotional period. See the two examples below:
Make sure to check page 16 of our latest ebook to learn more about acquiring quality users into your loyalty & rewards program by clicking the button below.
Click to learn 5 strategies used by top apps to acquire, engage, and retain users.
