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If you’re here, you probably have a physical store, a mobile app, an e-commerce store and are trying to create a connection between all three.
More than a buzzword, an omnichannel strategy is all about creating one holistic experience for customers to ensure consistency - and an omnichannel loyalty marketing strategy is an integral part to a successful strategy.
But how do you get started with something that seems as overwhelming as an omnichannel strategy?
In this guide, we’ve created a step-by-step framework to help you create your omnichannel loyalty program.
What is an Omnichannel Strategy? And What is an Omnichannel Loyalty Program?
An omnichannel strategy is a business approach that aims to provide a seamless and integrated customer experience across multiple channels, both online and offline. The goal is to create a consistent and cohesive experience for customers, regardless of how they interact with the brand, whether it's through a website, mobile app, social media, physical store, or any other touchpoint.
An omnichannel loyalty program means providing a holistic loyalty program that goes through all your existing channel and customer touchpoints (mobile, online, and offline) to create one seamless customer experience. This increases the number of potential touchpoints your business can have and rewards customers for milestones, making the experience truly one of a kind.
A good example of an omnichannel experience is when you purchase a product online, track it through an app. and then return it to the physical store. That’s three main touchpoints in one experience. And each touchpoint has its own potential to be a great marketing experience, and the customer has access to all of them and can switch between them as convenient.
Why is Building an Omnichannel Loyalty Program Important?
Build Better Customer Experiences
An omnichannel loyalty program isn’t just about giving out points and discounts hoping that customers will buy more, although that is part of it. It’s more about creating a meaningful experience that fulfills the customers needs. This is why retailers use customer data from the omnichannel loyalty program that enables them to provide customers with personalized content.
Capture Valuable Customer Data & Insights
Omnichannel loyalty programs allow you to take a deep dive into how your customers think and behave when it comes to your business. Data like purchase frequency, point usage rates, preferred shopping channels, and more are all important clues
Stand Out From The Competition
Implementing an omnichannel customer experience and omnichannel loyalty program means a lot of things, but at the top of the list: you’re always top of mind. With omnichannel, you provide customers with one of the most important advantages of modern time - convenience.
The added touch points mean more data and analytics as mentioned above, which marketers, product managers, and growth professionals can leverage to create better experiences to acquire, retain, and grow their customer base.
Step-By-Step: How To Build a Successful Omnichannel Strategy with Loyalty Marketing
Step One: Define Your Goals
The first step is to clearly define why you’re building an omnichannel loyalty program. Is it because you want to retain existing customers? Or collect more data to be able to provide personalized experiences? Is it purely for competitive advantage, or are you looking for cross-selling and upselling opportunities?
Once you know why, you’ll be able to implement a cohesive, focused, and effective loyalty program that achieves those goals. Here are some possible goals we thought of, and feel free to check off the ones that resonate most with your business.
- Customer Retention
- Customer Engagement
- Data Collection and Insights
- Cross-Selling and Upselling
- Behavior Modification (For example: encouraging customers to buy from your mobile app instead of in-store)
- Customer Segmentation
- Cost Reduction
- Market Differentiation
Step Two: Know, Understand, and Segment Your Audience
Before diving into the actual ins and outs of your loyalty program, it’s vital to understand who you’re creating your omnichannel loyalty program for.
Mapping out your user personas includes understanding their background, purchasing behavior, purchasing frequency, etc. allows you to:
- Recognize which rewards and challenges would work best
- Identify what types of content your users would want to see
- Know which touchpoint/channels to capitalize on
After understanding your user personas, you can segment them and create specific experiences for each persona in order to build experiences that feel personal and meaningful to them.
Step Three: Define Your Channels
While channels differ from business to business, there are three core channels that you need to bear in mind when building your omnichannel loyalty program.
Channel 1: In-Store
A physical store is usually where most omnichannel strategies start out. In order to include your brick and mortar store into your omnichannel loyalty program, you need to:
- Optimize your physical store for in-store engagement
- A specialized software (and possibly hardware) solution that allows you to capture purchase data and send them to your loyalty program’s database
Channel 2: E-Commerce
Think of this channel as where your products exist in the online space. So basically and primarily: your website.
Through your website and checkout process, your customers should be able to track their progress within your loyalty program and be able to educate themselves on how to earn and redeem points.
The most important part of your e-commerce platform is being able to create a unified view where you can access all information about your customer, no matter where they interacted (mobile, offline, or online)
This way, you can sync data coming in from multiple sources so you can get the full picture of a loyalty member’s activity and be able to take data-driven decisions accordingly.
Channel 3: Mobile
Mobile apps are the magical link between online and offline, simply because when in-store, it’s super easy for customers to access their phones and scan a QR code or engage in whatever fun activity you have planned. The best way you can truly establish an anchor in your omnichannel loyalty program is through a dedicated mobile app solution.
A loyalty mobile app means empowering users to claim and redeem rewards on the go and access exclusive membership content literally within the palm of your hands. The only disadvantage is that it can be a bit tricky and expensive to build a mobile loyalty program from scratch, which is why we highly recommend outsourcing it directly.
Step Four: Choose Your Loyalty Program and Mechanics
There are eight total types of loyalty programs - each one with a different approach and purpose (if you need some help, we wrote a complete guide to all 8 types of loyalty programs here).
In this step, we’ll go back to the very first step in our process which is figuring out our why.
For example, If your only goal is boosting customer engagement, that’ll be a completely different loyalty program than if you’re looking to capture data. It’s important to choose one that best fits your customer base and their behavior, along with the nature of your business and what you’re selling.
Step Five: Integrate your Loyalty Program with Your Omnichannel Platforms
Now, to ensure that your loyalty program is consistent across all different touchpoints, you need to make sure it’s well integrated with your omnichannel platforms.
Aside from what we mentioned above (in-store, mobile, and online) you also need to make sure your social media, email-marketing, SMS, Chatgbot, and in-store POS are all aligned.
The main purpose behind this step is making sure that customers can easily access the same experience from all different touchpoints.
Step Seven: Engage Your Customers With Personalized and Timely Content
Now that you have your loyalty program in tact, it’s time to make sure you optimize it to maximum potential.
To do this, you need to make sure you reach your customers at the right time with the right message. The best way to do that is through an automated workflow, which is triggered based on certain actions your customers take.
How to create your own omnichannel strategy
- Define Your Goals
- Know, Understand, and Segment Your Audience
- Choose Your Channels
- Choose Your Loyalty Program Mechanics
- Integrate your Loyalty Program with Your Omnichannel Platforms
- Engage Your Customers With Personalized and Timely Content
Conclusion
That’s it! Now, you’re one step closer to implementing your omnichannel loyalty program and building an amazing customer experience across all channels! You can talk to one of our omnichannel loyalty consultants here - 100% free of charge.
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