Your Guide to Personalized Experiences in Your Loyalty Program

In today's world, personalized experiences mean everything to your customers. But the problem is many businesses aren't including personalization as part of their marketing and product offerings.

It's not clear whether this is because they're still unaware of the benefits of personalization or if they simply don't believe in it.

In this article, we're talking about personalization within loyalty programs. Particularly, how you can offer your customers personalized experiences using Gameball.

Personalization and the Loyalty Experience 

Did you know that 25% of consumers aren't happy with the level of personalization available in the loyalty programs they use? (Red Point Global)

Let's Change That!

Customer loyalty programs aren't new but personalization within them is!

And because traditional loyalty programs assume a one-size-fits-all method, customers don't feel like they're getting value from those loyalty programs.

The average customer is part of 14 customer loyalty programs. However, they only use 50% of these programs, Red Point Global says, citing a survey of 28,000 customers. The reason for this is that traditional loyalty programs don't consider customers, their needs, and their desire for personalization and a good experience. 

Personalized or customized loyalty programs, on the other hand, allow customers to get points for other options aside from purchases like social media shares or on their birthday. This variety helps customers accumulate points and reduces the pressure to just buy. It also helps you build a relationship with them.

Imagine asking people to recommend your store to others. For every person they recommend and who joins the loyalty program, they get 50 points. While this part of referral marketing, the idea is the same as it helps businesses offer personalization across several rewards options.

The best way to enhance loyalty programs, excite and engage customers is through personalization. And it's quite simple!

Once brand owners and loyalty marketers understand the benefits of personalization and include them in their loyalty offerings, only then can they increase customer retention, offer better rewards, increase personalization for their customers, and enhance overall business results.

Personalized Experiences Are the New Loyalty

You know now the value of personalization for loyalty programs. The next step is to include some form – or several forms – of personalization in your rewards program.

Here are 4 personalization ideas you can use along with suggestions to help customers get more points. 

Profile Completion

Each customer, or "player" as we call them on Gameball, has a personalized profile that they can access when they enter your store. This profile, called the Player Profile, shows customers the points and badges they earned, current levels, how many points they need to level up. It also shows them their transaction history as well as their referral link. 

With this in mind, you can ask customers to give you more information about themselves that you can use to increase personalization within the customer loyalty program.

For example, customers can earn 100 points for every piece of information they give you when they first join your loyalty program. This can include the basics such as their name, age, email, and additional information such as their favorite color, if they have a pet (or their pet's name), how many children they have, and so on.

This information will help you later offer personalized experiences through your loyalty program. (More on that below).

You can also create events so that every time a customer completes a certain action, it's delivered to Gameball and the customer is awarded points. Event here means an action or a series of actions performed by your customers that can be tracked by Gameball so that you can reward your customers based on these actions. Through your Gameball dashboard, you can configure a reward for players who complete their profile.

In a way, this allows you to collect customer data, while your customers are rewarded with points they can use in multiple ways later on.

Direct Rewards: Birthday

Who doesn't love a birthday gift? Especially if it's a surprise!

For this, we recommend you configure a reward and a badge for players on their birthday. We have multiple birthday badges already available on Gameball or you can create your own to include your brand's logo.

On a customer's birthday, you can reward them with the birthday badge and give them a number of points to make them feel special.

If you're worried about customers adding multiple birthdays to get multiple rewards, don't worry, we're one step ahead of that. While the date of birth may be edited, Gameball only allows customers to get the birthday reward once a year.

So if it's 10 February and your customer says their birthday is 15 February and later edits this to 15 March, they only get the birthday bash once this year.

If your platform doesn't support customer birthday info, customers can add it directly into the Gameball widget once you activate the birthday challenge.

Whether or not they log on to your store or platform on their birthday, they'll get a reward.

You can have Gameball send them an email with their birthday gift and redirect them back to your platform to sign in, see what they got, and use their points.

You can learn more about setting up the birthday challenge via our Help Center.

Anniversary

Another personalized reward option that customers can enjoy is their anniversary – with your store.

Every year, your customers get a reward on the day signed up on your platform. It’s a great way to celebrate those loyal customers who have been around year after year. You can also have Gameball send them an email on their anniversary to redirect them back to your platform.

For the anniversary reward, you can give customers a badge and points or a badge and a limited time discount or freebie, or just the badge.

Badges on Gameball are earned through challenges. Create an anniversary challenge to your customers and celebrate their membership every year. Check our help center on more info on how to create an anniversary challenge.

In case you’re wondering, you can also create an anniversary badge for your platform anniversary for your customers to celebrate with you!

Let's say your store or business has been around since January 1, 2018. Every year, on January 1, your customers will have marked an anniversary. You can schedule a challenge through your Gameball dashboard on the date of your anniversary and decide early on what customers get then.

Based on Shopping Behavior

Another idea is to use player data to reward your players. You can use player properties, player tags, or player actions to reward them.

The tags are the ones you include on your Gameball dashboard that define your various customer segments.

Gameball also allows you to set up various rewards for each type of customer based on their data and behavior.

For example, you can set up special rewards and discount coupons for customers who repeatedly buy a specific type of product.

So you can configure a challenge through Gameball where you reward customers for buying 10 electronics products from your store over a course of one year. In return, customers win a badge of an Electronics Fan and 1000 points!

More Ideas for Personalization

We've covered the 4 main ways you can personalize your rewards and engage your customers. But we're not done yet.

We've got 2 more super-tips for personalization:

-         Personalized messages

-         Personalized emails

By the way, you don't have to do everything at once and feel overwhelmed. The setup is easy and all you need to decide is when you want to reward customers and then how you're going to do that. 

Let's get back to personalizing the experience for your customers, which will keep them coming back to your business.

Personalized Messages

Based on your customer data, you can send customized messages targeting a specific type of customer, announcing your on-sale items, promoting for an event, or even celebrating the special reward they got for completing a certain action.

To get the most of personalized or customized messages, we recommend you:

1. Be human: Customers hate automated messages but the secret to doing it right is to be human in the way you talk to your customers. They'll feel as if you, the store owner or marketing manager, are talking to them directly.

2. Segment your customers: Remember your customers are different so your messages need to be different.

3. Tailor the customer experience: This means that you shouldn't send the same message for different requirements or actions. For example, if a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn't check out, you'll want to send them a push notification or pop-up to remind them and incentivize them to check out. You don't want a generic notification of trending items on your store.

Personalized Emails

For every achievement a player (aka customer) makes, Gameball can automatically send personalized emails on your behalf. 

Sending your players an email on their birthday with a reward inside would surely send them straight to your platform whether they are active customers or customers who make a low number of purchases.

Gameball lets you customize your emails, including: email title, body, and banner image!

This way emails sent out will always have your brand flavor, theme, and tone of voice. So make sure to write a catchy email message to your customers.

For each of the rewards mentioned above, Gameball lets you notify your players by email to motivate them to come back to your platform and use their rewards. So, make sure to make the most out of it!

If you'd like to personalize emails even further and offer special discounts or ask customers to participate in a survey you're doing, you can do so through Gameball's integration with ActiveCampaign.

Learn more about Gameball email feature and how to customize your customer emails in this article.

Start Personalizing Now

You've now uncovered the secrets of personalization and how to create a unique experience for your current and soon-to-be-current customers.

The first step is to decide what you want to do and create your challenges and events accordingly.

For example, both the birthday and anniversary challenges are one-time-a-year events. You can get to configuring them and your message and badge so you don't have to worry about it till the end of the year.