Loyalty programs in ecommerce

3 min read
Loyalty in Ecommerce cover photo

Challenge

Loyalty programs for shoppers in both online and physical stores are still an effective and basic tool for generating sales and boosting customer engagement. 

Synerise has developed many possibilities for creating and managing such programs and offers multiple ready-made solutions described below. 

Business Background 

For a customer from the retail industry we prepared a custom loyalty program dedicated to users who made online purchases in their e-shop. 
The main assumption was that the users could gain 1 point for every 1 unit of currency spent.  

But creating the program was just the start. To be effective, customers have to be engaged and encouraged to take part in the program and use their discounts. This was our main goal of the campaign. The solution was to use personalized dynamic content to engage them in every step of the funnel. 

Here’s how we prepared the program for our client and you can apply the same ideas when constructing your own dedicated program. 

How to set it up

Step 1 CHOOSE THE SEGMENTS YOU WANT TO ENGAGE IN YOUR PROGRAM  

We started by selecting users segments for our campaign. In Synerise you can expand and narrow down the segment criteria easily and choose other assumptions in the same simple way. 
We took two main conditions into consideration: 

  • Account status (registered/ not registered)
  • Active promotions (if he activates any promotion / or not)

Based on this we created 3 segments of customers: 
1st segment: users who did not have an account and did not use any coupon  
2nd segment: users with an active account but who did not activate any coupon in the application 
3rd segment: users with an active account in the application and an active promotion  

Step 2 DECIDE WHICH FUNNEL YOU WANT TO USE

After choosing the segment, you have to take a look at your shopping path and choose one in which dynamic content will be displayed to your customers. It is important to choose the places on your website where you want to add your campaign. 
In our case it was a shopping path, determined by the following steps: 

  1. Visiting the product page
  2. Pop-up displayed after adding the product to the basket
  3. Basket with the chosen product

Those were the places where we have added the dynamic campaign for each segment.

Step 3 ADD PERSONALIZED CONTENT AT EVERY STEP OF THE JOURNEY FOR EVERY SEGMENT

Finally, we came to the last and the most important step.  
We created different content for every segment. Here’s what it looked like in practice. 

Segment 1: Users who did not have an account and did not use any coupon

  • If a user from segment 1 visited the product page, he first saw dynamic content with a number of points.
  • When he added a product to his cart, a pop-up displayed the second dynamic content campaign, which informed users about the privilege of membership in the loyalty club.
  • When user went to the cart page, he saw another dynamic content campaign with a banner encouraging him to join the club and use the discounts after logging in.
Message to users who did not have an account and did not use any coupon encouraging to registration

Segment 2: Users who have active account but did not activate any coupon in the application. 

  • When a user from this segment went to the product page, they saw the same banner as users from the first segment with the number of points available for a product.
  • When he added the product to the basket, he saw the banner on a pop-up with the information that he could choose to activate coupons in the loyalty club.
  • When the user went to the cart he saw a banner that informed him that he could activate the coupon and enjoy the benefits of the loyalty club.
Message to users who have active account but did not activate any coupon in app encouraging to activating the promotion

Segment 3: Users who had an active account in the application and an active promotion 

  • When this user got to a product page he saw a dynamic banner with the number of points he could gain for buying the product.
  • After adding the product to the basket, a pop confirmed that his coupon was active. This segment saw the calculated discount based of the coupon already applied, so the price with the discount was shown.
  • When the user got to the cart he saw a banner with the information that the coupon was active and that he could use the benefits of the loyalty club.
Message to users who had an active account in app and an active promotion encouraging to try other benefits from the club

Check in details how to create this campaign.

Summary

The most important thing in every loyalty program is encouraging new users to register and to actively use the benefits of membership. 
Dynamic content is a good solution for this and can be very easy to implement at every stage of the consumer journey.  
These cases can be good examples of how you can start and can flexibly meet the needs of different kinds of stores and you can start your journey from those scenarios.