Your Steps to Success

Marketers around the world are continually taking stock and re-looking at their loyalty programs to ensure they are primed for the future.

With that in mind, we in Liquid Barcodes want to ensure that every one of our clients is equipped with a powerful “Playbook for Success,” which is designed to support you with a clear understanding of loyalty best practice principles as well as the operational priorities needed to run a program that truly captivates your customers.

This book is the result of the key strategic insights gathered from the Liquid Barcodes leadership team – industry professionals who have built some of the world’s most innovative loyalty programs in convenience retail. Their learnings are now combined for the first time with practical insights from our customer excellence team that supports your program operations every day, in every country, and in every language our clients need.

We are proud that Liquid Barcodes’ loyalty marketing technology remains the only loyalty technology platform exclusively built to create captivating loyalty programs for convenience retailers and their customers, and we are excited to explain how our “customer connection cycle” framework can be applied to your business to help you achieve exceptional results.

In this article, we showcase our seven steps to success Recruit, Engage, Promote, In Store, Reward, Analyze and Operate, and throughout this book, we will discuss each one in detail, as well as a helpful checklist to implement each feature, step by step as your program grows.

The Customer Connection Cycle

1) Recruiting Your Members

Connecting with customers requires two essential elements – firstly, permission from your customers that their purchases can be tracked and secondly, those customers share their contact details in order to receive your marketing communications.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to recruit your customers as members using all of the channels available to you – in store, by advertising your program (online or offline) or alternatively by leveraging our “referral” feature to build your program by asking existing members to recruit new ones.

2) Engage

The most important aspect of your loyalty program design should focus on how you plan to engage your members. The Liquid Barcodes live loyalty platform uses the principles of gamification at its core, supported by a sophisticated loyalty engine that manages points, prizes, coupons and communications, as well as surveys and sharing features. Even when some of your customers are already loyal to your store, we believe that your relationships can be continually enhanced, so our platform ensures you have a powerful toolbox to engage them.

3) Promote

No matter how you structure your loyalty program, your customers can only join and engage with you when they become aware of your proposition and take action. From automated campaigns for your standard promotions, to more agile communications designed to ensure relevance all year round, this chapter will teach you how to promote your program effectively and efficiently.

Recruit, Engage and Promote – the first three steps to loyalty in convenience retail

4) In Store

In practical terms, the decisions you take on how members identify themselves in your stores will impact how easy it is to connect your customers and your program, and therefore it affects your customers’ willingness to engage. Your loyalty program should remove friction rather than add any delay or inconvenience for members. This chapter will discuss the latest innovations that are delighting customers including the optimum ways you benefit when your program and your point of sale systems are integrated effectively.

5) Reward

Your entire loyalty proposition will determine whether your members feel valued. This chapter will discuss our extensive portfolio of reward features, as well as key insights to help you maintain a balance between instant rewards such as a free coffee for joining, as well as rewards that take time to earn so members have to save their rewards points to claim something special.

The chapter also discusses the appeal of points, games and tier status as well as the explosion of programs enjoying “extreme loyalty” through the use of powerful subscription-based programs which can offer your members unlimited benefits.

6) Analyze

Loyalty program operators have access to an abundance of data, so this chapter discusses what KPIs we recommend and how our Liquid Barcodes platform dashboard displays program performance in real time.

We will also discuss advanced communications concepts such as A/B testing which you can use to capture useful insights and continually optimize your program.

7) Operate

This chapter discusses how to operate your program efficiently, from the creation of your campaign templates in a useful library format, through to the design of personalized communications over the typical life cycle of a member.

We will explain which campaign elements can be automated and which are managed manually and why.

The goal of this chapter is to simplify the day-to-day operations of your program, leaving your team free to create new and exciting concepts that your customers will love.

In closing, you can trust this playbook to become your handbook to success as you build, manage and optimize your relationships with your customers for years to come.