Powerful Promotions

With your engagement strategy in place, our next steps is to ensure you create a compelling promotional plan to drive awareness, trial, purchase and repeat purchase of your key products. After all, the purpose of your loyalty program is to drive profitable behavior  changes. 

As always, we’ve created a checklist of our top ten tips to successfully promote your products, so this chapter outlines out top ten tips to ensure you have a fully optimized promotional plan.

Key Principles for Powerful Promotions

Our experience shows that the best loyalty programs balance their “always-on” concepts with more tactical and exciting campaigns that are relevant and personalized. Your promotional calendar needs to be simple enough to understand, yet dynamic enough to excite. 

We also see an increasing importance in combining both transactional and emotional concepts – connecting with customers in ways that appeal to them on both a practical and on a human level. These top ten tips will explain how.

Top Ten Tips for Powerful Promotions

1. Create consistent concepts that members learn to love and look forward to. The idea is to run simple campaign concepts that the customer learns. For example, if you create a campaign called ‘Treats Tuesdays”, members will realize that there is always a reason to open up the app on Tuesdays because there will be something new. The clear and consistent communication reduces the need for push notifications and you enjoy app openings by design. Other ideas such as “deal of the day, deal of the week” etc are strong winning concepts that are proven to be effective, so even your suppliers will want to join in. 

2. Permanent headline promotion: As well as certain days and times for campaigns, a consistent value proposition such as “Always 50% off” is a headline that everyone can understand, anticipate and enjoy. With a permanent promotional section like this, you teach members that there is always something for ½ price, and suppliers can also plan to support your program at key times of year. 

3. Exclusive Member Pricing: Members love when products are available at preferential pricing no matter how many times they buy – just for being a member. It’s particularly useful to focus on key categories that also build your brand – such as healthy eating. The longer term promotions on new or strategic products can take time for customers to try, but once they do, customers love to tell each other about them. We see great success using this approach for private label food products as well as suppliers who have agreed to become partners for your program, for your mutual benefit. 

4. Focus on your program's currency: Some programs use points, some use coupons, and some use stamps. For simplicity, whatever base currency you use to reward your customers, you should also use for promotional purposes. The more consistency you create, the better your customers will learn and respond.  If you use stamps, try double stamp coupons. If you prefer points, create double/triple points for specific products, categories or specific days. Linking your promotions to the core or foundation of your program is more strategic long-term, and also cheaper for you to operate. This avoids the need for deep discounts so the customer pays full price, but gets more stamps. You can also drive purchases of specific products with bonus points and stamps or even specific “double points days” to drive footfall at quieter times.  We also recommend using your program's core currency to incentivize cross-sell and product trials in new categories that customer’s can explore.

5. Create campaign templates that you can re-use to operate efficiently. We recommend designing at least ten templates for the most common campaigns you will do again and again. Lean loyalty program operations are key to any marketing team. By creating one library of graphics and POS settings that are fully tested and working perfectly, you can then easily schedule the same campaign in new campaign periods over and over again. This also includes approvals from key strategic supplier partners who will always be keen to run new campaigns, so these templates should be valid for at least 12 months, and be ready to use for both new products and mature products. 

6) Focus on Fun: Many of our promotional campaigns succeed because customers find them fun! We have created an entire library of games that tempt and tease your members in ways that they love. The true power of gamification is to drive urgency and exclusivity, while promoting your products in a way that really stands out. We use game concepts such as “hurry” or “chicken” or “how long do you dare to wait?” where the deals get better and better, but the richer the offer, the more likely that stock will run out! And not only do members love them, suppliers do too – any of our digital games can be used to drive sampling, brand awareness and engagement in a way that no other channel can offer.

7) Create your own happy hour: Customers readily understand the idea of a happy hour, so this feature is a clever way to allow coupons to run exactly between the times of your choice. You can focus on specific weekdays when your store is usually quiet, or a specific time of the day or a combination of both.

8) Sharing is Caring: One of the most appealing concepts within our loyalty platform is the ability to create a community connection between your members and their friends and family, using our “sharing” feature. It’s good for new products, good for brands and great for you the retailer. The ideas is to create “share & care content” – promotions that can only be shared. The member cannot use it herself, but she can give it away to a friend. This creates word of mouth, collaboration, buzz and a real sense of community. What better way to create emotional loyalty, with people talking together about your brand, your app, your program and your products. The feature can be designed using free vouchers, rebate coupons, games or even points and stamps and when they have shared, the original “gifting” member herself can be rewarded for her generosity.

9) Personalize content with the power of machine learning. Our machine learning model allows you to combine member insights such as demographics, purchase patterns and usage data alongside complementary insights such as day part, day of the week and weather data. The more campaigns you run, the more our machine learning algorithms can personalize your offers so that every user gets their preferred content first.

10) Use push notifications cleverly and consistently. No matter how great your program is, it can’t succeed without consistent communications that capture your customer’s attention.  Every great relevant offer, every new game and every great “share and care” concept deserves a great “push notification” campaign to ensure a fantastic build up. And don’t forget to build these in to the overall lifecycle of your program, from welcome messages, to birthday messages, to new coupon announcements, as well as reminders on key campaigns, that are intelligently triggered and sent only to members who have not claimed a reward they are entitled to. Our experience shows that push notifications are the most powerful tool for any digital program owner, so make sure you use them cleverly and consistently for optimum results.

Checklist for Powerful Promotions 

This chapter’s checklist as below will help you focus on creating powerful promotions. Use this simple guide to check that you are running great promotions that your members understand and enjoy.