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Successful Loyalty Programs: Key Considerations and Best Practices
As industries mature, new customer acquisition gets more and more expensive. The mobile games, and each of its sub-genres, have certainly been no exception. This dynamic makes it ever more important to retain customers longer and increase their LTV.
A well-designed loyalty program can be a powerful tool to foster customer retention, increase brand loyalty, and drive repeat purchases. However, not all loyalty programs are created equal, and the difference between success and failure often hinges on a few critical factors.
In this article, we'll explore the two most important aspects of designing a successful loyalty program: offering a compelling customer value proposition and ensuring ease of use and accessibility.
In the next article, we'll discuss what else successful programs do that unsuccessful ones do not, providing insights into how you can design a loyalty program that truly resonates with your customers.
Customer Value Proposition: The Foundation of Loyalty
The heart of any loyalty program is its value proposition. This refers to the benefits and rewards that the program offers to its members. To create a compelling value proposition, it's crucial to understand what your customers value most, then design the program to align with those desires. The more meaningful and relevant the rewards, the more likely customers are to engage with your program regularly. And of course, the more they engage, the more they fall in love with your game.
The first step in creating a strong value proposition is understanding your customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors. It often requires player behavior analysis, and usually direct feedback from your customers. When you partner with playAWARDS, we can help you with this.
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What motivates them to make an in-app purchase?
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What kind of rewards would make them stick with your app over a competitor?
Understanding Player Needs and Preferences
Once you have a clear understanding of what your players value, the next step is to design rewards that are both desirable and attainable.
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When considering "owned and operated" rewards such as in-game currencies, you must determine how to make the rewards significant enough to encourage continued engagement but not so costly to your business that they undermine profitability. playAWARDS can help with this!
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When considering "partner" rewards, there's a wide-open field of options for you to explore. playAWARDS takes this into consideration and works with you to identify, vet, and sign partners that will work for your app.
It's also important to ensure that the rewards structure is balanced—if rewards are too difficult to earn, customers may lose interest; if they are too easy, the perceived value may diminish. If you lean too heavily into in-app benefits vs. partner rewards or vice versa, you'll create disengagement with players who are only interested in the other.
Consider offering tiered rewards or benefits that increase in value as customers engage more with your brand. This not only incentivizes higher levels of participation but also creates a sense of progression and achievement for your players.
Finally, it's not just the rewards that should be meaningful. The earning process should feel meaningful and integrated as well. We refer to this as a "deep integration" into your game. This means not just bolting the loyalty program on, but having it feel like an element of and have a presence in every aspect of your app, from game play to the main menu to liveops events to sales and more. This level of integration will make the full loyalty loop of earning and redeeming meaningful to players. This means something different in every app, so be sure to work with playAWARDS to design a deep integration loyalty experience for your app.
Designing Meaningful Rewards
To keep the value proposition fresh and exciting, it's important to regularly update and refresh the rewards you offer. This could involve seasonal promotions, limited-time offers, or the introduction of new rewards based on player feedback or emerging trends. By continuously evolving the program, you can maintain customer interest and prevent the program from becoming stale.
playAWARDS will work with you to vary your in-app benefit rewards over time. We're also constantly signing and announcing new partners, which creates wonderful opportunities to refresh the catalog and remind players that the rewards store stays fresh.
Regularly Refreshing the Offerings
Ease of Use and Accessibility: Making Loyalty Simple and Engaging
Even the most compelling rewards won't matter if customers find your loyalty program difficult to use. A successful loyalty program must be simple to understand, easy to join, and seamless to participate in. The more intuitive and user-friendly the program, the more likely customers are to engage with it consistently.
The first interaction a customer has with your loyalty program is often during the enrollment process. This process can be cumbersome or time-consuming. That's why with playAWARDS, all players are automatically "enrolled" (start earning loyalty points and tier points). It's not until the player goes to more meaningfully engage for the first time – the moment where they are interested in and click to consume their first reward – that we ask them to authenticate with us.
Streamlining the Enrollment Process
Once enrolled, customers should find it easy to understand how to earn and redeem rewards. Complicated points systems, vague terms or rewards restrictions, extra hoops to getting their in-app benefits, or process that feel over cumbersome can all deter players from participating. Successful loyalty programs typically use straightforward, transparent systems where customers can quickly see their points balance, understand how points are earned, and know exactly what they can redeem them for. This is our ambition with the playAWARDS Loyalty Center.
In addition, we recommend that you offer multiple ways for customers to earn rewards, such as making purchases, logging in, deeper engagement with your game, completing liveops events, and more. This not only increases opportunities for earning but also helps keep customers engaged with your app in the ways in which you wish for them to.
Simplifying the Earning and Redemption Process
Technology plays a critical role in ensuring the ease of use of a loyalty program. Many successful programs leverage mobile apps, personalized emails, and digital wallets to make it easy for customers to track their rewards, receive notifications, and redeem offers. Players need a central hub where they can manage their loyalty account, view offers, and see their status. playAWARDS has created an SDK to support ALL of this getting done INSIDE your app. Additionally, we continually iterate on the consumption flow and constantly work to improve the experience in the loyalty center.
Additionally, integrating your loyalty program with any other e-commerce platform, website, or POS system you have can create a seamless experience for customers. playAWARDS has worked tirelessly to provide interfaces and integrations with both apps and rewards partners to streamline the redemption experience. The goal is to make participation in the program as effortless as possible, so players can focus on enjoying the benefits.
The Right Technology Makes for a Seamless Experience
Wrapping Up
In this article, we discussed the key considerations and best practices of successful loyalty programs, including both customer value proposition and ease of use. In your efforts to craft the ideal value proposition, you must focus on understanding your players' needs and preferences, curating a set of meaningful rewards that speak to those needs, then regularly refreshing the offerings. As it relates to ease of use, you want to make it easy to enroll, easy to earn, and easy to redeem. This is where playAWARDS technology can help!
When you partner with playAWARDS, we help you every step of the way, providing both our rich, mature technology suite, but also our team of experienced Professional Services, including rewards partner services, BI and economy services, marketing, player development, and more.
Finally, remember that crafting and optimizing the right loyalty program for your players isn't easy and won't happen overnight. But if you have patience and get it right, then there's a BIG payoff in the end.