Going the Distance: Four Ways to Build a Better Customer Loyalty Program for Your Brand

It’s easy enough for a customer to join your loyalty program, especially when you’re offering an incentive such as discounts. All your customer has to do is give out some basic information, and voila! They’re in the fold, a brand new loyalty member with your company. From there, it’s happily ever after. You offer the perks; they stand solidly by you, bringing you their continued business. Simple. Or is it? In reality, just how many of those customers are act ively participating in your loyalty program? Do you know? Sure, loyalty program memberships are on the rise according to market research company eMarketer, having jumped 25 percent in the space of just two years. However, that figure may be a bit misleading. The truth is that, while loyalty program sign-ups may be more numerous, active participation in such programs is actually in decline. At the time of the study, the average US household had memberships in 29 loyalty programs; yet consumers were only active in 12 of those. That’s just 41 percent. And even that meager figure represents a drop of 2 percentage points per year over each of the preceding four years, according to a study by loyalty-marketing research company COLLOQUY.

When discounts just aren’t enough

So what’s a brand to do? How can you make your loyalty program worth your customer’s while—as well as your own? After all, gaining a new loyalty member doesn’t mean much if your customer isn’t actively participating in your program. Consider this: Does your customer loyalty program offer members anything different from what your competitors are offering? Chances are your program includes discounts. That’s a given. And what customer doesn’t appreciate a good discount? But when every other company out there is providing this staple benefit in comparable amounts, it becomes less and less likely that customers will remain loyal to any one particular brand. Frankly, it’s all too easy for customers to get lost in a sea of loyalty member discounts. They’re everywhere. In fact, just under half of internet users perceive that all rewards programs are alike, according to a 2015 eMarketer survey. The key to success, then, is to differentiate your business from the crowd. If you can offer your customers something unique and valuable beyond the usual discount, chances are they’ll be more likely to stick with your brand. Here’s some inspiration from companies who get it.

Virgin: Reward more purchases with more benefits.

That’s not to say you need to get rid of discounts entirely. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Customers still love a good discount. The goal is to be creative in terms of the loyalty perks you offer. Take the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, for example. As part of its loyalty program, the airline allows members to earn miles and tier points. Members are inducted at the Club Red tier, from which they can move up to Club Silver and then Club Gold. Here, it’s not just a discount. It’s status. And people respond to feeling important, elite. Still, even where the rewards themselves are concerned, Virgin is motivating loyalty customers with some pretty attractive offers. At the Club Red tier, members earn flight miles and receive discounts on rental cars, airport parking, hotels and holiday flights. But as members rise in tiers, they get even more. At the Club Silver tier, members earn 50 percent more points on flights, access to expedited check-in, and priority standby seating. And once they reach the top, Club Gold members receive double miles, priority boarding and access to exclusive clubhouses where they can get a drink or a massage before their flight. Now that’s some serious incentive to keep coming back for more. Discounts are still part of the equation – but they are designed with innovation and personal value in mind, elevating them to more than just savings.

Amazon Prime: Pay upfront and become a VIP.

What if your customers only had to pay a one-time upfront fee to get a year’s worth of substantial benefits? It may not sound like the smartest business idea at first glance. But take a closer look. Amazon Prime users pay a nominal $99 a year to gain free, two-day shipping on millions of products with no minimum purchase. And that’s just one benefit of going Prime. It’s true that Amazon loses $1-2 billion a year on Prime. This comes as no surprise given the incredible value the program offers. But get this: Amazon makes up for its losses in markedly higher transaction frequency. Specifically, Prime members spend an average of $1,500 a year on Amazon.com, compared with $625 spent by non-Prime users, a ccording to a 2015 report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Patagonia: Cater to customer values.

Sometimes, the draw for consumers isn’t saving money or getting a great deal. The eco-friendly outdoor clothing company Patagonia figured this out back in 2011, when it partnered with eBay to launch its Common Threads Initiative: a program that allows customers to resell their used Patagonia clothing via the company’s website. Why is this program important to customers? And how does it benefit Patagonia? The company’s brand embraces environmental and social responsibility, so it was only fitting that they create a platform for essentially recycling old clothing rather than merely throwing it away. The Common Threads Initiative helps Patagonia build a memorable brand and fierce loyalty by offering its customers a cause that aligns with deep personal values. OK, so their customers get to make a little money, too. Everybody wins.

American Airlines: Gamify your loyalty program.

If you’re going to offer your customers a loyalty program, why not make it f un? After all, engagement is key to building a strong relationship with your customer. And what better way to achieve that goal than making a game of it. American Airlines had this very thing in mind when it created its AAdvantage Passport Challenge following its merger with USAirways. The goal: find a new way to engage customers as big changes were underway. Using a custom Facebook application, American Airlines created a virtual passport to increase brand awareness while offering members a chance to earn bonus points. Customers earned these rewards through a variety of game-like activities, from answering trivia questions to tracking travel through a personalized dashboard. In the end, participants earned more than 70 percent more stamps than expected – and the airline saw a ROI of more than 500 percent. The takeaway: people like games.

Stand out from the crowd.

Your approach to your customer loyalty program should align with your overall marketing approach. Effective branding is about standing out, not blending it. Being memorable is key. To this end, keep in mind that loyalty programs are no longer a novelty. That means that yesterday’s strategies won’t work moving forward, so look for ways to rise above the noise, setting yourself apart from the cloying drone of countless other cookie-cutter programs.

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Small Changes, Big Impact: 5 Things You Can (and Should!) Do Today to Boost Your Website’s Performance

Every spring it happens like clockwork: the temperatures get warmer, the days get longer and everything in nature becomes more vibrant and colorful. Along with these changes in the great outdoors comes the irresistible urge to clean house and embrace a fresh start. Why not keep that motivational momentum going and apply it to your business – and, more specifically, to your website – as well? After all, there’s no time like the present to sweep away the old and outdated and bring in fresh new ideas and technologies. But you don’t necessarily need to dive head-first into a full redesign and all of the time and expense that entails to reap measurable results. Instead, here are five small steps you can – and should! – take today to ensure that your site is up-to-date, relevant and doing all it can to bring you new customers and grow the community around your brand:

1. Reposition your contact form.

For most website owners – especially those in service-based businesses such as law, accounting, consulting, real estate, etc. – the key “win” for their site is when it motivates a visitor to request more information or schedule a meeting. Contact forms are a ubiquitous website staple intended to provide a convenient – and highly measurable – avenue to initiate communication between an interested prospect and a company. However, perhaps because they are so commonplace, all too often these forms are given little strategic thought, resulting in a cookie-cutter name/email address/phone number format that yields more bogus spam submissions than legitimate new business opportunities. However, there is one simple change you can make that has been shown to get better results: reposition your standard “Contact us” form as an “Ask our experts” feature. By doing so, you shift the focus of the form to providing your visitors with an opportunity to submit a question that is specific to their needs and concerns. Rather than feeling like they are opening themselves up to an endless barrage of solicitation calls and emails, your visitors will sense that they are initiating a dialogue with an expert who will help them solve their particular problem. Make sure to respond to all inquiries within 24 hours, provide helpful advice that is free of charge and tailored to your prospect’s situation, and leave the door open to continue the conversation in a future meeting or phone call. By doing so, you will establish an important foundation of trust and confidence with your potential new client that will make them more inclined to engage your professional services. I have personally seen the submission rates on these types of forms increase dramatically. On one site where this small change was implemented, form submissions jumped from one or two per week to one or two per day – all legitimate business opportunities that were sparked simply by repositioning the focus of the form.

2. Productize your offering.

Another challenge that professional services organizations face in creating a website that works as an effective customer conversion engine is that they do not sell a specific product but rather a suite of services that can be customized to each client’s specific needs. This makes it terribly hard to market to visitors who come to their site and simply want to know “What exactly does this company sell, and how much does it cost?”. Because there are so many variables to the company’s offerings, there is not a quick and easy answer to these questions. If this challenge sounds familiar to you, one approach you can try is to “productize” what you have to offer. Create a bundle of services with a fixed price, and market that package on your site in a simple, straightforward manner that makes your offering easy to understand and helps visitors feel like doing business with your company is as simple as buying a product off the shelf at a store. This is exactly what my company did with some of the technology consulting services that we offer. Instead of only listing the array of services we provide, we also created a product that representing a very specific offering. This made it so much easier to answer the “What do you sell?” question, and it gave us something tangible to promote in our marketing campaigns. In reality, this approach in no way limited the range of services we are able to offer our clients; rather, it merely served as a vehicle to open doors to new opportunities and made it easier to start conversations with new customers for whom we could ultimately provide a custom-tailored solution. Examine the services that you offer, and work with your marketing team to create an appealing package that you can market – understanding all the while that this “product” is really just a means for you to connect with customers and begin the sales process with something tangible that they can easily understand.

3. Lose your home page carousel.

One simple change that I have seen many websites make in the past year or so is to remove animated image carousels from their home pages. These carousels have long been a popular fixture of website design, but the reality is that they can sometimes do more harm than good. Home page carousels typically feature giant, screen-spanning images which carry with them heavy download requirements both for the images and for the scripts that power the animation sequences, thereby creating a potential stumbling block in performance for users on mobile devices or with slower connections. Additionally, studies have shown that click-through rates on animated carousels are extremely low, and they drop significantly from the first slide to the subsequent ones. This is why many companies are replacing rotating carousels with a singular static message instead. This one change can greatly reduce a page’s download size (when my company did this on our home page, its file size decreased by 75 percent) while having little to no effect on actual user engagement or click-through. In fact, because the page now loads more quickly, many sites actually see an uptick in user engagement because fewer people are abandoning a site due to poor performance. Do you have a carousel on your website? If so, do you know whether or not it is working well for you? Your marketing team may be able to do some A/B testing between a version of your site with this animation feature and one without it to see which performs better. Since carousels do work well for some sites (like news organizations or sites with lots of frequently updated content), having this data can help you determine whether or not it’s time to ditch the carousel.

4. Update your image(s).

Stock photography is something of a necessary evil of website design, as more often than not, companies don’t have the budget to execute a full-fledged custom professional photo shoot. However, not all stock images are created equal. Stock photos that are overused or that look so obviously staged that they scream of their “stockiness” can cheapen a site’s design and leave visitors with a negative overall impression of the site. Replacing those images can make a big difference in a site’s visual appeal. If your site’s imagery is stale, you can make some simple image swaps to freshen it up. If you are going to change out old stock images for new stock images, make sure to seek out photos that feel fresh and that are not terribly overused (most stock photo sites will tell you how many times an image has been downloaded). An even better option is to try to add some unique imagery to your site. This could be photographs that you hire a professional to take or – in keeping with one of this year’s hottest trends – custom illustrations that you commission from an artist. If your budget is tight, incorporating even just one or two such one-of-a-kind images in key spots on your site can really boost its visual impact. For instance, if you lose that aforementioned carousel on the home page and replace it with one truly compelling static image and message, it can make a really powerful first impression on your visitors.

5. Publish less.

Most experts agree that publishing original, value-add content on your site on a regular basis is key to optimizing its success – both from a sales and marketing standpoint and as an advantage in the never-ending battle of SEO. While I agree with this approach in principal, for many companies, the drive to publish regularly has resulted in putting out mediocre content simply to meet an inflexible standard of frequency. This is often an entirely counterproductive effort, as content that lacks in quality, original thought or value for the reader reflects poorly on the organization and its perceived level of expertise. Publishing original content to your site on a regular basis is still a best practice, but that content must offer value for it to succeed. Let’s say a visitor comes to your site and is impressed to find that you publish new articles weekly or monthly; however, once they click through the headline to see what they can glean from your writing, if what they find is mediocre at best, what motivation do they have to return to your site again in the future, let alone entrust you with their hard-earned dollars? If, on the other hand, you publish new content less frequently, but everything you produce is of the highest quality, then that same visitor will know that the time they spend on your site will always be worth their while, and they will look forward to the next time you post something new. Re-examine your current content marketing strategy, and ask yourself whether you are focused on quality or frequency. If it’s the latter, commit instead to writing less but to improving the quality of what you offer on your site. While this change may not have an immediate impact, it will absolutely yield long-term results that your visitors will appreciate and respond positively to.

In closing

Eventually, your website will need a redesign, but in the meantime you can make small, strategic, surgical changes that will pay immediate dividends in your site’s success. This approach of implementing gradual but regular modifications will also benefit you when it does come time for that full redesign. By making intelligent improvements over time, you will ultimately be closer to your end goal, leaving less to accomplish with the redesign and thereby paving the way for a smoother and less costly project.

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Breaking Boundaries

There are hundreds of millions of bloggers worldwide, each with their own unique voice and motivations. Some blog for profit or self-promotion, others use blogs to build online communities and provide a forum for sharing common interests – the list goes on and on. For me, the reasons are more personal. Even now, I get butterflies as I tell you the story of how becoming a blogger has changed my life. I started my blog, Around Applegate, in March 2009, seeking inspiration and guidance on the path to finding personal and professional fulfillment. For the past 12 years, I have been a graphic designer. In theory, being a designer is the glamorous part of marketing. In practice, very rarely do I get to execute my ideas from conception to completion. There are creative directors, art directors and clients that intercede and shape the end product. Through the process of editing, originality and innovation are routinely compromised. All too often I find my place in the process is reduced to a production artist. This is not the role I desire. I want more; I need a true creative outlet. I was introduced to blogging in an unlikely way: through a search for "tile inspiration." I was directing a photo shoot at work that involved a tile floor. Not knowing much about tile patterns, I turned to Google for guidance and landed on Young House Love, a blog started in 2006 by a young married couple living in Richmond, Virginia, to update friends and family on their kitchen renovation project. Three years and more than 1,000 posts later, the site has developed a cult following of home improvement DIY-ers from around the world and received more than 1 million hits last month alone. Young House Love was the first blog I laid my eyes on, and I was instantly captivated. I became caught up in a brave new world, one in which ideas and inspiration thrive in the absence of ego, corporate politics, rules or procedures. A culture of sharing without censors. An intoxicating level of creative freedom that’s sometimes risky but always exciting. Then and there I decided to start a blog of my own. Although it takes a matter of minutes to set up a blog, it took me a little over a month to determine the look and content that would define Around Applegate. The blog came to encompass all things creative. It’s a space where the things that inspire me creatively can live and, in turn, inspire others. I have written about everything from Twitter to my grandma's Italian cookies to sites that interest me and the people around me that love and support me. And somewhere along the way, through the process of documenting change, what I love and what I’ve learned, I have found clarity in the ideas that will shape the next phase of my life and my next business venture. Admittedly, keeping up with posts has been a challenge. Wanting to have interesting things to write about, I am constantly involving myself in the world around me along with researching and completing new projects. I must admit, I'd rather get started on the next project than stop to write about the one I just finished. But I have to remember to feed my blog, to nourish it with content in the same way it's nourished me with excitement to create. It’s something that I have never before possessed at this level. It’s like being in love. Writing a blog has become more satisfying than anything in my life to date. No relationship, no promotion at a job, no prize won or goal met has come close to the fulfillment Around Applegate has given me. It has helped me to realize my niche. It has let me be who I am without judgment. It has let me create without criticism. It has given me the chance to reach people I don't even know and inspire them to do the same. All without cost. Feed the blog, and the blog feeds you. Break out of your boundaries: start a blog of your own and see where it leads you. Not sure where to begin? Become a follower of blogs that appeal to your interests and passions. You’ll be amazed by the smart, funny, clever, creative, insightful bloggers out there, and chances are you’ll find you have your own ideas that must be shared with the world. I’ll leave the last word to two blogging superstars, Seth Godin and Tom Peters:

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In the Driver's Seat

Fame Foundry has partnered with NASCAR driver Ryan Newman to develop his new official website. The site is home to the Ryan Newman Fan Club, which marks its 10th anniversary in 2011 with over 10,000 fans worldwide. When the site, which has been completely redesigned and re-engineered from the ground up, is unveiled on February 16, it will introduce a revolutionary new experience for fan club members that will allow them to be part of every race and every event like never before.

More than killer design

The new RyanNewman.org will offer all the expected benefits of a fan club site, including schedules, stats and merchandise as well as behind-the-scenes photos, videos and news from the Ryan Newman Racing organization. However, more importantly, it will be the only site of its kind in NASCAR built around an exclusive members-only micro social network. Here members can engage with other fans of Ryan Newman and NASCAR in ways never before possible as part of a thriving virtual community created by and for the fans.

Micro social network, major engagement

"Fame Foundry created something never seen before, allowing members to interact in new ways and providing them a central location to call their own." – Ryan Newman Members can post their own photos and videos to the site, making the community as much about the fans as it is about Ryan Newman. They can also participate in discussions that are much more robust than traditional message boards, as they are interactive and pervasive throughout all types of content and every event. In addition, fans can interact in real time anytime in live chat rooms. All photos, videos, discussions, news and chats will be aggregated by event so members can choose to browse content either by type or by event. The site is built to elevate the most popular member photos, videos and discussions, rewarding those who make great contributions and making it easy for members to find the best content. Additionally, each member will have an enhanced user profile page that provides a snapshot of all their recent activity across the site and highlights their most popular contributions. While the technology driving the site is quite advanced, the interface is highly intuitive so that members of all ages will find it easy and pleasurable to use. Fans can even remain active in the community when they are on the go, as the site is compatible with mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines

Because racing fans thrive on competition, members who start discussions or who post photos and videos can earn points – or votes – from other members that will put them in the chase for a spot on the fan club leaderboard. Points will be tallied all season long, with prizes awarded to the top performer each month as well as the top overall points earner for the season.

Giving fans and sponsors what they really want

"It has been exciting to watch the Ryan Newman website come to life,” said Newman. “The site is much more than its cool design. Fame Foundry created something never seen before, allowing members to interact in new ways and providing them a central location to call their own. It also provides more value to our sponsors than we have ever had before." “We are looking forward to launching the new Ryan Newman website,” said Greta Ray Anderson, director of the Ryan Newman Fan Club. “Not only will fan club members be able interact in meaningful ways with each other on the site, but Ryan will have his own profile, allowing him to engage with members directly by posting status updates, photos, videos and comments. RyanNewman.org will now become the exclusive go-to destination for the Ryan Newman fan community.” For a tour of the site and its many unprecedented features, check out this exclusive preview.

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