The percentage of transactions that are tied to specific loyalty members vary across companies but are often much lower than most companies desire. In the battle to drive loyalty and identify every transaction, every stone must be overturned. A variety of factors can impact the effectiveness of your program. Are the benefits of my program clear? Do we provide enough incentive for the customer to change behavior? Are we communicating and reminding customers about the program enough? Or perhaps too much? Is our content, gamification, and messaging both engaging and interesting?
Another key consideration to address is your customer facing staff. The associates, servers and waitstaff are the front lines to champion and accelerate your loyalty program. They are a critical interaction with your customers. Your staff should be asking customers if they are part of the loyalty program. This may be the reminder that the client needs. In-store conversations also provide the opportunity for staff to explain the program benefits and invite customers to sign up.
Sounds so easy, right? So why isn’t it happening?
Recently I visited my brother who works for a large QSR. Of course, I picked his brain about their loyalty program. He was very proud of their program. They had invested a lot of time and money in the development of the program, had a beautiful and engaging mobile app, and great benefits to the customer. Over the course of the five days that I was visiting, we ate there three times. In all three interactions, neither he nor I were ever asked if we were part of the loyalty program, if we’d like to earn rewards for our purchases, or if we had the mobile app. Not once.
He was very disappointed and a little embarrassed after speaking so highly of their program. “I’m going to speak to so-and-so about this on Monday,” was all he could say.
I then asked him if their associates were measured on loyalty attachment. “What do you mean?” he said. “I mean your staff is going to do what they are measured on. So if you want them to get as many transactions attached to a loyalty profile as possible, then you need to start measuring them on that metric,” I told him.
It may be something new in your reporting and analytics, but there is a huge opportunity to drastically increase your loyalty attachment rate. Here are a few steps to make this happen:
Getting as many transactions attached to known users as possible is critical to delivering effective personalized marketing. Incentivizing your front line staff can be a very powerful tool to help you achieve this and change your program!
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