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We surveyed over 400 new ecommerce brands that joined the LoyaltyLion platform from the second half of 2020 to the first half of 2021. We wanted to find out the key features and functionalities they considered important when choosing a loyalty provider.
We found that users want features that aren’t found in classic, off-the-shelf loyalty platforms. They want more advanced functionality and, in particular, flexibility to customize their loyalty experience.
Top of the list were features that let merchants offer a unique loyalty experience that supports their brand values and identity. Users also wanted features that allow them to deliver more personalized interactions with customers.
Keep reading for the top five features you should look for when considering a loyalty platform for your business or request a callback with one of our Loyalty Consultants to learn more about all these features.
1. Customizability
There are a lot of off-the-shelf loyalty programs available in the market. This leads to lots of merchants taking their customers’ loyalty for granted. It also doesn’t challenge them to think about the kind of loyalty experience they provide their customers. The LoyaltyLion platform is one of the most customizable platforms in the market and offers different levels of customization based on the resources, capabilities and size of your team.
So what customization is available to you?
Our Loyalty Page Editor lets you create an instant loyalty page displaying your customers’ loyalty information clearly (like their points balance or which tier they’re in) and mobile friendly way. You can also customize the page’s colours palette to match your website’s branding.
It’s also easy to implement custom rules and activities so you can reward customers based on the behaviors that align to your brand ethos the best. For example, Edgard & Cooper, the pet food brand, lets customers trade in their loyalty points to donate a meal to a shelter dog in need.
Finally, our comprehensive SDK and API support means you can work with developers and ecommerce agencies to build a loyalty experience that mirrors your brand identity. You can create a fully interactive page within your store’s code with no iframe or pop-up.
2. Integrated Loyalty Page
It’s hardly surprising that this feature has made it to number two as it’s a key customization feature that our platform has. An Integrated Loyalty Page allows you to offer a fully on-brand loyalty experience. You’ll be able to create a unique URL for your loyalty program and make it a natural part of every customer journey by embedding loyalty components on product or post-purchase pages.
3. Referral program
Not all referral programs are the same and managing and marketing them isn’t either.
A successful referral program will support and complement your customer acquisition strategy by speeding up the process of turning your customers into loyal ones. You need a loyalty platform that gives you control with minimum setup and maintenance requirements, easy to customize referral rewards to your brand/product and provides sophisticated referral analytics to act on.
More than 50% of people are likely to give a referral if offered a direct incentive, social recognition or access to an exclusive loyalty program. With the lifetime value of a new referral customer being 16% higher than your average customer, you can unlock the potential of referral marketing by using our referral management features to:
- Create refer a friend rules
- Reward referrers with points and rewards
- Set up ESP email triggers for completed referrals
- Send post purchase referral reminders
- Turn reviewers into referrals with an automated referral email after a customer has left a review
- Gather referral insights to see revenue generated and the success of your referral program
4. Review integrations
Customer reviews are a really easy way to create user-generated content. This social proof drives fruitful engagement with customers post purchase and lets you interact with customers to keep them coming back to your store.
88% of customers put as much weight on online reviews as they would on personal recommendations. Our platform integrates with the best in class review platforms in the market, such as Okendo and Reviews.io. The variety and choice of review integrations we have means it is easy for you to extend the loyalty experience by rewarding customers with loyalty points and rewards for leaving their feedback.
Why stop there? Take it to the next level and check out all of our best in class integrations.
5. Loyalty emails
You’ll value this feature a lot if you need simple but effective marketing automation to put your loyalty program at the front of your customers’ minds. You can automatically:
- Send emails to welcome customers to the loyalty program and start building the emotional connection with your customers from day one
- Let them know rewards are available and bring customers back to your store to redeem
- Send monthly reminders of rewards to consistently keep your loyalty program at front of your customers’ minds
- Encourage customers to make referrals to complement your customer acquisition strategy
- Tell customers their points are expiring to create a sense of urgency to redeem rewards
Our emails are also fully customizable so you can design them to match your brand identity.
To sum it all up
The loyalty platform needs of merchants constantly evolve as a business scales. A merchant’s needs are also impacted by ever evolving customer motivations and habits too.
Just look at how ESP integrations became the most sought after feature in 2020 as merchants needed new ways to communicate with customers despite worldwide shut down thanks to the pandemic. With this change, it’s now expected that loyalty platforms integrate with a variety of ESPs as standard.
At LoyaltyLion, we’re continuously working with our merchants to understand their needs and motivations. And it doesn’t end there. We’ll continue to share these insights with youd and use it to inform our short, medium and long term roadmap.
To learn more about our platform features. Contact one of our loyalty experts today and see the features live in action.
About the author
Thuan Bui
Thuan is a Product Marketing Manager at LoyaltyLion. He has worked for global brands leading and executing product management, product marketing, service marketing and portfolio marketing strategies across both B2B and B2C markets. At LoyaltyLion, Thuan manages our product marketing strategy, to make sure our readers are kept informed and learn to get the best out of our new and existing platform capabilities.
