Loyalty: KPIs that Go Beyond the Transaction

While loyalty programs are ultimately about growing revenue, generating lift, and driving frequency, that doesn’t mean transactions are all you should be measuring. In fact, if that is your only key performance indicator, then you’re almost certainly dampening the growth of your loyalty program.

Here are 4 important loyalty program goals you won’t be able to optimize for if you’re only looking at transactions:

1. Keeping Customers Engaged

For a variety of financial, geographic, and other reasons, loyalty customers may not be in a position to convert for long periods of time. If transactions are your only KPI, then your loyalty program is likely heavily slanted toward promotions. That can be alienating to these members who aren’t in the market to buy and cause them to churn out of your program.

But more than that, loyalty member expectations have changed. They’re far less interested in the old school loyalty punch cards and “earn and burn” programs. Today, consumers are looking for loyalty programs to engage with them more. They’re interested in relationships that aren’t so transactional and tap more into their interests, aspirations, and values.

When businesses accomplish that, they keep their brand top of mind with customers so when they are ready to buy, they’re much more likely to buy from you.

2. Building a Brand Community

Another feature of old school loyalty programs that is falling away is the closed nature of those programs. Members were kept on the outside, with no ways to contribute.

Modern loyalty programs give members lots of ways to engage with the brand, whether it’s being active in community forums, taking polls, participating in social media campaigns, or contributing user-generated content. Strong brand communities like this are magnets for new customers, aiding your acquisition efforts.

Also, if your loyalty program allows other members to help one another, then that provides an augmentation of your customer service operations, lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction.

3. Understanding Your Customers Better

Loyalty programs offer boundless opportunities to better understand the needs, wants, aspirations, influences, affinities, and more about your customers. As third-party cookies depreciate, loyalty programs should be a vital source of zero- and first-party data.

In aggregate, this data can help you plan impactful messaging themes, select the right influencers, and make other big decisions. And at the individual level, this data can help you use personalization, segmentation, and automation more effectively, boosting the relevance of your program. 

Together, these will make your loyalty members feel both heard and known, creating a dialogue with those members.

4. Nurturing Brand Advocates

Some of your most valuable customers aren’t big spenders—they’re big influencers. Through their social media posts, blog posts, and word of mouth, they bring new people to your brand, accelerating your acquisition efforts.

However, these influencers are almost completely invisible to your brand if you’re focused solely on measuring transactions. That’s a huge missed opportunity to identify these valuable members and then recognize, encourage, and reward them for their beneficial activities.

It’s critical for brands to measure the financial success of their loyalty program. However, don’t be too narrow in doing so. A myopic focus just on transactions means you’re missing lots of growth and cost-saving opportunities. To capture the wider benefits of having a loyalty program, make sure that you’re also tracking member engagement, member activity, member growth, and member influence.

Want to create a loyalty program that accomplishes all of that?

In our companion on-demand webinar below, we discuss all of those program goals in more detail, along with strategies for how to accomplish them. We also share real-world examples from Oracle CrowdTwist customers. 

We hope you enjoyed “Loyalty: KPIs that Go Beyond the Transaction.” Some of our other on-demand webinars include:

• Content Planning: Advice from Oracle’s Global Digital Marketing Agency
• How to Transform Your Customer Experience with a CDP
• Priorities for a Mail Privacy Protection World
• Modular Email Architecture: The Next-Generation Template

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Need help with your loyalty program? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including a Loyalty Strategy & Technical Services team that can help you craft and execute an effective modern loyalty program.

Talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@Oracle.com.