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Loyalty programs are vital for building long-term customer relationships, increasing brand engagement, and driving repeat purchases. By incentivizing ongoing interaction, these programs help businesses retain high-value customers who are more likely to engage, make additional purchases, and become brand advocates. Establishing a process to identify and target likely loyalty members allows businesses to personalize outreach, encouraging customers to enroll and stay active in the program. This targeted approach maximizes engagement and strengthens customer loyalty, directly impacting overall customer lifetime value.

Value-Based Outcome

All BlueConic use cases are associated with one or more Value-Based Outcomes, which are defined areas of focus that help you measure the value of a CDP to your overall business. This use case can be closely related to the Value-Based Outcome of Higher Data Quality, as the main driver for loyalty programs is a consistent stream of customer activity data and an ongoing dialogue to gather more first-party data such as preferences, interests, and purchase history.

Before You Begin

Before you begin implementing loyalty program enrollment tactics, make sure you are familiar with what a CDP use case is and all of the components that will make yours more successful. Once this is done, you can start defining your “Before You Begin” requirements, which includes identifying key stakeholders and target audiences, gathering data sources and credentials, and defining what success looks like.

For this use case, example “Before You Begin” requirements may look something like this:

• Key stakeholders: Marketing and customer loyalty teams
• Target audience: New and existing customers not yet in the loyalty program
• Data types: Customer purchase history, engagement data, customer preferences
• Platforms: Campaign management platform or email service provider
• Measurement and ROI: Loyalty program enrollments, engagement rates, revenue per enrolled customer, and website or channel analytics

Use Case Configuration Steps

Step one: Collect data

When it comes to driving loyalty program enrollment, step one is to collect data to understand when and where to promote the program effectively. While this article will showcase the use of the BlueConic Engagement Listener as a method to accomplish this, it’s important to view it as one potential approach rather than a definitive solution. For businesses in industries like retail, service, or publishing, where frequent customer visits create ample opportunities for engagement, the Engagement Listener can be a powerful tool. However, for businesses with infrequent visitor interactions—such as once-a-year visits—the Engagement Listener may not align with existing engagement models. In these cases, other methods that leverage behavioral or contextual signals specific to those rare visits might be more effective. It’s crucial to evaluate the best approach for your unique business needs, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all solution.

Use the Engagement Listener

The Engagement Listener is available in your BlueConic tenant out-of-the-box and is designed to dynamically categorize visitors into low, medium, and high engagement levels based on their behavior, assigning each an engagement score. Scores are calculated from visits and clicks over time, with recent activity weighed more heavily, and thresholds can be customized for precise segmentation. The Listener will automatically create engagement-based segments and store engagement scores in profile properties for easy targeting across channels and campaigns.

Build your loyalty segment

Before creating a loyalty program enrollment process, you need to define the audience that best aligns with program goals. Start by building a segment that targets potential members based on specific criteria, such as a minimum number of past purchases or a high engagement score, and excludes existing known members of your loyalty program. This ensures your campaign reaches customers who are more likely to enroll and benefit from loyalty incentives.

1. Navigate to the Segments tab of the platform and click the Add Segment button. Give your new segment a name.
2. Now, you can set conditions that define the rules that customers must meet to be included. For this example, we will set up a segment for customers who have made at least three purchases in the past or have a “High” engagement score.
   • Click the select condition dropdown and choose Profile. A list with all available profile properties will appear in a pop-up window. Select the property that is storing previous purchases and choose the “Number in range” option. Set the minimum value to 3.
     
   • Use the "OR" operator and click the select condition dropdown and choose Profile again. Select the property that is storing customer engagement scores (from the out-of-the-box Engagement Listener) and choose the “Number in range” option. Set the minimum value to what you consider a high engagement score.
     
   • Use the "AND" operator and click the select condition dropdown and choose Profile again. Select the property that stores whether a customer is already in the loyalty program and choose the "is empty" option.
     
3. Save your segment.

Step two: Activate data

To activate the segment you just created to identify potential customers you want to enroll in your loyalty program, you have two main execution options:

Option one: Using BlueConic Dialogues

The first option involves creating a BlueConic Dialogue that will collect loyalty program enrollments. This keeps the entirety of this use case configuration within the BlueConic platform.

1. Go to Dialogues in the main menu and click the Add dialogue button.
2. Choose the Lightbox dialogue from the pop-up window and when the new page opens up, name your dialogue and click Save.
   • Note: Loyalty program enrollment can also be served to your website with other dialogue types, like a slide-out or toaster.
3. To set up the dialogue, configure the following settings:
   • Who: Here, you will choose the segment you just created by choosing “Segment” from the Select Condition dropdown menu. Then, search for the name of your segment.
     
   • When: Use the When tab to define the dates and times when this dialogue is visible. By default no rules are set, and the dialogue is unrestricted by date or time. However, you may want to consider using the "Add rule" drop-down menu to:
     • Set a recurrence - Activate this option to select a recurring schedule.
     • Hide after conversion - Use this rule to hide the dialogue from a visitor after they have already clicked or converted on it (i.e., when a customer has signed up for the loyalty program).
     • Show on event - Configure this rule to show the dialogue after a specific event, like making a purchase.
   • Where: In this setting, define the channel(s) you want the dialogue to appear on. For loyalty program enrollment, this will be your main shopping or engagement channel.
   • What: This is where you will define what your dialogue will look like on your website. This is typically left up to your design or branding team, but should include the following basic elements:
     • Messaging that encourages the customer to enroll in your loyalty program and explains its benefits.
     • A form box to collect their email address or contact information.
   • Why: You can leave this setting as the default option or you can choose to configure a unique conversion moment for your dialogue here.
4. Once your dialogue is configured correctly, switch the toggle at the top of the page to “On” and remember to Save your settings.

Option two: Using BlueConic Connections

This option involves sending potential loyalty program candidates to an external system using a BlueConic Connection and messaging them there. When determining which connection is best to use, ask yourself the following questions:

• What platform am I currently using to capture and engage with loyalty program members?
• How often do I want to be able to export your segment audience and what profile properties are required (i.e., email address, consent status, etc.)?
• What event(s) should trigger your loyalty program messaging (i.e., a website visit, social media post engagement, etc.)?

Common Loyalty Program Activation Connections

Once a connection is established to export BlueConic data to a campaign management platform, email service provider (ESP), or loyalty program platform, the rest of the activation process takes place within that system. BlueConic enables seamless data transfer, exporting your personalized customer segments based on real-time behavioral and profile data. From there, you can use these dynamic segments directly within the platform to create and personalize messaging tailored to your loyalty program members.

Step three: Measure outcomes

A critical element of executing any use case is understanding the KPIs against which the results will be measured. For a loyalty program enrollment use case, the most common metric is loyalty program membership over time. However, you may also want to track your segments and their growth over time using the Segment Over Time Insight. Additionally, you can set a growth KPI for your segments and track against that goal using the Segment KPI Insight.

Next steps: Refine and personalize your use case

• Set up a reminder email campaign for potential loyalty program members that were initially targeted but have not yet enrolled
• Consider using loyalty gamification platforms to further engage with your loyalty program members