The Step-By-Step Guide to Loyalty Program Implementation
4 Must-Follow Steps in Implementing a Winning Loyalty App
Why would you burn your money by using mass marketing?
From the idea to a successful implementation of a loyalty app, we're going to show you the steps required in order to implement a successful loyalty app.
You may be searching for a loyalty app, or you may have already implemented one, but it just hasn't been successful. So let's discuss the ideas and what it would take to roll out a successful loyalty app.
Let's break it down and go over the four primary steps that are required in order to implement a successful app. Then we'll cover some of the pitfalls and the common mistakes that everybody makes, and how to avoid those.
STEP ONE: Defining Your Objectives
What are the business goals? The very first thing you want to do is you want to have a clear idea of your end goal and objectives. Your end result. As it's famously said, if you fail to plan, then you're planning to fail. You don't want to fall into that trap.Have a clear, concise and measurable goal.
What is it that you're trying to accomplish by implementing this loyalty app?
Is it to increase sales and revenue? If so, how? How are you going to increase sales and revenue by implementing a loyalty app?
Is it to learn customer data and customer behavior? If so, why is it that customer behavior is so important to you? And then lastly, if you had all of your customer's data through the loyalty app or CDP platform, how are you going to monetize that data? Do you have the means and the resources to monetize that data? And understanding your goals will allow you to create a loyalty app that will better align the app with your business vision and your end goals. Otherwise, you'll be following the herd and you will be doing everything that everybody else is doing and making the same mistakes. And it would just ultimately lead to failure. If you're trying to implement a loyalty app because you're trying to get an email address or a phone number of a customer so you could market back to them somehow and get them back into the restaurant more frequently and get them to spend more money; if that's the end result and the end goal, there's a better way to do that without really implementing a loyalty app.
STEP TWO: Rolling out a loyalty app – Integrating your loyalty app into your restaurant's systems
Just because you released the app or implemented the loyalty app, it doesn't mean that you're going to have a line of people downloading that app that is just simply not going to happen. . It's not always gonna have the same desired outcome that one may expect.
In today's environment, most people are not willing to give you an email address or phone number or yet download an app, another app right on top of all the other apps that they're only going to use once a week and they're going to get a $5 discount. That is just not going to happen. So set your expectations and make sure that you don't set yourself up for failure.
If you're implementing a loyalty app, don't try to use it as a digital coupon book. It's just not going to work. It's not going to have the same impact that it did a decade ago where you would just send out these coupons and everybody would respond to it and come in. Make sure you don't do that, because ultimately when you do that, you're going to devalue your brand and you're going to attract the least profitable customers, the bargain hunters.
You don't want to implement a loyalty app and make it into a digital coupon book and bring in the least profitable customers into the restaurant, because that's going to impact your net margins and your profits. And again, ultimately, it's going to devalue your brand.
The next thing is to ensure that the loyalty app integrates with all of your other systems. So you want to make sure that they target your online ordering to your customer feedback, to your waitlist and reservation. And also very critically, it has to integrate to a customer data platform, aCDP app,hopefully with all that information is being pushed into the CDP and personalizing marketing based on that behavior is where you are actually going to turn a mediocre loyalty program into a very successful loyalty program that differentiates you from everybody else.
Again, just forget mass marketing. You can't do mass marketing and focus on personalized marketing to each individual customer based on their behavior. And now you have not just that information for loyalty customers, but you have it for almost all of your customers. And a key differentiator between a normal CDP and a really