See the sales impact. Track customer activity. Optimize your promotions. Rewarding for every kind of business. Keep the sales coming. Connect your third-party apps.

Kiosk Buddy. Flash Order. These businesses were fairly compensated by Square for their time. Simple, transparent pricing. Start your free trial.

Contact sales. Promote your loyalty program with email and text message marketing. Explore Square Marketing. What is a customer loyalty program? How do customer loyalty programs work? Read more FAQs.

How to Set up a Loyalty Program That Works. Why Your Coffee Shop Needs a Loyalty Program and Tips for How to Start One. Overview of Square Loyalty. Get Started with Square Loyalty Promotions. Choose your region and language Australia English Canada English Canada Français France Français Ireland English 日本 日本語 España Español Espanya Català United Kingdom English United States English Estados Unidos Español.

If you're operating with a growing business, you may not have much flexibility when it comes to your budget. However, you can still offer an attractive rewards program that fosters customer loyalty. While growing businesses don't have the same financial influence as bigger companies, these organizations can still create incentives that motivate customers to return to their stores.

When developing their rewards program, small businesses need to be creative and develop a unique system that mutually benefits both the company and the customer. Take a look at a few common ways that growing companies leverage rewards programs to build customer loyalty. Punch cards are a common reward program for B2C companies.

With it, customers get a business card that gets a hole punched after every purchase. Once customers fill up the card with punches, they receive perks and rewards. The benefit of this system is that customers are guaranteed to return a certain amount of time to receive the reward, making repeat purchases and driving revenue.

Nothing Bundt Cakes has a popular punch card loyalty program that offers customers a free personal cake when they buy 12 of them. Opt-in email solicits the customer's email address for communication with your brand.

Once the customer opts in, your company can email them offers or promotions. Emails are cheap to compose and distribute and can be sent at almost any frequency. You can also use email automation tools to deliver emails efficiently.

Free trials are typically thought of as incentives used to convert potential leads, but you can also utilize them in rewards programs too. For example, say you have a new product or service that's about to launch. You can release a free trial to members of your loyalty program.

This not only acts as a reward for customer loyalty but also works as a marketing tactic that primes your customers for a future sales call.

One way to add value is to look externally at businesses to partner with. By combining your resources, you can create an offer that benefits both you, your partner, and your shared customers. Credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard do this all the time by offering cards sponsored by a specific brand.

While having a credit giant on your side is nice, start by looking for local, non-competitive businesses you can partner with to add more to your offer. You can incentivize loyal customers to become advocates by offering them an attractive reward for customer referrals.

If your offer is good enough, customers will be happy to take the time to network your business with other potential leads. Tracking points is a tried and true method of tracking customer loyalty. The two keys to making these programs successful are a worthwhile incentive and a reasonable timeline to earn the incentive.

For example, if you sell workout gear, people might make purchases fairly often, and there are many different businesses to choose from. Your incentive would need to be valuable — like a free t-shirt — and the buyer would need to be able to earn it quickly enough to keep them striving toward it, but not so quickly that the reward loses value.

Loyalty discounts come with a bonus to the traditional customer loyalty programs we've covered so far. These types of programs allow you to give back to the customer while also collecting data that can help you personalize their buying experience.

Kroger's Community Rewards program is a great example of loyalty discounts in action. To employ this type of program, you'd offer consistent, predictable discounts to customers every time they display an identification marker that associates them with the program.

This might be a QR code, a card, or a phone number. On the back end, your business captures data about what the customer purchased. Over time, you'll understand your customers' trends, patterns, and habits so you can improve their experience, making them even more brand loyal. These types of programs are so strong because the incentive is consistent and predictable, which gives the customer a reason to come back again and again.

Giving back to the community is good for the world and business. A great way to foster customer loyalty is to offer added benefits for shopping with your company — like doing something for the greater good.

Baron Fig makes office materials, a broad market to sell in, but has a program dedicated to planting trees for every item sold. Conscious consumers will think highly of your small business and spread the word about these programs because of their selfless nature.

Community programs are highly effective for small businesses as they can attract customers in your area or from computer screens. Some examples are family-owned gyms offering Zoom classes to make customers feel more included, or having bakeries pop up in local flea markets.

These are all steps small businesses can take to build customer loyalty and social bonding as well. To get started with building your customer loyalty program, you have to prioritize the customer experience.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July and has been updated for comprehensiveness. An actionable guide on building customer loyalty and retention. Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office.

The Beginner's Guide to Building a Customer Loyalty Program Sophia Bernazzani Barron. How to Build Customer Loyalty Adopt a multi-channel customer service system. Provide exceptional service. Be consistent. Focus on the customer, not the competition. Build credibility through customer interactions.

Deliver added value. Share positive customer experiences. Reward customer loyalty. How to Create a Customer Loyalty Program Choose a great name. Create deeper meaning. Reward a variety of customer actions. Offer a variety of rewards. Make your 'points' valuable. Structure non-monetary rewards around your customers' values.

Provide multiple opportunities for customers to enroll. Explore partnerships to provide even more compelling offers. Make it a game. To get the most out of this generous offer, Torrid includes it at the bottom of every marketing email it sends:.

A simple action like opening an email and clicking through it already gets you one point every day. This is a genius way to make sure that people open your emails day after day—until, eventually, a product catches their attention.

Whether you go with a point-based, tiered, or paid membership structure, customer loyalty programs that constantly offer value to its members are the best way to ensure repeat purchases. For your rewards program to work, you need to keep your customers engaged and interested, with status emails, special offers, birthday gifts, and more.

Take inspiration from these seven e-commerce brands that do that just right and build your loyalty program with a strong focus on its perks. Seray is a Product Marketing Manager at Drip.

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Get closer to your customers with Drip. Try Drip free Demo Drip Sign in. Blog Customer Experience May 24, 10 min read. By Seray Keskin. Table of Contents. What Are Customer Loyalty Programs?

Image source: stories. Rather than giving customers financial discounts or free goodies, the brand donates a percentage of sales or pledges to take action on a social, environmental or economic issue.

This encourages customers to buy specific items repeatedly and gives the brand a credible air of corporate social responsibility. It might seem unnecessary, but determining if a loyalty program will be a good addition to your business strategy is important before you start.

This can give you a framework for how much to invest in creating a loyalty program and whether it makes sense to start one at the present time. You should be able to answer the following questions about each of your customers:. Your ideal target audience for customer loyalty programs is an individual who buys from you frequently, but could increase the profit they generate for your brand.

Create KPIs for your customer loyalty program. For example, what sales increase would you like to see, and for which products and regions? Setting these goals for your loyalty program will help you to determine the right approach, progress and ROI at a later stage. Market research might help you to determine the average cost for your industry.

Choosing the right type of customer incentive for your business is important. Is it giving back to the community, ongoing benefits, or an ad-hoc reward that generates freebies? How will you reward their loyalty?

Make incentives clear to new customers with quick benefits highlighted. You may offer initial incentives to join as well as ongoing rewards. If you want customers to keep coming back, keep things simple. That way, purchases from you become a habit.

A clunky and unreliable system or too many caveats and conditions may drive them away. A Customer Effort Score CES survey can be helpful for judging your existing customer loyalty program and customer experience, as well as functionality to analyze unstructured feedback such as survey verbatims or social media posts to automatically assess effort, sentiment, and emotional intensity.

Traditional customer loyalty programs have evolved into more of a subscription, requesting monthly fees in return for a VIP experience. An example might be unlimited free priority shipping, or additional perks and features. It can actually be viewed as a way to save, particularly if the customer shops regularly with you.

Offering a choice of incentives can be useful for broadening the appeal of your customer loyalty program, but understanding your customer segments, preferences and priorities is instrumental.

Make loyalty rewards a progressive achievement by including tiers. This gamification encourages customers to get to the next level and unlock more benefits, adding a competitive element with higher-tier customers feeling proud of their status and lower-tier ones being motivated to achieve the same level of prestige.

Make sure the path to higher tiers is clear, and encourage higher-tier customers to spread the word about incentives. Ready to learn more about Qualtrics? Experience Management. Customer Experience Employee Experience Product Experience Brand Experience Market Research AI.

Experience Management Customer Experience Customer Churn Customer Loyalty Programs. See how XM for Customer Frontlines works Watch On Demand Demo. What is a customer loyalty program? Free eBook: Reimagining omnichannel CX in the age of AI What is the ROI of a customer loyalty program? Loyalty data is a powerful tool Customer loyalty programs can be a rich source of useful data.

The best types of customer loyalty programs, with examples There are a few types of customer loyalty programs to choose from. Depending on the type of customer relationships you have, you can choose how to reward customers for their business with one of four program types: 1.

A paid loyalty program A paid loyalty program exchanges benefits for an ongoing or one-time fee, paid for by the customer. com 2. A tiered loyalty program In this type of loyalty program, customers get different benefits depending on their rank in the system. com 3. com 4. Free eBook: Reimagining omnichannel CX in the age of AI How and when to start your customer loyalty program First, determine if you need a loyalty program It might seem unnecessary, but determining if a loyalty program will be a good addition to your business strategy is important before you start.

How long have they been a customer, and how quickly do they make a payment? What other products do they show interest in, or might show interest in? What competitors or alternative suppliers might they go to? What profit is generated by their business?

How satisfied is this customer with our service and customer experience? What would incentivize this customer to return for another purchase? So, now that you're on board with the value of customer loyalty programs, how do you start one? The first step to a successful customer loyalty program is choosing a great name.

It should incite curiosity and interest and urge customers to participate. Most importantly, you must distinguish it from the myriad of other loyalty programs they might already be part of.

The name should go beyond explaining that the customer will get a disco unt or will get rewards — it needs to make customers feel excited to be a part of it. Image Source. Some of my favorite customer loyalty program names include beauty brand Sephora's Beauty INSIDER program and vegan supplement brand Vega's Rad ish Rewards.

These clever, unique names hint at benefits but don't give them away — making customers curious to learn more and join.

Some customers are cynical about customer loyalty programs and think they're just a clever ploy to get them to spend more with businesses. To get customers excited, tap into the "why" behind your product or service to make your customer loyalty program as compelling as possible.

Briogeo is a customizable hair care product line. With just a few answers to a quiz, customers will have a shampoo and conditioner crafted just for their hair on their doorstep.

Its rewards program is just as customer-centric as its product. With no frills or distractions, customers know that this loyalty program is getting them closer to even more affordable hair care products.

It's a win-win. Another way to demonstrate your commitment to customer loyalty beyond just purchases? Reward non-purchasing customer actions. Customers watching product videos, engaging in your mobile app, sharing social media content, and subscribing to your blog are still valuable signs that a customer is engaging with your brand — so reward them for it.

Those who spend at a certain threshold or earn enough loyalty points could turn them in for free tickets to events and entertainment, free subscriptions to additional products and services, or even donations in their name to the charity of their choice.

Lyft does a fantastic job of this with its LyftUp program. Riders can round up the cost of their ride to the next dollar and donate the change to the charitable organization of their choice — making it easy and rewarding for them to make an impact while using the service as they normally do.

For example, if you're offering cashback rewards as part of your customer loyalty program, assign a monetary value to your points so customers can visualize what they can earn and spend by continuing to purchase from you. Credit cards do an excellent job of this by illuminating dollar-for-dollar how people use points — just watch any commercial offering points in exchange for dollars, airline miles, groceries, or gas.

Values are important to customers — in fact, two-thirds of customers are more willing to spend money with brands that take stances on social and political issues they care about. TOMS Shoes donate a pair of shoes to a child in need for every purchase its customers make.

Knowing that providing resources to the developing world is important to its customers, TOMS takes it a step further by launching new products that help other important causes — like animal welfare, maternal health, clean water access, and eye care — to get customers excited about helping in other ways.

Once you've launched your customer loyalty program, make sure you're promoting the benefits of joining. If customers get rewards from purchasing from your online store, next to the price, share the points they could earn from spending that much.

You might have experienced this when flying on an airline that offers a loyalty rewards credit card. The flight attendants might announce that you could earn 30, miles toward your next flight — if you apply for the airline's credit card. Other ways to do this include promoting the program on social media channels and adding on-site push notifications when customers complete an activity that earns them points.

Co-branding rewards programs are a great way to expose your brand to new potential customers and to provide even more value to your existing, loyal ones. Brands might offer loyal customers free access to co-branded partnerships — like T-Mobile's offer of a Netflix subscription with the purchase of two or more phone lines.

Everyone loves games and competition — so use that winning spirit to get your customers interacting with your brand more frequently. Lots of brands gamify their customer loyalty programs to earn valuable engagements within an app, website, or at point-of-purchase.

Points are easily translatable for gamification. Take Treehouse , which teaches coding and app development, and rewards engaged users with more and more points leading up to a badge — which users can then display on their websites and social profiles to impress colleagues and potential employers with their skills.

If you're operating with a growing business, you may not have much flexibility when it comes to your budget. However, you can still offer an attractive rewards program that fosters customer loyalty. While growing businesses don't have the same financial influence as bigger companies, these organizations can still create incentives that motivate customers to return to their stores.

When developing their rewards program, small businesses need to be creative and develop a unique system that mutually benefits both the company and the customer. Take a look at a few common ways that growing companies leverage rewards programs to build customer loyalty.

Punch cards are a common reward program for B2C companies. With it, customers get a business card that gets a hole punched after every purchase. Once customers fill up the card with punches, they receive perks and rewards.

The benefit of this system is that customers are guaranteed to return a certain amount of time to receive the reward, making repeat purchases and driving revenue.

Nothing Bundt Cakes has a popular punch card loyalty program that offers customers a free personal cake when they buy 12 of them. Opt-in email solicits the customer's email address for communication with your brand. Once the customer opts in, your company can email them offers or promotions.

Emails are cheap to compose and distribute and can be sent at almost any frequency. You can also use email automation tools to deliver emails efficiently. Free trials are typically thought of as incentives used to convert potential leads, but you can also utilize them in rewards programs too.

For example, say you have a new product or service that's about to launch. You can release a free trial to members of your loyalty program. This not only acts as a reward for customer loyalty but also works as a marketing tactic that primes your customers for a future sales call.

One way to add value is to look externally at businesses to partner with. By combining your resources, you can create an offer that benefits both you, your partner, and your shared customers. Credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard do this all the time by offering cards sponsored by a specific brand.

While having a credit giant on your side is nice, start by looking for local, non-competitive businesses you can partner with to add more to your offer. You can incentivize loyal customers to become advocates by offering them an attractive reward for customer referrals.

If your offer is good enough, customers will be happy to take the time to network your business with other potential leads. Tracking points is a tried and true method of tracking customer loyalty. The two keys to making these programs successful are a worthwhile incentive and a reasonable timeline to earn the incentive.

For example, if you sell workout gear, people might make purchases fairly often, and there are many different businesses to choose from. Your incentive would need to be valuable — like a free t-shirt — and the buyer would need to be able to earn it quickly enough to keep them striving toward it, but not so quickly that the reward loses value.

Loyalty discounts come with a bonus to the traditional customer loyalty programs we've covered so far. These types of programs allow you to give back to the customer while also collecting data that can help you personalize their buying experience.

Kroger's Community Rewards program is a great example of loyalty discounts in action. To employ this type of program, you'd offer consistent, predictable discounts to customers every time they display an identification marker that associates them with the program.

This might be a QR code, a card, or a phone number. On the back end, your business captures data about what the customer purchased. Over time, you'll understand your customers' trends, patterns, and habits so you can improve their experience, making them even more brand loyal.

These types of programs are so strong because the incentive is consistent and predictable, which gives the customer a reason to come back again and again.

Giving back to the community is good for the world and business. A great way to foster customer loyalty is to offer added benefits for shopping with your company — like doing something for the greater good. Baron Fig makes office materials, a broad market to sell in, but has a program dedicated to planting trees for every item sold.

Conscious consumers will think highly of your small business and spread the word about these programs because of their selfless nature. Community programs are highly effective for small businesses as they can attract customers in your area or from computer screens.

Some examples are family-owned gyms offering Zoom classes to make customers feel more included, or having bakeries pop up in local flea markets. These are all steps small businesses can take to build customer loyalty and social bonding as well.

To get started with building your customer loyalty program, you have to prioritize the customer experience. Editor's note: This post was originally published in July and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

An actionable guide on building customer loyalty and retention. Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office.

The Beginner's Guide to Building a Customer Loyalty Program Sophia Bernazzani Barron. How to Build Customer Loyalty Adopt a multi-channel customer service system. Provide exceptional service. Be consistent. Focus on the customer, not the competition.

Build credibility through customer interactions. Deliver added value. Share positive customer experiences. Reward customer loyalty. How to Create a Customer Loyalty Program Choose a great name. Create deeper meaning.

Reward a variety of customer actions. Offer a variety of rewards. Make your 'points' valuable.