LoyaltyLion is a data-driven loyalty and engagement platform that powers ecommerce growth. Unlock real insights to build a better understanding of what drives longer-lasting customer relationships, and use those insights to connect and accelerate your existing marketing efforts. Proven to increase retention and spend, LoyaltyLion is trusted by thousands of fast-growth ecommerce merchants worldwide.
Fiona Stevens is the Head of Marketing at LoyaltyLion, a data-driven loyalty and engagement platform for fast-growth ecommerce merchants. LoyaltyLion helps thousands of retailers worldwide to build fully customised loyalty programs, proven to increase customer engagement, retention and spend. Fiona has over ten years’ experience in Marketing, having worked in-house and agency side across functions including PR, SEO and content. She has specialised in loyalty for retail and ecommerce brands for the past five years.
LoyaltyLion is a loyalty and engagement platform, powering growth for ecommerce merchants around the world.
Ecommerce is the fastest growing trillion dollar industry in the world, growing at over 13% each year.
Lower barriers to entry have caused fantastic growth. But that means stores face more competition, and the added problem that Amazon accounts for around half of all online sales.
More competition also means greater acquisition challenges. The traditional costs of acquiring new customers are increasing, but ad effectiveness is going down with only 9% of digital ads being viewed for more than one second.
And finally, to create long-lasting shopper relationships and secure customer loyalty, stores need to replicate the personal touch of an offline experience, online. Yet today just 49% of consumers feel emotional connections with the brands they shop with online, and 81% of consumers want brands to demonstrate that they understand them better.
So a little more about LoyaltyLion. As I mentioned, we’re a data-driven loyalty and engagement platform. We know from some recent research we undertook, that for nearly 80% of merchants, increasing customer lifetime value is the main reason for creating a loyalty program.
We help merchants drive that customer lifetime value, by unlocking real insights that can be used to build a better understanding of what drives longer-lasting customer relationships. We believe that loyalty programs can be extremely powerful, not just in connecting existing marketing tools, technologies and tactics, but also in accelerating their success.
Merchants can use LoyaltyLion to create and manage their own, fully-customized and on-brand loyalty programs. That loyalty program can be fully embedded at every stage of the customer journey – from the site navigation, to the checkout. Stores can award points for positive customer behaviours such as purchases, account creation, social media likes, shares and follows, or acts of advocacy such as referrals or reviews.
Their customers can then redeem those points against rewards such as money-off vouchers, free gifts and products, or other completely custom rewards. More and more, we are seeing merchants offer experiential rewards such as early access to sales or entry to an exclusive VIP community. We’re also increasingly seeing rewards that mirror a brand’s values – for example, allowing points to be redeemed in exchange for a donation to a charity.
We started working with our first ecommerce store in 2014, and we now work with over 6,000 merchants worldwide. Each month, LoyaltyLion merchants send over 1 million loyalty emails, over 4 billion loyalty points are issued by stores via LoyaltyLion, and more than 150,000 rewards are claimed by shoppers.
We work with merchants on Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and Magento, as well as custom stores and we have native integrations with over 20 other ecommerce technologies. We are a Certified Shopify Plus technology partner, and have been named one of the RWRC Discovery 50 powering the new retail world. We are backed by industry-leading entrepreneurs with decades of experience in loyalty, ecommerce, CRM and data science.
LoyaltyLion, and loyalty programs in general, are most effective for stores that have high repeat purchase rates. For example, our customers tend to predominantly fall across industries such as fast fashion, health and wellness, beauty, pet care and food and drink, where people have a regular need or desire to replenish their supplies.
There are some other key triggers that can help stores to identify that they are ready to consider loyalty and retention. For example, you might find that your customer churn rate has been steadily increasing over time, or that you have a growing database of customers who are unengaged and not returning to shop again.
You might find that your acquisition costs have been consistently rising or that lots of new competitors have entered the market and started selling similar products, and it has become more important to differentiate your brand and stand out from the crowd.
In each of these scenarios, a loyalty and retention strategy can be a long-term solution that drives significant ROI across each of your marketing channels.
By helping you to segment and drive additional revenue from your most valuable customers, by increasing their purchase frequency and average order value. Also by helping you to re-engage customers who have not returned to purchase again within an expected timeframe, before they churn. And finally by helping you acquire new traffic and conversions more cost-effectively via your loyal customer advocates.
When customers land on the site, they receive a pop-up notification encouraging them to create an account and letting them know they can earn points and rewards with each purchase.
You can then choose to display your program as a widget like this one or an Integrated Loyalty Page such as this one.
Either way, you can fully customize your loyalty program to align with your brand identity.
For example, with an Integrated Loyalty Page, you can customize the colors, fonts and iconography to match your store.
77% of customers are motivated to join a loyalty program if the benefits are clearly communicated, so having an Integrated Loyalty Page can help you clearly show the ways members can earn points, the rewards you are offering, and your tiered loyalty program structure.
As you can see, LoyaltyLion allows you to run a points-based system incentivizing any beneficial on-site activity by giving your customers loyalty points that can be redeemable on future purchases.
Customers can earn points by making purchases, liking and following you on social media, leaving a review, visiting your site, referring their friends, having a birthday, signing-up to your newsletter list, and much more.
And with regard to the rewards you want to offer, these can come in any form.
Some of the most popular include free shipping vouchers, a monetary discount, a percentage discount or a free product reward.
Now let’s see how the back end of the platform works.
As you can see, your loyalty program analytics are completely built-in to the platform.
Through your Analytics dashboard, you can choose a custom time frame and look at the revenue that has been generated from loyalty purchases, activities that have been completed, the number of new program members, and the redemption rates of those members.
If you are implementing a referral strategy, you can also track the traffic that is coming from referrals, your new customers, and the revenue that has been generated.
When we go to the Insights section, you will see a snapshot of your customers’ value.
Here you can see the spend, repeat purchase rates, and AOV of your both loyalty program members and guest members, as well as, your program members who are redeeming and non-redeeming.
If we scroll down, you can see a more detailed breakdown of repeat purchase and conversion rates.
The Insights tool also automatically segments your customers into those that are most loyal, those that are at-risk of churning and those that have lapsed but you could target to win them back.
In each customer segment, you can also see the revenue that you are generating from them.
Now let’s click to Campaigns – this is one of our most innovative features.
Here, with Campaigns, you can use onsite notifications to A/B test different loyalty campaigns such as increasing AOV or referrals to improve the performance of your program and find real insights about your customers.
These time-based experiments will help you to learn how to positively influence customer behaviour
Let’s see a live example of a store using LoyaltyLion.
When Lively first met with LoyaltyLion, they already had a powerful brand identity, however, they wanted to secure long-term loyalty that would drive higher repeat purchase rates and customer spend.
They created a tiered loyalty program that reflects their unique brand values and strengthens their community feeling.
Currently, I am on Lively’s integrated loyalty page. As you can see they’ve included their loyalty program on their main navigation header, and show members’ their points balances to encourage them to engage more with the program.
Here members can see which tiers they are in, what benefits they have, and what more they can gain if they move up to the next tier.For instance, if I move up to the Total Boss Status, I can have early access to new styles, and earn 2 points per dollar spent.
If I scroll down, I can see more ways to earn points, and by clicking to each activity, I can directly earn points.If I scroll down even further, I can see the monetary discounts that I can access.
By creating an aspirational, tiered loyalty program, Lively increased customer spend by 36% and average order value by 21%.
Lively’s loyalty program is very well-integrated. They use their program in conjunction with other tools such as Klaviyo and Zendesk.
Today Lively’s loyalty program has increased their customer lifetime value by 39%.
Other stores are also seeing great success with their loyalty programs. For example, health and wellness brand Ancient Nutrition saw a 300% increase in reward redemption when they moved from their previous loyalty provider to LoyaltyLion.
With the implementation of the Instant Points feature, they saw a 36% increase in AOV – shoppers are now motivated to add more products to their cart in order to earn enough points for a reward.
Cosmetic brand, REN Clean Skincare is also using LoyaltyLion for their ecommerce store, and thanks to their fully-customised loyalty program, they have seen a 68% increase in customer spend by loyalty program members. 38% of their total revenue is generated by their loyal customers.
The short answer is that even if you only have ten customers, they are customers that you could be encouraging to return and shop again, or motivating to act as advocates.
However the truth is that a loyalty program does not suit every ecommerce business. If you are selling a product that shoppers only buy once every few years – for example a mattress, or a designer handbag – then you will struggle to implement a meaningful system of points and rewards. The more customers you have that are likely to shop with you on a regular basis, the more ROI you will be able to drive from a loyalty program.
Speaking of ROI, the best way to see real results from your loyalty program, is to ensure that it’s fully integrated with your wider marketing tools and technologies. As you saw from the Customer Value Snapshot in the demo, loyalty data can be extremely powerful in segmenting your customer base so that you can identify your most loyal customers who have the highest lifetime value, those customers who are at risk of churning, and those that are lost and need to be won back. This segmentation helps you to prioritise your marketing effort so that you focus on the customers that will deliver the greatest ROI, fastest.
A loyalty program can be built into your strategy in many ways. For example, lots of LoyaltyLion merchants have fully integrated their loyalty program data into their email approach, using elements such as points balances and available rewards in everyday communications to provide more highly personalised emails. LoyaltyLion integrates with most major ESPs including Klaviyo, Oracle Bronto, Hubspot, Ometria, Omnisend, Dotdigital and more.
Other merchants also connect their loyalty programs with their reviews providers such as Reviews.io, Okendo or Judge.me, using points to incentivise customers to leave reviews and collecting more powerful user-generated content with no additional investment or effort as a result.
You could also consider integrating loyalty data into your helpdesk. This enables customer service representatives to paint an even fuller picture of the customers they are speaking to, delivering more personal support experiences. It also empowers them to use points to sweeten potentially negative situations.
Finally, your loyalty program can help to connect online and offline experiences. For example, merchants using Shopify POS can ensure that customers can earn and redeem rewards wherever they are shopping, and also empower in-store staff by giving them access to every customer’s online loyalty profile, even if they haven’t shopped in-store previously.
A loyalty program should not be a standalone or siloed activity, but part of a wider strategy and via LoyaltyLion’s integrations you can ensure that your program sits at the heart of your tech stack, adding additional power to your existing tools, and helping them to deliver greater results.
LoyaltyLion can be used by merchants of all sizes – we have a free plan for those who are just starting out, and a number of paid plans with additional features so that your loyalty program can grow in line with your store as you scale up. Our paid plans start at $159 US dollars – or 129 British pounds per month and allow for an unlimited number of members. Pricing is based on the number of orders your store processes so you only pay for the shoppers that are ordering, rather than your whole membership base.
The speed at which you can roll out your loyalty program depends on your plan and the level of complexity you’re going for. A store using our free plan can create and launch a program within minutes using our self-service onboarding journey. Those on paid plans will benefit from an onboarding manager who will guide them through the setup of their program from day one through to launch. They will then have another member of our team regularly review their program and provide insight and advice.
Our team are experts in customer retention, living and breathing loyalty 24/7.