by Fatema Mulla
Loyalty schemes are a powerful and effective eCommerce marketing strategy, and can be one of the biggest sources of revenue for many brands. But for high growth merchants on enterprise level platform Shopify Plus, how can you implement the right loyalty scheme that will help to boost your stores sales and conversions?
Loyalty schemes are a powerful and effective eCommerce marketing strategy, and can be one of the biggest sources of revenue for many brands. But for high growth merchants on enterprise level platform Shopify Plus, how can you implement the right loyalty scheme that will help to boost your stores sales and conversions?
Shopify Plus allows for more creative opportunities to add a variety of different features, allowing merchants to use different ways of reaching out to encourage loyalty with your customers. These can include rewarding UGC, integrating rewards at checkout, gamifying engagement across multiple platforms and more.
Here are a few ways that merchants on Shopify Plus can add loyalty schemes to their store:
Build a community
Before implementing any loyalty schemes, it’s important to ensure you have built up a strong community of followers who will likely respond well to any loyalty schemes you implement.
Shopify Plus enables merchants to do this easily by using Flow to set up workflows and triggers that will allow them to easily follow up with customers, helping them to engage and build a community.
You can also use the platform’s Scripts feature to add exclusive offers and discounts for VIP customers, helping them to feel more valued, essentially resulting in an increase of more loyal customers.
Integrate rewards at every touchpoint
Customers are more likely to respond and engage with your loyalty program if they know they are being rewarded for anything they do on your site. Reward your customers for any action they complete on-site, and encourage them to convert at multiple different stages during their journey.
You can also reward customers for engaging at touchpoints across multiple channels outside of the site too. This can be done through Shopify Plus’ Flow, by setting up workflows to engage with customers who engage with you on-site or on various social media platforms, through emails, or other media.
With Shopify Plus, merchants are able to integrate easily with various multiple sales channels, allowing them to easily connect with customers through an integrated, multi channel strategy.
The screenshot below is an example from Shopify merchant The Elephant Pants, who incentivise further engagement by offering rewards at a wide range of different touchpoints.
Reward and encourage UGC
User generated content is one of the biggest and most effective ways of encouraging loyalty. It encourages customers to market your products for you, which can be a great way to push customers towards making a purchase. It also has the potential to bring in more customers, as people will be more likely to trust good reviews and endorsement.
There are many apps that can integrate with your Shopify Plus store that can allow you to take advantage of any UGC you receive from customers. Some of these include Yotpo, Nosto and more.
You can use a loyalty scheme to encourage customers to produce UGC, and then reward them with points, offers or exclusive discounts when they do to push them towards becoming a loyal and engaged customer. This can be done by using Shopify Plus’ Flow to tag repeat customers, setting up workflows to follow up with gifts and reaching out to them to further encourage loyalty.
Gamify engagement
Gamification is a strategy that is becoming increasingly popular with many brands. It can also be a fun way of introducing loyalty schemes by getting customers to engage with interactive content on your site.
Shopify Plus app partner LoyaltyLion for example, enables gamification within their loyalty programs, allowing for users of the loyalty program to perform onsite activities to earn points and rewards.
A good example of this is the gamified loyalty program run by Shopify Plus merchant The Chivery. The company - who sell apparel and accessories - ran their gamified loyalty program over three of their sites. They rewarded participants of the program with redeemable points that they could then use to purchase items in store, turning casual fans into paying customers.
Find the Right Loyalty App for Your Store
It’s important to ensure that you have both the right loyalty scheme set up for your store as well as the ideal apps to facilitate said scheme. Different brands suit different kinds of loyalty schemes - so while some may use points schemes for returning customers, others may just stick to referral programs. Shopify Plus can easily enable this through both a wide range of apps and also Shopify Plus’ exclusive features such as Flow and Scripts.
Shopify Plus integrates with a number of different loyalty apps that can be added to your store, including LoyaltyLion and Smile.io. Find the right app that best fits with both your store and the nature and specifics of your loyalty program.
LoyaltyLion is an app that can be integrated with your Shopify Plus store, allowing you to provide powerful loyalty schemes and programs for your customers.
Smile.io also integrates with Shopify Plus, allowing you to set up referral schemes for your customers.
Summary
Loyalty schemes can be implemented and added to your Shopify Plus store in a number of different ways. There are many different effective strategies that you can use to encourage loyalty, and Shopify Plus enables you to easily add these to your store.
If you want to know more about loyalty schemes on Shopify Plus, just get in touch with our friendly team and we’ll be happy to help.
