The Complete Guide to Customer Loyalty – Best Practices, Examples, and Features of Top Loyalty Programs

With ever-changing loyalty trends, touchpoints, and loyalty mechanics, settling for a cookie-cutter solution is not an option anymore. Flexibility and adaptability should be your primary concerns. Selecting the best loyalty program software provider shouldn’t be something that you do in between meetings. You need to sit down and dig deep into functionalities offered by different loyalty providers. Before making your choice, sketch out what goals your dreamed loyalty program should meet, what mechanisms you want to set in place, and who is your target audience. 

With this guide, we wish to empower you to launch a program that would make your brand stand out from the crowd of one-size-fits-all loyalty solutions offered by most companies. We hope our set of loyalty program best practices will help you to achieve that.

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Loyalty Programs Best Practices

1. Clear Loyalty Program Rules

Your loyalty program design should start with the program rules. Your loyalty program rules need to be transparent and straightforward if you want to see high loyalty participation rates. Loyalty programs are like a can of worms – If you lack the legal know-how, seek a professional legal advisor’s advice while setting up the program. First of all, create clear and concise program’s terms and conditions. Another significant issue is data privacy, primarily if you operate in the GDPR or CAN-SPAM applicable region. Read this post to learn more about other legal requirements.

Remember to make the points conversion simple – it should be fun and easily digestible.

Loyalty Landing Pages

Your loyalty program design is very important. Drive awareness around your loyalty campaign and capture more emails with dedicated landing pages. A landing page can be the first-contact space with your program for customers – that’s why you need to go the extra mile to ensure that it clearly lays out the program rules and conditions. You can launch landing pages quickly and easily with Voucherify landing pages creator. 

Example

Customers sign up for the program via a dedicated landing page with a link to the program's terms and conditions. The page contains all necessary consent fields and email anti-fraud measures (e.g., double opt-in). Customers get 50 loyalty points for signing up that can be redeemed for a 10% off discount coupon. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

MAC loyalty program has a straightforward explainer page that goes through the program’s rules. It also entices customers to join the loyalty program by offering 15% off the next purchase if one enters the program. 

Customer Cockpits

Loyalty program design should not stop at landing pages only. Customer cockpits are a dedicated space, where customers can find all the information about earned points, rewards, and future prizes waiting to be unlocked. By giving customers access to their personal loyalty program space, your support team won’t have to answer thousands of questions. It will also give customers the power to freely juggle their points, browse rewards, and get them with one click.

Example

Customers collect points by making purchases in your store (1$ spent equals 0.5 points). After earning enough points, customers can exchange them for rewards on their own via a fully branded customer cockpit. The prizes include discount coupons, free product samples, and free shipping perks.

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

H&M loyalty program has a customer cockpit where customers can see all vouchers, rewards, membership status, earned points, and how many points are missing to reach the next tier level or the next discount.

2. White-label Loyalty Programs

Your loyalty program should be recognizable and an integral part of your branding. It should be evident that it is YOUR loyalty program. It would be even better if it were recognizable as a stand-alone brand under your umbrella brand. 

You can add your branding to every element of Voucherify’s white-label loyalty platform. Our flexible API and SDKs for major coding languages make it easy to implement your company’s front-end design. We also offer out-of-the-box branding options for the customer cockpit, the visual email designer, and the landing page creator. 

3. Wide Loyalty Rewards Selection

Your customers know best what they want. Offering rewards that deliver real value to your customers and fit their preferences will help you enrol more customers and make them more satisfied with your loyalty scheme. You can even ask customers what they consider valuable and useful enough rewards for participating in your program. Don’t offer surplus products that nobody wants as your rewards – it’s lazy and disrespectful. Instead, create unique products explicitly used for your loyalty program or offer limited edition products to make customers feel special (e.g., Sephora's Beauty Insider program).

Be careful not to overburden your customers with too many options – striving to get the best option possible can make some customers anxious and unwilling to make any choice at all.

Attractive Loyalty Rewards Catalog

Voucherify supports plenty of loyalty rewards ranging from digital incentives to free products. With a complete suite of rewards, you can quickly combine and stack different promotions for the ultimate loyalty experience. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

Sephora Beauty Insider loyalty program lets customers choose benefits they want from their Rewards Bazaar. Members earn one point for each dollar spent. Points are redeemable for various rewards that the members can choose from the catalog, like gift cards, free products, limited edition products, in-store beauty tutorials, events entrance, and more. 

Pay With Points

Voucherify lets you choose pay with points as a loyalty reward. This type of reward allows your customers to choose what they want to purchase (their reward) and use their loyalty points to get it. You can set the exchange rate for your points (your currency), e.g., 5 points = 20$. 

Example

Let customers use loyalty points as gift card credits, where 1 point equals 4$. Set the maximum exchange value to 100 points per order. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

You can earn points in the Exxon Mobil Rewards+ program. You can then use every 100 points earned for 1$ saving applied at the check-out if you choose to use your points to pay for the purchase. 

4. Data-driven Program Conditions

If you cannot collect, process, and apply data to your loyalty program, you can’t personalize it. It is essential to use proper technology to gather, crunch, and leverage customer data to meet customers’ expectations and always be one step ahead. You can extract data from social media, website and app analytics, customer touchpoints, transactional data, and many more. Juggling all this knowledge is not a light burden, but Customer Data Platforms can help. You should be able to harness the data you have collected in your loyalty program. Therefore an integration between your CRM/CDP platform and the Promotion Engine you use is critical. 

Integrations with CRM and CDP platforms

Voucherify offers integrations with CRM and CDP platforms like Braze, Intercom, Salesforce, and Segment out-of-the-box. Suppose you are using another CRM or CDP platform. In that case, you can easily integrate your data management platform with our software and use your customer data to personalize your loyalty program.  

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

Pomelo Fashion used Segment to synchronize Voucherify and Braze’s CRM system to launch their referral program. You can read our case study here.  

5. Loyalty Program Personalization

Exceptional loyalty programs offer customers something unique and special – something created just for her or him. Tailor-made loyalty programs, so the ones that consider the individual customers’ needs, interests, preferences, and so on, are the key to winning their hearts, trust, and wallets.

Real-time Customer Segmentation

Segmentation allows you to filter customers based on their attributes, such as purchase history, personal information, or spending habits. Messaging triggers that work on top of segments let you deliver incentivized loyalty messages to customers in the right context, building a more coherent user journey. You can segment customers in real-time, meaning each new customer will be automatically assigned to the specific segment if they meet the pre-set criteria.

Example

Build an exclusive loyalty program targeted only at the high-value customers (e.g., spent at least 1000$ in your store or used a specific payment method). When a customer joins the segment, send a personalized email invitation to the program with the unique loyalty card code. Let users from that segment exchange points for exclusive events tickets and priority access to new collections. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Macy’s is an American department store that operates approximately 700 department stores. Anyone can enrol in the program. However, customers with Macy’s Credit Card automatically join the program with the Silver status with unique benefits such as 3% cash back at Macy’s partner restaurants.

Geolocation & Geofencing

If you run a global business located in various cities or countries, you might want to run different or slightly altered loyalty programs for other locations.

There are a couple of ways to use geolocation to personalize your loyalty programs. It can be a special campaign for a specific customer segment, e.g., Barcelona customers. You can also use geolocation for a more advanced campaign, like a notification triggered every time a customer enters one of the geofences you’ve defined (e.g., via an integration with Radar). For example, your mobile app could send messages about loyalty points your customer has on their account every time they enter your stores.

Example

If customers enter a predefined location (geofence around your store), send a push notification via Braze with their current loyalty score and information on how many more points they need to be eligible for rewards. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

Using geo-fencing technology, the NikePlus app sends offers and other promotional messages to customers near physical store locations. 

Custom Earning Rules & Loyalty Events

Reward more than just purchases. Make sure that there are multiple ways to earn loyalty points. With so many smart loyalty tactics out there, the formula of X number of purchases valued at X number of points is not enough anymore. Incentivizing purchases is the number one goal for most businesses, but it does not mean that you have to resign from encouraging any other form of customer activity. 

Example

Reward bookings made only within a predefined time. If a customer booked a trip in April, reward him/her with loyalty points that can be exchanged for extra trips and amenities (e.g., free drinks in hotel rooms or discounted car renting services). 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Italian cosmetics brand KIKO has over 930 stores in 20+ countries. Thanks to their award-winning loyalty program, they continue to grow despite market saturation and high competition in the beauty industry. KIKO rewards customers for purchases and activities – writing at least 5 product reviews, completing their online profile, and connecting their KIKO account with their social media accounts. For performing all of these activities, customers are rewarded with 100 points (called Kisses). 

To learn more about KIKO and its unique strategy, visit this post.

Metadata (Custom Attributes)

Your loyalty program software should offer plenty of personalization options out-of-the-box but sometimes even that it is not enough. Sometimes you want to use custom data, like weather conditions at the customer location, customer’s favourite colour, preference for dogs or cats, the product’s packaging type or anything else you can imagine. You can use metadata to add custom information to different objects like customers, products, orders etc. to make them more specific for your unique use cases.

Example

You can use advanced promotional scenarios thanks to metadata (custom attributes). One example is weather-based campaigns. You can create a workflow in which, if certain weather conditions are met at the customer location (for example, it is snowing), Zapier sends specific metadata (for example, “SNOW”) to your customer object. Then, you can create a segment based on that metadata and target customers in whose location it is snowing, for example. Read more about how to do it with Voucherify in our step-by-step guide. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Timberland used a three-day weather forecast to drive customers to purchase rainwear in the UK.

6. Instant Gratification

Imagine buying a new book that you wanted, and then instead of enjoying it straight away, you need to put it on the shelf for a week. What do you feel? Annoyance, weak strings of anger, disappointment? You don’t feel the initial excitement due to the gratification delay. 

Your loyalty solutions should be designed in a way that allows for fast points redemption, speedy reward delivery, and points conversion. The longer customers need to wait for the actual fruits of their loyalty towards your company, the more annoyed they will end up.

Automatic Loyalty Rewards Assignment

Instead of customers manually redeeming points for rewards via cockpits, you can integrate Voucherify in a way that would allow for automatic rewards assignment when customers collect enough points. 

Example

If a customer collects 100 points, automatically add a free product to their basket. For every next 50 points, add a 5% bigger discount to orders above 100$.

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Members of the Estée E-list loyalty program get automatically assigned free full-size products when they reach 450 points and 650 points levels (when they enter tier 2 “Be Enthusiastic” and 3 “Be Envied,” respectively). 

7. Time-Specific Loyalty Offerings

Time-limited offers are a fantastic tool to plan your promotional calendar. Pre-planned marketing efforts let you delight your customers with refined and original loyalty ideas throughout your sales funnel. Besides, by building a sense of urgency and anticipation, you can successfully convince customers to purchase sooner than they would otherwise. 

Loyalty Points & Program Expiration Dates

The sense of urgency is one of the most fundamental factors for loyalty campaign success. The expiry date on coupons and loyalty points or the “time left” counter on the website are the things that push shoppers to take action. It’s not enough to announce the expiry date in the marketing messages. You need to have a possibility to set up expiry dates in your loyalty program software to make sure the rewards cannot be used after they expire.

Example

Set up a loyalty campaign where unsent loyalty points expire after six months after collection to boost customer engagement and increase rewards redemption rates. Also, the campaign's timeframe lasts a full year – after that period, all members’ loyalty score is back to 0, and it is impossible to exchange points for rewards. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Shell Go+ rewards have a very short expiration date — they are valid for up to 30 days from the issue. This way, Shell brings customers back to repeat their purchases at least once a month, which makes sense from a business perspective — people fuel their cars regularly, and Shell wants the customers not to go to the competition. Quickly expiring rewards make customers come back to Shell regularly. 

Extra Points for Special Occasions

You should target special occasions like anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, and other celebrations that go along with your brand identity. Running an extra event like that will not only generate buzz around your program but also help to personalize your offer even more. 

Example

Automatically reward birthday customers with 100 loyalty points and 10% off discount coupons. If any of the VIP tier customers celebrate their birthday, then double the points awarded and send a higher-value reward, such as an exclusive product sample or 25% off discount on everything. To make your offer time-bound, make sure that the birthday rewards have short expiration dates, e.g., a week only. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

myNB Rewards, a program by New Balance, offers a 10$ birthday bonus for program levels. 

8. Contextual Loyalty Notifications

To get a serious ROI from your loyalty campaigns, you need to target customers at the right time with the channel they prefer and use. Voucherify offers various integrations with distribution software providers as well as the in-built email builder. Voucherify offers various integrations with distribution platforms (Braze, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, CM Telecom, Mandrill, Intercom, Sendgrid, Textlocal, Twilio) that let you meld personalized loyalty tactics and incentives with the cross-channel marketing infrastructure you already have at a fraction of the cost.

Omnichannel Notifications

Voucherify offers three incentive delivery options:

1) CSV export – allows you to download incentive details and upload them manually or programmatically to delivery channels, e.g., send coupons as merge tags in the email.

2) Manual send out – enables marketers to send incentives to specific groups on demand from the dashboard (e.g., send loyalty invitations to high-spenders).

3) Real-time triggers – define conditions under which your loyalty software sends a contextual incentive automatically, e.g., loyalty members who have spent more than $500 get an automated message with an extra thank you 10% off discount.

Example

Orchestrate marketing communication of your program with Braze. Incorporate custom push notifications within your app to inform customers about new points earned, redeemed rewards, and points expiration. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Ulta Beauty’s loyalty program Ultamate Rewards offers a truly omni-channel experience with in-store, website and mobile app access to the loyalty program, email and push updates about the program. They also let the members add their rewards to Apple Wallet. The program is a huge success – loyalty program members generate 95% of income for Ulta! 

Smart Reminders

Smart reminders are based on real-time customer attributes and are timely displayed non-intrusively on a device of choice. They can help you to remind customers about their loyalty program rewards waiting for them.  You can send different types of notifications to nudge your customers to purchase more from you. 

Example

If a customer has loyalty points on his/her account and they are expiring soon, you can send them a notification about it, nudging them to make a purchase. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Ibotta, a free cash back rewards and payments app that gives cash back for everyday purchases when you shop and pay through the app, is sending push notifications when the cash earned on a user's account is soon to expire. 

9. Mobile-Ready Loyalty Programs

Creating a loyalty program in the form of a mobile app is something that all future-oriented brands should do. Physical loyalty cards are a thing of the past. Your customers might forget them at home or lose them. Besides, they take up space in the wallet. Points collected in an app are much more accessible. If the customers have your app downloaded, it is also easier for your brand to stay top of mind. Thanks to a mobile app, you can provide geofencing-based notifications. 

To learn more about mobile-first loyalty incentives, check out this post.

SDKs & Support for Mobile Apps

Thanks to extensive SDKs, you can easily integrate the Voucherify loyalty program API with your existing mobile app. You can also seek help from our partners, expert software agencies helping brands succeed in the mobile space. 

Voucherify also offers a mobile app for in-store offline redemptions management. Customers can use their loyalty points or other rewards gained in the loyalty program like vouchers or gift cards by scanning their incentives at the checkout counter.

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

H&M offers a mobile app version of their loyalty program. Some special offers are available only for the mobile app users to encourage users to download and keep the app so that H&M always stays top-of-the-mind. 

10. Loyalty Program Gamification

The biggest challenge of loyalty programs is to keep customers engaged after achieving a certain level. How to gamify your loyalty program? Try adding multiple levels to your loyalty incentives, visualize the journey customers need to take to reach the top, and keep your program rules simple. Remember that your customers won’t beat the game unless they know the controls.

Custom Loyalty Currency

Running a point-based program may be tedious for customers who expect innovation from your brand. To boost the customer experience and add value to your program, you may consider using custom currency instead of points. With custom loyalty points, you can deliver a more on-brand and unique experience for your audience. 

Example

Customers collect Corks for purchasing wine via our mobile app (one Cork = $10). When loyalty members collect 10 Corks, they get wine for free. When the free bottle of wine is added to the order, customers’ loyalty score is back to 0. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Bulk Nutrients came up with a catchy currency name calling it not just ‘points,’ but ‘whey cool points’ as whey protein is their most popular product. This way, the association between points' unique name and the brand itself is clear and intuitive. 

Loyalty Program Tiers

You can set loyalty tiers based on either minimum or maximum points earned in the program. The loyalty program rules that apply to each tier could differ in various ways:

• The rewards available – offering some rewards only to higher tiers. For instance, you could be offering physical prizes for the bottom level, points for the second, and cashback for the highest tier. 
• The reward value – offering different discounts to different tiers (5, 10, 15% off).
• Different earning rules – giving 1 point for an X spent for the bottom tier, 1.5 points for the same amount for the middle tier, and 2 points for the VIP tier.
• Expiry dates – for example, VIP clients could have longer expiry dates for their rewards.
  

Example

Your customers earn points for being subscribers. The longer they stay subscribed, the more advanced members they become. You can offer discounts based on the membership level.

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Lancome offers three tiers in their loyalty program: 

• Rose Gold (1-1,999 points);
• Gold (2,000-6,499 points);
• Platinum (6,500+ points).

All levels offer better shipping policy, rewards, and birthday gifts. However, only Platinum users can enjoy exclusive events access and expedited shipping.

Bonus Points for VIP Tiers

You should be able to set points multiplication based on the customer tiers or segments, allowing you to give bonus points for higher levels. 

Example

Basic members get 1 point for each 1$ spent, VIP get 2 points for each 2$ spent. Moreover, all rewards are -25% cheaper for premium members. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

Samsung Rewards program gives different amounts of points for each tier. Tiers are based on the number of transactions made within a month. 

• Entry Level: 5 or fewer qualified transactions made within a calendar month. Each transaction is worth 5 points.

• Silver: 6-20 qualified transactions made within a calendar month. Each transaction is worth 10 points.

• Gold: 21-30 qualified transactions made within a calendar month. Each transaction is worth 15 points.

• Platinum: 31-50 qualified transactions made within a calendar month. Each transaction is worth 20 points.

Unlocking Rewards

Your loyalty software should let you have rewards catalog with “locked” rewards that will be “unlocked” once the loyalty program member meets specific criteria (for example, has enough points on balance). 

Example

10$ gift card voucher getting unlocked if the customer has at least 201+ points collected. Lipstick getting unlocked if the customer has 301+ points collected on their account. Information about both rewards is sent via an automatic email message. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

The reward unlocking mechanism is the same as a well-known stamp collection in bars, cafes, or restaurants. McDonald’s has a loyalty program where if you collect five stamps for ordering drinks, the 6th drink will be free of charge. 

11. One Loyalty Software, Many Incentives

To have a coherent loyalty strategy and make the most out of your promotional activities, you should have a holistic approach to running promotions. Combining different promotion types can bring in benefits you would not get otherwise. Promotion stacking, if done wisely, can help you protect your budget from abuse. 

Combining Promotions

Voucherify lets you use different promotions like coupon vouchers, in-cart discounts, gift cards, loyalty, referral programs, and online giveaways. 

Example

Customers earn loyalty points through making referrals (1 referral = 100 points). Points can be exchanged for three different reward types – discount coupons, free products, and free shipping codes. Each referral code can be redeemed up to 3 times, granting loyalty members up to 300 points. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Citibank has a ThankYou loyalty program in which users can get points for using credit cards or some of their services (loans, insurances). Members of the loyalty program can get various rewards: they can pay with points, get gift cards to major brands (TJmaxx, Marshalls, Sierra, HomeSense, Home Goods), reduce their credit card debt with the points, or donate their points to charity causes.

Stacking Promotions

The promotion stacking functionality lets you define allowed and forbidden discount combinations that give you even more space for loyalty program personalization. You can offer discounts and gift card credits as loyalty rewards. Depending on your business use case, you can allow or disallow using both for the same order. This way, you can define some loyalty rewards that should or shouldn't be combined with other active promotions. For instance, a general 15% discount cannot be combined with a 20% discount received via loyalty program membership.

Example

If customers earned a 15% off discount code via a loyalty program membership, they cannot use it with other owned discounts and incentives, protecting your promotional budget from abuse.  

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

The One To One Rewards program is a loyalty program designed by Nissan to earn valuable points at Nissan dealerships. Members get points for purchases at Nissan dealerships, 1$ spent is 1 point earned. One To One Rewards can be combined with Nissan Visa Card rewards that give cardholders points for using the Nissan Visa Card.

Cardholders of the Nissan Visa Card can earn:

• 5 points per $1 spent on products and services purchased at Nissan dealerships and on gas.
• 3 points per $1 spent on dining.
• 1 point per $1 on purchases everywhere else Visa credit cards are accepted.
  

Members can redeem those points collected in both programs on their next service visit, for parts or accessories purchased, or for the next new or used vehicle purchased at a Nissan dealership.

Transferring Points Between Loyalty Cards

Voucherify offers transferring points between loyalty cards, whether these are multiple loyalty cards of one person from different brands or the same brand loyalty cards with different cardholders. 

Example

If a customer does not travel much and has a lot of points because he owns a credit card from a specific brand that gives him points back for purchases, he can transfer the loyalty card points to another loyalty card (e.g., a friend’s), so that they can use the points for travel. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Miles&More lets you transfer your miles to anyone you want that is also a program member. 

12. Partnership Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs that expand across a network of partner brands tend to enjoy higher visibility and participation rates. As customers earn points (or rewards) in more places, they have bigger chances to get rewards and are more motivated to participate in the program. 

One Loyalty Card, Many Partners

In Voucherify, all of your partners can create an account and connect to the same loyalty program. From the customer perspective, they will see one loyalty program, they will have one loyalty card, and they will be able to earn points or rewards from transactions or activities made in the partnering stores. They will be able to redeem the rewards in the participating stores as well. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍

Again, a great example of such a scheme is the Miles&More frequent flyer program, where you can collect miles (points) on one loyalty card by making purchases across the network of over 74 participating partners. 

13. Loyalty Program Tracking & Optimization

Your loyalty management system should provide data instantly, preferably in well-organized reports, to help you find the best strategy for your business. You should be able to adapt your loyalty scheme rules quickly based on that data. Voucherify offers tracking and reporting options as well as an easy-to-use dashboard to support you with optimizing your loyalty program settings.  

Tracking & Analytics

Voucherify has in-built tracking options that display the following data:

• Active distributions and sent messages (via which you can deliver rewards, inform about added points, send loyalty cards, and more).
• Top earning rules and top rewards.
• A sum of points gained by your customers sorted by date.
• Conversion rate chart that shows the total number of redeemed points sorted by date.
• Recent program changes and customer's actions.
• Customer activity on customer level (360-degree customer profile).
  

Easy-to-use Dashboard

If you need to adapt your loyalty program quickly and change its rules, you can do it straight from the dashboard, in a couple of clicks, without the need of involving your IT developers and waiting for them to implement the changes. The changes will take place instantly after you change the setting in the dashboard. The best brands track and analyze the members’ usage and participation in their loyalty programs to optimize their spending. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

Wizz Air has been optimizing its loyalty program and in 2019 has changed the rules of the benefits from using Wizz Credit Card, which acts as a loyalty card for Wizz Air:

• From giving 3 points for every 100 forints spent to 2 points for purchases done at wizzair.com or Wizz Air Mobile App.
• They have stopped offering a free Wizz Discount Club membership for the cardholders.
• They have added an instant gratification: 10 000 points added to the account of new joiners.

14. Safeguarding Your Loyalty Budget

To protect the budget, you should make sure your program targets the right audience with the right incentives. You can achieve it by applying laser-focused validation rules, segmenting the customers, and tiering the loyalty program, all of which we have described earlier in this guide. Another option to protect your budget is to set general budget limits. 

Budget Limits

There are several ways to limit the budget in Voucherify. Most of them are based on restricting customer actions and the cost of them: 

• Number redemptions per customer.
• Total redemptions for a given campaign (e.g., first 500 customers are eligible).
• Total discounted amount within a single campaign.
• Total order value with a single campaign.
• You could also create limits for triggering points per earning rule (e.g., max 100 points for social media activity). It could help manage your budget spent on enticing certain customer behaviors and budget spent on enticing purchases.

Read this post to see how to prevent loyalty fraud.

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

Nissan lets the loyalty program members use up to 50 points per service transaction or 250 per sales transaction.

Earning Rules Limits

Earning rules define actions that reward customers with points. With earning rules limits, you can better control how many times users can perform a given action in exchange for points. 

Example

Customers can earn points by making purchases and performing specific events, namely, writing product reviews. To protect the program from abuse, customers can write up to 8 reviews to earn free points. Each next review is not rewarded with points. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?‍‍‍

Urban Outfitters loyalty program offers various ways to earn points to its members. To protect the program budget, Urban Outfitters has implemented a cap on the activities based on which the users can get rewards: 

• Writing a product review – 5 points (maximum 3x per month). 
• Browsing UO website or app – 1 point (maximum 5x per month).

15. Loyalty Fraud Prevention

Loyalty program fraud happens when one customer signs up for your program multiple times. Fraudsters often use email aliases or fake addresses to sign up for loyalty programs to use your incentives numerous times.

Email Verification

You can avoid these fraud attempts by implementing: 

• Double opt-in feature (the double opt-in feature verifies the email address’s existence before finishing registration).
• Automatically blocking email aliases.
• Requesting unique email addresses.
• Automatically lowercasing e-mail addresses.
  

Another way to prevent fraud is to filter suspicious activities. Look for the red flags like orders with extremely low or high values, canceled orders, failed referrals, or customers with many unused points.

Monitoring Tools

If you are worried about monitoring failed redemptions that may indicate a fraud attempt, you can connect your redemption gateway to a webhook. Webhooks will transmit the notification about a failed redemption directly to your marketing team (on Slack, email, or another tool). You can use Zapier to model such marketing automation with Voucherify Promotion Engine.

You should also use built-in monitoring tools to track the performance of your program in real-time.

Validations Rules Builder

Validation rules are the heart of all promo campaigns. With validation rules, you can define promotion eligibility conditions. In simple terms, it is our promotional “if.” For instance, you can specify that the loyalty discount is available only if the order amount exceeds 50$. You can create multiple built-in and custom rules with metadata. 

Example

Customers earn points by completing workouts and marathons. Points can be redeemed for discounts in your online shop. However, only users with 5+ finished marathons are eligible for the premium rewards category.

16. Simple Loyalty Program Management

Launching a loyalty program is expensive. The rewards are just one part of it, another part is the infrastructure, software you need to run it, whether you build it yourself or buy an out-of-the-box solution. The last but not least is the loyalty program maintenance, both from the IT team and the marketing departments’ perspective. To be cost-effective and quick, your loyalty program should require the minimum IT support necessary. 

Marketer-friendly dashboard

Voucherify provides an easy-to-use dashboard, a place where marketers can launch and manage the loyalty program rules and the distributions all by themselves, without the need to involve developers. 

How Loyalty Leaders Do It?

When Beryl successfully integrated Voucherify with their stack, their marketing team got new superpowers. Since then, setting up promotions is a part of their daily routine. There is no more development support needed for launching promotions and marketers can log in to the platform and create campaigns quickly. Thanks to the easy-to-use dashboard, the marketing team can now analyze and replicate successful campaigns. Read the case study here.

Developer-focused Automation

Voucherify was created by developers, for developers. Not only are we easy to integrate with (thanks to a complete API documentation and various SDKs) but also to maintain. We know what overhead loyalty programs can be. That is why we have created various automations and features. 

• Webhooks.
• Bulk updates, exporting and importing capabilities.
• Rollback redemptions & disable/enable vouchers with one click.
• Custom events. 
• Custom fields. 
• Debugging logs.

17. Large-scale Deployments

The convergence of online and offline retail operations in recent years has brought new challenges to the management of loyalty programs for large enterprises. One of them is how to deliver a unified experience across both existing and new customer touchpoints such as mobile, social platforms, content, and more. Another challenge, even more complex, is how to make it tick in the multinational context, across several branches and teams.

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Dedicated Clusters

Voucherify offers a custom location for deployment. This translates into better application response for your customer-facing applications and overall performance of your ecommerce ecosystem. But there’s more, separate deployments enable security- and performance-oriented customization including API throttling or stronger isolation from Voucherify partners.

User Roles & Approval Workflows

Voucherify adapts to your processes and supports multiple teams at once. To support enterprises in launching personalized loyalty programs, we have introduced several must-have features that ensure security of your incentives.

• Separate API keys for different user roles. 
• Default and custom user roles with different access levels. 
• Admin role and approval workflow with automatic email notifications. 
• MFA and SAML.
  

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