Customer Loyalty is a battleground various businesses want to master. According to research, acquiring new customers costs five times more than retaining the current ones. Besides, existing customers are 50% more likely to try your new products as well as spend 31% more than fresh ones. Therefore, how to retain loyal customers is always a top priority of every business. Among various ways, launching a Customer Loyalty App, which can encourage users to return and purchase products, is a worth-trying solution. To learn more about this Software Development, do not skip this blog!

1. What Is A Loyalty App?

A Loyalty App, which can track and record all users’ activities, is a modern version of the traditional loyalty card. Thanks to this Customer Loyalty Software, it can be easier for businesses to plan and optimize campaign reward programs at selling centers. Referral tracking is also made possible via a central dashboard to integrate and improve such programs. Moreover, an effective customer loyalty software brings about opportunities for businesses to manage several reward tools per customer at one go, including gift cards, loyalty cards, and rewards. Being considered as a CRM or a customer engagement tool, Loyalty Software can offer multi-mode deployment, be it web-based, cloud-based, or an on-premise solution. 

Another significant function of the Loyalty App is improving customer engagement. This is mainly because customers can easily leverage the loyalty program benefits by using their phones and simply scanning the QR code at checkout to update their loyalty status. Besides, this software development helps the customers to stay relieved of the hassle involved in looking out for the physical loyalty card when requested by the staff for payment.

Customers easily scan QR codes at checkout to update their loyalty status.

2. Top 03 Key Features To Include In Customer Loyalty Software

If your businesses are pondering on building A Loyalty App, here are some features that should be taken into consideration:

a. Easy Registration

The sign-up form is one of the most important features of the app because it plays a critical role in keeping customers. A poor or complex one may make users jump through hoops, and to make matters worse, such users can delete the app immediately without thinking twice. Therefore, the Loyalty App should offer a smooth and easy sign-up process without any friction. 

To facilitate registration, placing the social login options or emails on the sign-up page can be a good idea. After that, if you already have information from your CRM system, link it right away so that customers do not have to provide it again. If there is a new customer, prompt them to fill in their name, date of birth and phone number. Pay attention not to exploit too much to avoid creating uncomfortable feelings. Do reward new users with some points upon successful sign-up as well to gain a good impression.

b. Push notifications

Push notifications, which bring ROI (return on investment) as high as 3500%, are extremely important for almost all Mobile App Developments, and Customer Loyalty Software is not an exception. Such notifications act as a reminder prompting users to have access to your app to keep track of the latest promotions, coupons,... However, let’s keep in mind that overuse may be counter-effective because customers may consider it spam and turn off this feature or even remove the app. Adequate notifications can foster the touch between brands and their customers, hence bringing businesses maximum revenues. Starbucks, for instance, leverage location-based push notifications in their loyalty app to send targeted offers to the users. Its principle is based on a user’s location, their purchase history, and whenever they pass by a Starbucks store, they are sent a notification of an offer so they could claim it by visiting the nearby outlet. 

Push notifications are popular in almost all mobile apps.

To make it clear, this feature relies on API Integration. In case you wonder “What is API?”, here is the answer: API (Application Programming Interface) is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. In a push notifications system, two used APIs are Notification API and Push API. The former allows displaying notifications to the user while the latter lets a service manager push messages from a server, even when the app is not being used by the user. Both APIs are built on top of the service worker API that acknowledges the push messages in the background and passes them on to the mobile app. With the right tools integrated into a system, the product owners can identify customer segments who possibly have not been engaged (not using the application enough or not utilizing their rewards). There are provisions to filter out the correct segments and the product owners can only send reminders or special offers to such users.

c. Reward-based and redemption system

The Loyalty App needs to mix a variety of rewards, such as Discount codes, Vouchers, Gifts or Convert to consumer money, depending on the choice of business. Rewards can also be in the form of badges. Based on the user’s purchases or activities over time, badges can be upgraded and would be linked with the user’s profile. In order to receive the aforementioned rewards, businesses can offer many forms for customers to accumulate points:

• Ordering: The most common form, customers earn points based on order value.
• Write reviews, review products: Commonly used on e-commerce platforms or review sites.
• Other forms: Log in every day, Play games, Perform tasks (invite a friend to make an order,…)

Remember to integrate the checkout redemption as well because the rewarding points mean nothing to customers if they can’t easily apply at the checkout time. Whatever points users collected over time, allowing them to use those points at the payment time by automatically subtracting the rewarding value from their bill can bring a sense of happiness and enhance their whole experience. This would encourage the users to purchase and engage more so that they can collect various rewards to get discounts the next time, hence, increasing the returns for businesses.

3. How To Create A Loyalty App?

To process a Loyalty App Development, keep in mind 3 main steps. The first and foremost is  Developing and Testing an interactive Prototype. At this point, it is necessary to line up all possible user flows to draft wireframes - rudimentary screen visualizations. From these low-fidelity designs, you continue to have high-fidelity mockups representing the application’s screens as they will look in real life. Once the interactive prototype has been brought into shape, it’s time to translate the designed screens into code. Besides the mobile application, the software providers would code the back-end (database, server-side logic, etc.) and a web platform for your staff to manage the app and its content. It would be better if you choose an outsourcing team with Agile Methodology as any issues or bugs get caught very early on in the development process. Finally, launch this app to the public and keep an eye on its performance to modify if any.

Contact us if you are finding a Loyalty App Provider for your businesses and brands. Having over 6 years of experience working with leading enterprises and brands in various industries, SotaTek team specializes in designing and implementing software of various complexities and sizes. Whether you need a Software Development Service for iOS or Android, our experts can serve you with both Swift and Kotlin development languages.