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The Ultimate Guide to Retention for Shopify Stores

Points strategy 

Bring your retention strategy to life with the most effective activities and rules

Your points strategy checklist Points strategy best practices Bonus top tip  Points strategy inspiration Back to contents

The activities and rules you build into your loyalty program are the ingredients that drive program participation. Ultimately, they are what will determine the success or failure of your program, as 64% of loyalty program members spend more money to maximize their points earnings. But don’t worry. In this instance, rules don’t equal boundaries. Rather, a fun space where you can be creative in the way you build your loyalty program. Let’s find out more about activity rules.  

Your points strategy checklist

  • Give customers more than one way to earn points. Offer at least two earning opportunities for activities outside of purchases, such as reviews and referrals.
  • When you choose the value of your points, make sure you don’t give more than 5% back to customers when they redeem. This is enticing without harming profit margins.
  • Tie your activity rules to your marketing strategy. For example, if social media is important to you, offer points in exchange for follows and likes.

Best Practice

Follow the best practices below to create exciting and unique ways for customers to earn points

Start at the beginning

70% of consumers say they purchase more regularly from a brand if they are a loyalty program member. As such, the first and most important activity rule to set up is the one that incentivizes non-members to enrol in your program.

Offer customers points for joining the program and you will see your enrolment rate increase exponentially. It’s best practice to award enough points for sign-up so that a new member can immediately redeem a reward. This helps to secure a second purchase sooner and ensures they don’t join and immediately forget about your program.

We recommend using on-site notifications to promote this incentive. This shows guest checkouts the points they could earn if they create an account, motivating them to join before they leave the site.

Shopify Guide Images Points Strategy V2 Points For Joining

Award points for advocacy

Your loyalty program members are the most likely to act as advocates, and your activity rules should be set up in a way that helps you to make the most of that behavior. 

We recommend awarding points for social media shares and follows. This gives customers an easy way to engage and earn points while helping you build up your social following and keep in touch on more channels than just email. Where possible, it can also be beneficial to widen your reach by awarding points for social mentions or the use of hashtags. 

We also highly recommend offering points in exchange for reviews. Integrate your loyalty program with your reviews platform, and you can incentivize more user-generated content to drive conversion. 

If part of your reviews strategy is to collect more photo and video reviews, offer more points for those activities. Remember to make it clear on your rewards page that members can earn extra points for those reviews.

Shopify Guide Images Points Strategy V2 Award Points

Zero party data 

As more customers opt out of sharing their personal information, it’s harder for Marketers to collect the zero and first-party data they need to provide personalized customer experiences. 

We recommend using your loyalty program as a tool to collect more data. The easiest activity rule you can set here enables you to award additional points to customers on their birthdays. Use points to incentivize members to enter their birthday data on your rewards page, and you can delight them with points twice—once when they share and once on their special day. 

Getting slightly more advanced, you can also incentivize customers to complete profiles and quizzes that help you better understand their preferences. For example, a beauty brand might offer points in exchange for a survey that tells them more about skin type and product preferences. The customer earns points, and the data collected can be used to better and more effectively personalize comms. 

Shopify Guide Images Points Strategy V2 Zero Party

Top tip

Surprise and delight members with double points days

We recommend regularly surprising your members with double-point days. This helps them build up their points balance faster, reducing the time to their next purchase. Tie double-point promotions into wider marketing events such as product drops, sale launches, or holidays relevant to your brand. 

Inspiration

Explore the most effective activity rules

The Ultimate Guide to Retention for Shopify Stores

Chapter 1: Rewards page Chapter 3: Rewards Chapter 4: VIP tiers Chapter 5: Referrals Chapter 6: Email & SMS Chapter 7: Omnichannel Chapter 8: Your loyalty and retention checklists

LoyaltyLion incentivizes our customers to carry out activities that help our brand to grow. This is adding to our bottom line by increasing new customers and improving conversion rates. At the same time, current customers are being rewarded for engaging with the brand.

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