Loyalty Program Email Best Practices

How are your loyalty program emails doing? Do you see solid open and click-through rates on the campaigns you’re sending out? What about redemptions, are they growing?

If the answer to any of these isn’t something positive, then you might have a problem with your loyalty program emails.

That’s ok, it’s not the end of the world, and the good news is it’s fixable. It might be that you aren’t following some standard loyalty program best practices, and those are dragging your numbers down. 

If you think that might be the case, keep reading. We’re going to cover some of the basics you need to consider for your loyalty and reward campaigns. 

Effective promotion matters at the start

When it comes to really reaching your customers and getting them excited for your loyalty or rewards program, promotion is a big deal because it helps build overall brand loyalty. If you are doing it wrong, or not at all, you’re going to miss out.

There are a couple of reasons why this is an opportunity. 

First, research shows that your customers want to get loyalty and reward program information by email. And personalized promotional emails have higher open and click-through rates. Second, it helps you stand out. The majority of brands aren’t sending out promotional emails about their loyalty programs beyond a welcome email. 

So, it’s critical to realize that your brand needs to promote your program effectively as a best practice. Easy ways to start doing that is including mentions of your loyalty program in your welcome emails and offering up rewards and points updates in every email you send, from sales to transactional.

Make your benefits clear

Great rewards programs generate revenue for your brand, and loyal customers tend to spend more. So those are two big reasons to make sure your loyalty campaign emails make it very clear how your program works and how customers can cash in on those rewards. 

Here, consider using some really nice graphics to start. 

Sephora is one brand that does an excellent job with its loyalty program. You can see they have solid graphics that lay out exactly how the program works very clearly. Inserting this in the program welcome email can make a huge difference when it comes to educating your customers and encouraging them to buy.

Stay in touch

It’s also critical that you stay in touch with your rewards and loyalty program members. Loyalty emails provide an excellent opportunity to encourage your customers to buy. 

Here are a few examples of some emails you can send out under your loyalty program:

• Monthly or quarterly points updates
• Yearly review
• When customers hit a new tier or level
• When customers have enough points to buy something or redeem for rewards
• When customers are only a few points or purchase away from hitting a new rewards level

And those are just where you can start keeping in touch. If you want to go even further, you can. Combine the information you have in your loyalty rewards program tools with data from your customer relationship management tool, and you can go deep into personalization. 

As long as your emails stay specific to your reward program, and give your customers useful information, they’ll appreciate it!

Make it easy

Remember, one of the key metrics your brand cares about with loyalty programs is redemption. How many people are actually cashing in those rewards?

If you have low redemption and conversion numbers, one of the reasons why is you could be making the process too complicated. People are pressed for time and have little patience today if they have to spend 15 minutes figuring how they get something, they’re going to move on. 

As you can see in this email from Chipolte, it’s very clear exactly what they want you to do.

So go through your emails, especially those where you’re offering redemptions, and make sure it’s really easy to click through and claim the reward. All too often, brands will do everything right and then ignore this part. 

Hand in hand with that is having a clear call to action button on your email. Make sure your reader knows exactly what to do and where to click where you want them to. 

Start with these

Once you’ve got some of these best practices down, re-evaluate your campaigns. See what’s driving the most engagement with your loyalty program members and double down. You might find even small improvements can make a noticeable difference to the bottom line.