A loyalty program can deliver a significant return on investment for your ecommerce business. But only if customers use it.
For customers to actively engage with an online loyalty program, a few things have to be true:
- The rewards are motivating.
- The program is easy to use.
Ensuring your rewards are motivating involves understanding your customers’ values, choosing an appropriate rewards program type, and offering rewards that align with both of those. In other words, a lot of strategic thought goes into configuring an incentivizing ecommerce loyalty program.
Making your loyalty program easy to use is the second factor in encouraging customer engagement. Luckily, this component is quite simple to get right if you’re using the right loyalty program software or app. With Smile.io, Shopify ecommerce loyalty programs are easy to launch, manage, and optimize.
Show your loyalty program throughout your site where your customers are shopping with embedded content. With embedded storefront components like points on the product page, dedicated loyalty landing pages, and redemption at checkout, you keep your loyalty program top-of-mind. The best part? No coding required.
All of these embedded content features are available on our newest plan, Smile Plus. Shopify ecommerce merchants who sign up for our Growth or Growth Plan unlock the benefits of integrating their loyalty program throughout their websites.
Mike Rossi
Embed loyalty program content across your store
With powerful embedded storefront components available on our Growth and Plus Plans, you can boost the visibility and engagement of your loyalty program.
Choose from several fully customizable embedded content options:
- Landing pages
- Points on the product page
- Points on the account page
- Redeem at checkout
- Show points at checkout
- Points after purchase
Crystal and Stone seamlessly embeds loyalty content on its product pages with messages telling customers how many points they can earn by purchasing that product. The Australian crystal brand takes it a step further by fully customizing the content with its brand colors and unique point currency name. This helps the loyalty program stand out even further.
All of these embedded content features can be added to your Shopify loyalty program in a matter of a few clicks. They are designed to be easily implemented with little effort required.
With embedded content throughout your ecommerce site, you can expect benefits such as:
- Increase perceived value
- Increased average order value
When you embed loyalty data onto customer account pages, you show customers they are leaving value on the table if they don’t make a repeat purchase. Nobody likes leaving money on the table.
Loyalty landing pages explain your program
With Smile.io, you can also create a dedicated SEO-friendly landing page. Using drag-and-drop app blocks, you can customize and build your loyalty explainer page in minutes.
Club Voyage took full advantage of embedded content with its loyalty landing page built through Smile.io. This page seamlessly integrates into its website with custom text and images and is easy to find with a navigation link in the main menu.
Through the customizable blocks, Club Voyage uses the page to:
- Welcome customers to its program.
- Encourage customers to either login or sign up.
- Explain the basic conventions of the program (join, earn, redeem).
- Tell customers how they can earn points.
- Show customers what rewards they can redeem points for.
With a dedicated page for your ecommerce loyalty program, you can simplify your customer loyalty experience. Customers don’t need to search high and low for your program in your website footer or read through lengthy FAQs.
Loyalty landing pages are important for explaining your program benefits, encouraging sign-ups, highlighting your rewards, and promoting your program. It is also SEO-friendly, allowing another avenue for potential customers to discover you in the first place.
Gabrielle Policella
Redeem points at checkout to increase conversions
Embedding loyalty across your website should extend to the most important page on your website—the checkout page. This is the money maker, literally.
With Shopify’s checkout extensibility and Online Store 2.0 App Blocks, you can enable customers to redeem points for rewards directly at checkout, and extend this beyond the purchase to order confirmation and thank-you pages.
With Smile.io and Shopify customer data seamlessly integrated, the redemption at checkout extension will adapt to the individual customers’ point balance. Customers who do not have enough points for a reward will be told how many more points they need to earn for a reward, while customers who are eligible for a reward will see a drop-down of their current reward options.
These examples show the difference between a customer who is eligible to redeem and one who isn’t. The first image shows a customer who is 50 points short of the first reward. The second image shows a customer who can redeem either a $10 or $20 discount. Either way, this message lets customers know exactly where they stand with their point balances.
Gabrielle Policella
Since launching the points redemption checkout extension, thousands of Smile.io ecommerce merchants have enabled the feature. And the success of the embedded content speaks for itself.
When customers can see the value on the table at the most critical point in the customer journey, they’re more likely to redeem their rewards. When customers simultaneously redeem and earn points, they experience the best of your program on both ends. They receive the value your program has to offer and are motivated to receive that value again by making a repeat purchase to earn more points and redeem them again.
Compared to the traditional points redemption method with Smile.io of clicking “redeem” in the launcher and copying and pasting that unique code on the checkout page, customers prefer the checkout redemption method. This is because it simplifies the process and allows them to do everything on one page.
Redeeming points at checkout reminds customers that they can save money on that purchase, decreasing your cart abandonment rate. When customers realize they can save money there and then, they’re much more likely to complete a purchase.
On the other hand, when customers don’t have enough points to redeem yet, they are told how many more points they need to get there. This is a powerful incentive for customers to complete a purchase to earn enough points to redeem next time, increasing their basket size and average order value.
Either way, showing customers their point balances and redemption options on the checkout page is a win-win.
Embed loyalty content where it counts
The most effective Shopify loyalty programs are the ones that actively motivate and engage customers. Boost your own ecommerce loyalty program’s engagement by making it more visible throughout your website. Whether it’s displaying point balances on product pages, creating an SEO-friendly loyalty landing page, or enabling point redemption at checkout.
Remind your customers about your loyalty program on the pages they’re already looking at.
