It’s hard to overestimate the usefulness of loyalty programs. It’s a sure way to keep customers firmly attached. But sometimes it is quite difficult to manage all your marketing activities as often they are multilevel and multithreaded. And that’s where loyalty management software comes to help. This extremely useful tool is able to take the advertising campaign management experience to a whole new level. However, whether you are going to buy loyalty management software or use loyalty software development services, you still need to have a clear idea of what features the product should have. In this article we’ll talk about 8 key loyalty management software features that your toool should have in order to cover basic business needs.
Payment gateway integration
One of the key loyalty management software features is payment gateway integration. For example, by integrating white label payment gateway solution, acquirers and payment providers can offer added-value services to merchants. This will allow diversifying significantly the number of sources of income, which in the long term will be an advantage for all parties. Customers will be able to pay in the way that is most convenient for them, merchants will be able to receive money, and acquirers and payment providers will be able to conveniently manage cash flow.
Convenient reporting system
Loyalty management software should provide you with all the information you need to effectively control your marketing campaign. This will not only help you better understand the current situation of the business but also to plan further actions. A good solution should have informative dashboards that provide comprehensive information on:
- Average check amount
- Total revenue
- User socio-demographic data
- User preferences (like time and days of purchases)
- Payment method
- Other information about users, their behavior, and purchases.
Different modules
To increase the lifetime value of the customer it’s necessary to have the ability to integrate and customize different modules in the loyalty management software. This will greatly increase customers’ engagement and stimulate them to take the actions you want, as well as attract a new audience. For example, depending on your promotion strategy loyalty management software can contain the following modules:
- Discounts
- Points
- Cashback
- Coupons
- Referrals
- Coalitions
Communication with users
For a system to be truly effective, it is necessary to equip it with various loyalty management features for communicating with users. Otherwise, customers may simply forget about the existence of the brand and go to a competitor. A loyalty management solution should have a reminder feature integrated into it. Through it, you can inform users about various promotions, discounts, and seasonal events, or just remind them about the brand. In addition, you can make the reminder system dynamic, so that messages come only to a certain segment of customers.
Integration with CRM
The effective work of the loyalty management system is impossible without integration with the CRM system. The latter will be a source of customer attributes that will be subsequently used to form marketing campaigns and search for the best ways to encourage various categories of customers. A really good loyalty management software instantly displays all the changes made in the CRM system to reflect the current state of affairs.
A loyalty program engine
Quality loyalty management software should be equipped with a multifunctional system for creating and fine-tuning marketing campaigns. Among other things, the software should allow you to choose an item or item category, payment method, or minimum check amount. In a good loyalty program engine, the user should be able to:
- Range campaigns by priority
- Use activity templates.
- Launch campaigns by schedule.
- Create campaigns by personal conditions such as customer birthday or purchase number.
- Calculate loyalty campaign costs
- Calculate expected revenue.
Gamification loyalty management features
The main goal of loyalty programs is customer retention. But it often happens that clients install loyalty software and forget about it forever, and a potentially great tool lies dead weight on the device in the ‘’Promos’’ folder. To get customers interested and encourage them to actively use the software, you need to gamify the process. For example, you can add several levels of loyalty, depending on time and frequency of use. Among other things, the software can have the following gamification loyalty management features:
- Various tiers. The higher the tier, the greater the rewards.
- Rewards catalog. There may be different rewards or conditions for different tiers.
- Different Expiry dates. The higher the tier of the user, the longer he can use bonuses.
Scalability
Even if your business is not very big it’s important to consider the possibility of scaling at the very beginning. When you start a marketing campaign, the initial customer flow is usually low. However, if you’ve done everything right and the campaign is effective, the number of customers will increase relentlessly. It is extremely important to build into the software the ability to process a large amount of data and expand the functionality if necessary.
Summary
So, these were the 8 key loyalty management features that every loyalty software should have in order to provide comfortable management of marketing activities. It is important to understand that the features listed here are basic functionality, which should be in every requirements specification for the development of this type of software. Additional tools depend on the needs of your business and the specifics of the marketing campaigns you are going to run. The main thing is to have a reliable technological partner that will develop software according to your business needs or will customize a white-label solution for you.
