Add a meaningful dimension to your loyalty offering to make it matter more to your best customers, your business, and the world.
Your most loyal customers are no doubt financially important to you.
But, is your loyalty program just a transactional system, or is it also a rewarding hug for the people loyal to your business?
In other words, does your loyalty program have both an ROI and an ROM (return on meaning)?
Something for Nothing
Everyone loves to be rewarded for being a good customer. Points and perks are powerful ways to say “thank you”.
The strongest loyalty programs feature highly relevant rewards: free flights and lounges for regularly flying an airline, upgrades and special offers for choosing the same chain of hotels on every trip, discounts and special events for regular retail buyers, and so on.
Something More
But what defines relevance now, in the age of meaning?
After all, this is a time when people are seeking to make more of what they do – and to do things that matter beyond themselves.
One idea is to go beyond offering only the obvious rewards within your industry.
Become Doubly Rewarding
What if you made every purchase doubly rewarding?
First, with highly relevant “thank you” gifts for themselves (points, upgrades, etc.).
And second, with a way to wrap every loyal customer purchase with a “we” feeling rather than just a “me” feeling.
For example, what if every purchase on your business’s loyalty card triggered a gift to a selected charity, institution, or cause? It could either be an existing cause or one your business sets up.
“Good for you, good for the needy (or the hungry or the thirsty or the disadvantaged or…)”
How to do it in a Truly Meaningful Way
It is best to be bold about what your doubly meaningful loyalty program aims to do for others, thanks to the help of your best customers.
In others words, don’t play lip-service to the cause you choose to support; discerning people will see right through such a gratuitous ploy.
Genuinely, purposefully, and humbly, make the cause the hero of the program and let people use it as a way to create new meaning in the lives.
By adding an altruistic aura to the loyal customer’s purchasing behavior, you embrace them with modern thinking about the “we”, not just “me” role people are embracing.
A Meaningful Purpose Beyond Profit
With a doubly rewarding program, you help people do something good for the world as you say “thank you for doing business with our company.”
People feel that their behavior – and their rewards – matter more. By extension, they believe that their lives matter more. And from all this, they see that your business matters more to them and to the world.
It is what we call a win-win-win situation. Your customers win rewards. Your company wins their loyalty. A worthy cause wins the support of both.
Go Beyond the Obvious
Think beyond seeing the loyal customer as someone who only thinks “me”.