Category: Loyalty Program

5 Reasons Your Loyalty Program Isn’t Yielding Results

5 Reasons Your Loyalty Program Isn’t Yielding Results

Delve into the top 5 reasons why customer loyalty programs are underperforming and explore how businesses can overcome these challenges.

MarTech Blogger | May 12, 2023


Launching a loyalty program can be compared to embarking on an arduous and unpredictable journey. You will encounter countless twists and turns that can either propel you forward or hinder your progress. However, despite your best efforts, you may still find yourself struggling to make any significant headway.

The 5 Problems With Loyalty Programs

The reason behind your stagnation could be attributed to neglecting seemingly minor details that can thwart the potential success of your reward program. To help you evaluate your program’s effectiveness, we have assembled a list of five common reasons why loyalty programs fail. These invaluable insights will enable you to gain a deeper understanding of why your program may not be performing up to par. 

The Lack of Customer Satisfaction: Earning rewards is too Time-Consuming

Customers are drawn to loyalty programs because of the promise of rewards and immediate satisfaction. However, over-promising can lead to disappointment and ultimately cause customers to turn away. Delayed reward redemption is one of the most significant pain points for loyalty program members, causing frustration and a sense of unappreciation for their loyalty.

Furthermore, earning rewards can prove to be a difficult and daunting task for some, further adding to their discontent. To overcome the issue of delayed gratification and keep customers satisfied, loyalty program providers must implement effective strategies.

Offering a mix of high and low-value rewards, ensuring they are both affordable and desirable, is an excellent approach. Providing a welcome gift to new members can create a favorable first impression and offer a taste of the program’s benefits. Additionally, adjusting the type of rewards can make them more accessible to customers, increasing their engagement and loyalty. 

The Program Only Focuses on One Kind of Benefit, Neglecting Others

Achieving a balance in the value proposition of a rewards program can be challenging, especially when each customer segment has unique preferences. While it’s advisable to leave customers with a manageable number of reward types, diversifying beyond discounts is one way to keep the program fresh and captivating.

Customers typically prefer financial benefits such as cashback or coupons that provide tangible, flexible value. Nevertheless, a considerable number of customers also appreciate personalized and experiential rewards, such as exclusive access, VIP treatment, and birthday rewards. To prevent issues with loyalty programs, a balance between various reward types is essential.

Overly focusing on discounts or experiential rewards can lead to an uneven customer experience. Additionally, incorporating partner rewards can increase the range of rewards available and make them more enticing, particularly if they include freebies, gifts, or merchandise. Lastly, offering high-perceived-value rewards like early product access, VIP customer service, and downloadable content can enhance the program’s appeal, and increase customer engagement and satisfaction.

Personalization is Insufficient or Nonexistent

Personalization is key to a successful loyalty program, and customized deals and offers are the secret ingredients. When customers receive rewards that resonate with their interests, they’re more likely to use them. On the other hand, a one-size-fits-all approach can leave them disengaged and motivated to explore competitors’ programs. To avoid this pitfall, it’s critical to gather and leverage customer data for personalization. 

One effective way to do this is by sending personalized birthday reward emails that surprise and delight customers. Furthermore, gamified surveys can help you understand customers’ reward preferences, enabling you to tailor your offerings to their individual needs and preferences.

The X Factor is Missing

For customer loyalty programs to be successful, they must provide an enjoyable and exciting experience for everyone while also offering a unique attraction that sets them apart from competitors. In today’s crowded marketplace, it’s essential to make a strong impression on your customers to stand out and retain their loyalty. One strategy that can help you achieve this is gamification. By incorporating game-like elements into your loyalty program, you can create a more engaging and entertaining experience for your customers.

This can include challenges, badges, point systems, leaderboards, and other interactive elements that make the experience more enjoyable. To use gamification effectively, it’s important to offer highly valuable experiential rewards that customers can unlock by completing specific actions or achieving certain goals.

These rewards should be unique, exciting, and exclusive, such as special event privileges, personalized merchandise, or travel packages. By creating a sense of exclusivity, you can increase the perceived value of the rewards and motivate customers to participate in your loyalty program. 

There are No Exclusive Offers for Members

Consumers view customer loyalty programs as exclusive clubs, expecting extra perks for their allegiance. Neglecting to make members feel valued could lead to disloyalty. To prevent this, invest in offer management and segmentation, creating region or channel-specific rewards. Enhance the exclusivity with special access to premium content and exclusive community events. These thoughtful touches can foster an unbreakable bond with your customers and elevate their overall experience.

A successful loyalty program demands careful attention to critical factors like gamification and personalization, which can make or break customer engagement and retention. Neglecting these elements can hinder progress. Optimize your customer loyalty program with The Perx Platform – a cost-effective solution that supercharges user acquisition, in-app engagement, and reduces churn. Book a demo today to learn more about how the Perx customer loyalty and engagement platform can elevate your loyalty program and improve customer engagement.

Recommended for you


Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?


Why curated customer loyalty reward triggers keep multi-demographic audiences engaged

Why curated customer loyalty reward triggers keep multi-demographic audiences engaged 

Grace Alexander

MarTech Blogger | June 6, 2022


Customer engagement isn’t a one-and-done process. Capturing attention is only the first step when it comes to building lasting relationships between brands and their audiences. The most successful companies in this regard are those that actively fight back against disengagement and loss of interest using lifestyle marketing.

When businesses offer a narrow selection of rewards and loyalty offerings, they’re at heightened risk of losing customer attention over time. Having a variety of potential incentives for customers is a powerful advantage for a business, as is using automated triggers to guide each individual to the rewards that best suit them. 

Why do some customers lose interest in rewards? 

Simply having a rewards program is no longer a major differentiator for a business. Rather, a company that is serious about loyalty must consistently prove that its rewards offerings have value and meaning to customers. 

 Engagement is the goal of a customer rewards program, and that in turn is contingent on offering rewards that fit audience interests and meet or exceed their expectations. There are a few traits that can determine whether a rewards program fires up consumers’ interest or is quickly forgotten: 

  • Does everyone get the same rewards? If there’s only one rewards progression, a company may find itself failing to connect with a significant portion of its potential audience. Consumers today are very diverse, so an ideal rewards program will offer customized incentives to hold interest. 
  • How frequently are rewards given? If a business offers a low-frequency rewards program, requiring numerous interactions before consumers receive anything valuable, they may find that interest is low. The vague promise of future value is not very compelling to customers, so brands should reach out often. 

As Hubspot noted, the most effective companies at building loyalty achieve this goal by giving generous rewards often and fully integrating these programs with their overall sales processes. Rather than tacked-on additions, these businesses’ rewards offerings are fundamental parts of the way they sell their products and services to customers. 

Hubspot suggested that when organizations achieve a high level of integration between rewards and the rest of their business, the rewards program ceases to be its own separate entity. Rather, these businesses simply offer their loyalty incentives at all times, inviting customers to engage more deeply. 

How do you counteract customer disengagement? 

It’s one thing to create an environment conducive to audience engagement. It’s another to actively fight back against parts of the customer journey where buyers may fall out of touch with businesses. When working on this type of engagement strategy, it’s important to remember that nearly any interaction can be customized to keep customer interest. 

 Customer behaviors follow patterns. By collecting interaction data, businesses can map out the paths their audiences are taking. Do people typically disengage after a certain amount of time? Is there a supplemental experience that could make an ongoing connection more fun or entertaining? 

 McKinsey & Company Partner José Carluccio recommended that companies look into their breakage patterns, determining which segments of their customer bases are not engaging with loyalty programs. Figuring out which types of customers aren’t staying engaged is the first step to improving the relevance of rewards offerings and triggers. 

 Once businesses have determined where customers are disengaging, as well as which groups of consumers are most likely to break off engagement with the brand, they can respond by adding new elements to the program. Carluccio recommended offerings such as periodic reminders to clients that they have unredeemed rewards as well as more redemption options, potentially even including charitable gifts. 

What is the value of customized customer rewards triggers? 

One potential cause for disengagement — or a lack of engagement in the first place — is the use of rewards triggers that don’t match up with how segments of a company’s audience actually interact with the brand. Customization can resolve this issue, attaching loyalty points to nearly any activity and bringing a wide swath of customers into closer contact with the brand. 

 Companies can reward both online and offline interactions with custom rewards triggers. In-store purchases, app engagements, sign-ups for services, logging in to accounts — these and more can help customers earn points in a rewards scheme. 

 The ability to create a highly customized rewards-earning process helps businesses engage with their audiences in two ways. On one hand, it allows brands to reach their customers where they are, offering points for their preferred interaction styles. On the other, it lets organizations map out preferred customer journeys, encouraging certain types of activities. 

 To start creating these better-directed customer journeys, brands can map out the ways their customers prefer to interact with their rewards offerings. American Express recommended using diagrams of consumers’ dealings with organizations, across multiple channels and over time, to identify the gaps where disengagement is most likely to occur and target those weak spots. 

Businesses that understand how their customers interact with their offerings, and how they’d like to, are well-positioned to update their rewards triggers. Creating new sides to a loyalty program can open up the strategy to a wider selection of customer groups and demographics than ever before. 

Perx customization helps your brand thrive 

No two brands are exactly alike, which means customization is always relevant from a rewards and loyalty standpoint. This is one reason to choose the Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform as the backbone of your organization’s rewards and loyalty program. 

 The Perx platform’s Rules Engine allows a high level of control over rewards triggers, right out of the box. By designing a system of tailored rewards based on what various groups of customers actually want for your business, you can deliver a rewards program with fewer obvious points of disengagement and a smoother customer journey overall. 

The value of a rewards strategy is at its greatest when consumers actually want to use it and engage with it. Customization via a powerful rules engine puts this goal within reach for your brand. Request a demo of the Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform to see this solution in action. 

Recommended for you


Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?


The little rules engine that could: Creating the ultimate customer journey

The little rules engine that could: Creating the ultimate customer journey

Amrith Ganesh

SVP, Marketing & Customer Analytics | May 17, 2022


When dealing with customers digitally, it’s important to create a well-planned-out journey. This ideal set of interactions will keep people on the right track as they engage with the brand and deepen their loyalty over time. Creating this journey, however, can be a challenge.

Too many companies are spending excessive amounts of money to keep their customers on a preferred path. Rather than using an automated rules engine that will set rewards and triggers for loyalty and rewards programs, they’re working with expensive and restrictive manual efforts. These major expenses cut into the return on investment, offsetting the value and usefulness of loyalty programs and other engagement features.

What your organization needs to get out of this pattern is an effective, affordable rules engine. With the right rules in place, you can lay out a suitable path for your customers while keeping up a strong ROI.

More time conceptualizing, less time executing

Getting customers to engage with a brand in a specific way can be difficult and time-consuming if there are too many manual processes involved. When a business doesn’t have much automation in place and customer outreach is handled on a case-by-case basis, employees are investing time that could be better spent elsewhere.

A business that is manually guiding customers from one engagement to the next may be losing its ability to pull back, look at the big picture and form a strategy. Ironically, these companies spending more time controlling the customer journey end up with less control, because they can’t create an overarching plan.

Creating a smooth customer experience, where users are guided naturally from one interaction to the next, should be a major priority for businesses today. This is especially important because Gartner research has found that customer expectations are rising and 81% of marketers envision CX as the competitive battlefield of the future.

How can your business create a positive CX while performing less manual outreach? It all comes down to automation, powered by a strong rules engine. The custom triggers and outcomes programmed into the engine determine the path of a customer’s journey, with less intervention from your team. No matter how sophisticated your customer engagement strategy is, there’s an automation solution for you.

An continuous customer journey

When designing an automated, rules-based customer journey, you should make sure there are no obvious off-ramps for your customers. This means eliminating the inconveniences that may make a person stop engaging with the brand.

An off-ramp can be anything that hurts a customers’ enjoyment, such as an irrelevant reward, a long wait before re-engagement or a bad mobile experience. Ideally, each contact will lead to further engagements, with the customer setting their chosen pace. Each micro-experience is strung together into the next, creating a continuous and seamless journey.

Each time a customer engages with a brand, the interaction should be positive and resonant. CMSWire quoted Harvard Business School’s Gerald Zaltman, who states that 95% of customers’ buying decisions are emotional, rather than coldly logical. If your brand is making people feel good, they’re more likely to stay loyal.

CMSWire added that personal touches are a valuable element of the customer journey, as long as they are added seamlessly into the journey, and in ways that improve interactions. This is another area where automation is better than heavy manual intervention. Customers should be getting tailored experiences by default.

A rules engine is the behind-the-scenes technology that makes a never-ending, personalized customer journey possible. A good engine will allow your team to create an intricate system of triggers and outcomes to keep customers engaged indefinitely through earn and burn or loyalty points, rewards and hyper-personalized experiences that are immediately relevant to them.

With varied game mechanics for earning and using points on customized rewards, you can win the CX war and keep your audience interested.

Actions equal triggers, milestones equal rewards

Building out a loyalty strategy on a rule engine means creating customized loyalty actions. Common interactions serve as triggers, and when customers reach milestones in their engagement with the brand, they receive rewards.

These reward allotments and the triggers that activate them will differ for each brand, and they give you the chance to lead customers down ideal paths for long-term loyalty. Salesforce noted that rewards can be more interesting than just discounts on future purchases. Your brand can offer free subscription services to customers who reach a loyalty threshold, or even invite them to exclusive events.

When you’re using a rules engine to plan out a strategic loyalty and rewards program, you’re free to go more in-depth about what you offer to your most engaged customers. Your choice should reflect customer data and intensive research, so you can be sure you’re giving them rewards and experiences that fit their goals and lifestyles.

Loyalty programs may even include offers that don’t go directly into your customers’ pockets: Salesforce added that some compelling engagement programs involve charitable components. By engaging with your brand, people are contributing to worthy causes they care about.

Perx has the rules engine you need

To get started building the automation-driven customer rewards journey of your dreams, you can invest in the Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform.

The rules engine enables deep customization without time-consuming and difficult manual adjustments. You can design compelling reward earning and redemption scenarios that encourage customers to interact with your business in specific ways, leading them on a journey that suits both their preferences and your objectives.

Customized rules can be based on the real-time information coming in from real customer interactions. This means you can tweak and optimize the program based on actual information rather than assumptions. Such a level of precision allows you to shape the customer journey and experience in ways that will deliver results.

Rather than having to build a rules engine from scratch, the Perx Lifestyle Marketing platform gives you this capability right out of the box. Request a demo to learn exactly how it works.

Recommended for you


Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?


Does Your Customer Loyalty Program Need Resuscitation

Does your customer loyalty program need resuscitation?

How to keep your brand loyalty initiative from gasping its last breath

Grace Alexander

MarTech Blogger | April 26, 2022


Brand loyalty may not be dead, but it’s barely clinging to life. Maintaining customer retention and growth is ultimately down to how well your brand manages hygiene when it comes to customer engagement. Being able to engineer the customer journey with seamless transitions from touchpoint to touchpoint combined with meaningful rewards and continual opportunities for further engagement is key.

Traditional loyalty programs are where customer relationships go to die

Many traditional customer loyalty programs in use today are glorified ledgers. They:

Serve as not much more than a records keeper

Customers have advanced beyond being satisfied with mere point-tracking systems. Adding points as they are earned and deducting them as they are spent or redeemed is like logging blood pressure without doing anything about whether it’s low or high.

Aren’t clear about the worth of points to the customer

Lack of transparency about how much points are worth and what they can be spent on or redeemed for is comparable to giving a patient in crisis instructions for care in Latin — it’s unhelpful, to say the least.

Bury rewards and benefits so they aren’t easily accessible

Programs that keep information about rewards and benefits hidden away in an obscure page on their website can be almost pointless. That’s like prescribing medicine but hiding the bottle.

Don’t drive constant customer engagement

Not focusing on constant, continual customer engagement is as helpful as telling a patient to eat light during annual festivities but not bothering to remind them to take their daily medication.

Don’t nudge or track customer actions aside from when a point is earned or spent

Customer loyalty programs that only become active when the customer initiates contact and then goes dead again are similar to a pacemaker that doesn’t kick in until someone turns blue.

Don’t provide additional ways to incentivize the customer

Suppose your loyalty program isn’t coming up with new ways to get your customer motivated about interacting. In that case, you may as well call the time and sign the certificate because the slow death of your relationship has arrived.

Don’t build additional loyalty

Customer loyalty is like a barometer of health. If you aren’t doing regular checkups and making it easy for them to see you on-demand, you might find their loyalty DOA.

Deliver poor results and poor ROI

Not tracking metrics and analyzing the results of your customer loyalty program compares to sending off their samples to the lab and never bothering to follow up. Who wants to wait around forever? By the time you check back, your customers will be gone, gone, gone.

Modern loyalty programs breathe new life into customer interactions

When appropriately designed and implemented well, customer loyalty programs can become the primary driver of your customer engagement, growth, and retention initiatives. A great customer loyalty program will:

Build a tribe of loyal customers

The constant attention and care you show will create a strong relationship between you and your customers — and they’ll reciprocate with word-of-mouth accolades, resulting in holistic referral marketing.

Continually set customers up for yet another touchpoint

When you do repeated follow-ups that provide gratification and brand value realization, customers become more likely than ever to be receptive to your recommendations and advice. It’s almost like going to a doctor that treats you like a family member.

Build highly active customer journeys

Making your customer’s journey feel more like one long-lasting interaction instead of isolated events is how you become a necessary part of their everyday lives. So make sure you’re delivering an ongoing experience studded with actions and rewards to engage them further and keep the brand/customer relationship in good health.

Present personalized experiences

A patient who realizes that their doctor never learns their name quickly finds a new provider. Making sure your customer loyalty program makes every member feel special with tailored experiences and customized rewards will encourage them to make and keep regular appointments with your brand.

Clearly present the “why” of belonging to your program

The customer only turns to an “urgent care” version of a loyalty program when they hope to get some fast help. That initial reward for signing up can be a much-needed shot in the arm, but don’t forget to hand out the brochures that explain your point worth, benefits, and rewards to drive repeated customer actions.

Engage customers on a level that impacts their lifestyle

Patients who aren’t invested in their health tend to eat better and walk around the block for a few days after a doctor visit, then give up. You need a program that sets a reminder to keep walking daily, suggests healthy recipes, and offers a free meditation suggestion they can access at bedtime every night.

Perx transforms customer loyalty programs into lifestyle augmenting tools

Are your customer relationships clutching their chests and gasping for air? You need help, stat. Don’t sit by and monitor the situation while it bleeds out on the floor. Instead, take steps to proactively address the bond between brand and customer and extend its lifespan for years to come.

The Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform (LMP) changes how your customer loyalty program impacts customers. With Perx Platform, You can:

  • Power customer interactions with constant opportunities.
  • Increase customer retention by providing an ongoing journey.
  • Enhance customer engagement by tracking customers and leveraging extra opportunities.
  • Improve customer loyalty with highly personalized experiences.
  • Maximize referral marketing opportunities by turning customers into brand ambassadors.
  • Reduce your customer acquisition cost and maximize lifetime value (LTV).

It’s time to invest in a customer loyalty program with endless potential for personalization and the capability to develop endless customer journeys packed with actions, rewards and enjoyment. Perx helps you turn your brand loyalty system into lifestyle augmentation tools that keep customers active, engaged, and constantly watching for the next opportunity to play, win, save or be surprised with your next communication or offering.

Are you ready to do more than put a bandaid on your customer relationships? Request a free demo today.

Recommended for you


Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?