A loyalty program can help your brand connect with customers in newfound ways. By rewarding your most valued patrons, you’ll encourage recurring purchases and ultimately raise overall profits for the long term. Indeed, it’s common knowledge that keeping a customer costs 7 times less than winning a new one. In the digital age, a loyalty app could be a necessary platform to boost your loyalty programs as more customers shop from the comfort of their handheld devices.
However, before developing a loyalty app, you must consider the technical components involved. You’ll need to work closely with your software engineers and designers to optimize the user-friendliness of your interface. A complicated program might backfire, resulting in quick abandonment of the application or, in worse cases, consumers not trying it in the first place.
What Is a Loyalty App?
Loyalty apps come in many forms but essentially serve one purpose — they make your loyalty programs highly accessible to your customers. These applications reward loyal customers for their patronage, either by membership subscriptions or with every purchase.
Loyalty apps collect data from customer’s spending habits and preferences, enabling you to personalize future marketing campaigns. Hence, you can build stronger relationships with your customers with a loyalty app that caters to their specific needs and gives suitable rewards.
Why Use a Loyalty Card App for Your Business?
Loyalty card apps are specialized to provide customers with a convenient way of accessing discounts, packages, and limited-time deals from their mobile wallets. You may consider these applications the modern successors of traditional, printed, plastic membership cards.
There are many popular reasons you should swap out printed cards with loyalty card apps. These include:
- Gaining ongoing and real-time customer metrics that guide future marketing efforts (e.g., preferred type of redeemed discounts).
- Preventing the risks and frustration of customers losing their physical cards and missing out on limited-time deals, which compromises the shopper experience.
- Avoiding the high cost of materials, printing, and distribution.
- Falling in line with current contactless customer trends, which promotes the edginess of your brand and connects well with the modern shopper. Additionally, as many customers are now refusing to hand over a plastic card for fear of viruses, the use of a contactless alternative allays these fears.
The Disadvantages of a Loyalty App
Building a loyalty app from scratch is expensive. First, you’ll need to hire and consult a graphic designer to decide the overall visual layout of your app. These include font, color schemes, and graphic placements. While visual presentation is highly engaging, a poor setup could result in the opposite response. So you might have to sit through multiple tests, surveys, and revisions to achieve the best results.
Then, you’ll have to work with UX experts and software engineers to develop the most mobile-friendly interface that makes it easy for customers on the move. Like the design phase, you’ll need to undergo various changes and revisions before achieving the desired outcome.
Once you have marketing and engineering in place, you’ll have to set aside a budget to promote your app. These may include social media campaigns, email marketing, and listing fees on mobile app stores.
Unfortunately, with all the investments (that could quickly amount to tens of thousands of dollars), there’s still no guarantee that customers will download your app, especially when they already have lots of programs on their mobile.
The alternative? Design and share digital loyalty cards with PassKit. You’ll improve your marketing ROI and create professional campaigns in record time. The best part? They live in your customers’ digital wallets, so you don’t have to worry about the rate of app downloads.
Why Use Digital Wallets Instead of Apps?
Customer loyalty software like PassKit leverages what your customers already have. There’s no download, hardware, or any other prerequisite that might interfere with the customer experience. As such, your brand can focus exclusively on creating effective loyalty programs without fretting over technical details.
Over 150 million Americans have swapped out cash and physical cards for digital wallets. Your digital wallet loyalty program has the potential to reach a broad audience with unmatched accessibility. Additionally, digital wallets feature end-to-end encryption and multifactor authentication protection that offer users peace of mind.
Essentially, with a digital wallet loyalty program, you can connect with customers reliably, securely, and dynamically.
Enter PassKit – Your Leading Ally in Loyalty Programs
PassKit offers digital customer loyalty solutions that you can customize, manage, and apply with step-by-step guidance and creative freedom. Our tried-and-tested methods eliminate the need for costly marketing guesswork and convoluted software processes.
The PassKit solution is compatible with two of the most popular digital wallets worldwide, Google Pay and Apple Wallet, so you’ll connect with most, if not all, of your loyal customers without onboarding time.
Our Membership and Loyalty Card Manager provides a systematic approach to pass creation to avoid the omission of design elements. The PassKit Portal guides you in building a solid pass that comprises hero images to unique customer identification and scannable barcodes.
For complete support, have a look at our Developer Kit, which integrates wallet solutions to your existing loyalty programs. The SDK (software development kit) streamlines with the latest industry standards to help you scale your passes as your brand grows.
Check out these pass samples of the innovative possibilities with PassKit’s loyalty program builder. With our advanced features, you can tailor the most professional designs for your dedicated customers that they can immediately enjoy.
Try PassKit for free today to elevate your digital customer loyalty programs!
