For eCommerce brands, the holidays are all about customer acquisition. Bringing in first-time shoppers with deep discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals is the easy part. The hard part is ensuring those customers don't stay one-time purchasers and continuously engage with your brand. That's where loyalty comes in.

A loyalty program is the perfect solution for maintaining customer engagement while providing value. And, to be most effective, it needs to be tailored to fit the mobile-first consumer, especially the 76% of loyalty members who prefer to engage with a brand via SMS. 

Integrating your loyalty program with your SMS marketing strategy is the ideal way to engage shoppers before, in between, and after purchases with highly personalized and relevant messages. Not only can you segment customers based on loyalty data, but you can motivate those mobile-first shoppers to engage at exactly the right moment with the right rewards, and you can do it all quickly and easily via text.

Here are some of the customer experiences you can build when these solutions are working together.

Collect zero-party data through one-on-one conversations

Recent privacy changes have made it harder for brands to collect consumer data. While that's ultimately a good thing for both shoppers and brands, it means that businesses need to find new ways to learn about their customers.

By integrating your SMS strategy with your loyalty program, you can learn essential information about shoppers by simply texting them and asking questions. Collecting this zero-party data helps your brand build more detailed customer profiles that your loyalty program can leverage.

Once your brand has that customer data on hand, you can send more personalized recommendations directly to each shopper via text. In a survey recently conducted by Yotpo, over 43% of consumers said they want the ability to quickly communicate with a brand one-on-one via two-way text conversations. For loyalty members especially, the experience of accessibility to a brand is the differentiator between good CX and forgettable CX.

Deepen emotional connections with personalized messages and recommendations

Personalization makes customers feel special and more connected to a brand, increasing their emotional loyalty, which is one of the strongest drivers of retention, enrichment, and advocacy for eCommerce brands. 

Throughout a customer's loyalty journey, your brand can send tailored SMS messages that keep them engaged. In between purchases, you can text shoppers to remind them of engagement-based behaviors that can earn them points, let VIP tier members they're close to leveling up, or invite new members to take a quiz for extra points. More than 47% of consumers said that receiving a text about their loyalty points or rewards would encourage them to make a purchase — and the more personalized the message, the higher that number gets. 

 

Give customers low-effort ways to engage with time-sensitive promotions, offers, and more

One of the primary ways SMS marketing can maximize the value of a loyalty program is by leveraging the sense of urgency that a text evokes. In comparison to email, engagement with a text happens in real-time — over 90% of messages are read within 3 minutes of being received. 

This sense of timeliness is what leads many consumers to opt-in to receive texts from a brand. According to data from Yotpo, over 58% of consumers would sign up for SMS marketing messages from a brand in order to know immediately about promotions, offers, and updates even if they already receive emails from the same brand.

Texting is a low-effort way for consumers to constantly engage and earn rewards. Loyalty members expect early access to sales, product drops, and other exclusive events. SMS cuts through the noise of additional marketing communications and VIP members can interact directly with the brand to enjoy their benefits right away.

With a loyalty program and SMS marketing working together, brands can leverage data to engage shoppers with loyalty-specific texts, and use SMS to conduct meaningful conversations — capitalizing on every single interaction between your brand and your loyalty members. 

Learn how Yotpo SMS can work synergistically with your loyalty program to boost customer retention year-round.