How to build a great Loyalty App for your business?

Your prolonged search for “how to build a loyalty program app” ends here.

Customer retention has always been a challenge for businesses. No one wants to lose its loyal customers. After all, they play a prominent part in a business’ growth.

A loyalty program app can be a great way to persuade customers and ensure that they stick to your brand irrespective of the competitors. This way, you can improve customer retention by making them loyal to your business.

Retaining your existing customers is as important as acquiring new ones but it is seen that businesses often focus on the latter. Semrush reports that only 18% of businesses focus on customer retention in comparison to 44% who invest in customer acquisition. The same report reveals that the probability of selling to an existing customer is comparatively higher than selling to a new customer. Various other stats highlight how valuable existing customers are to a business.

So, if you are facing a low customer retention rate, building a loyalty or rewards app can prove to be an effective solution. In this article, we will discuss why you should have a loyalty app, the key features of a loyalty application, and how to create a loyalty program app for your business.

Why you should create a loyalty app?

Having a loyalty app isn’t a choice anymore, it’s a must-have for businesses in order to survive in today’s competitive market. Not having one allows your competitors to drive your customer base towards them.

Moreover, having customers is one thing, having loyal customers is the other. A loyalty app offers an excellent opportunity to convert customers into loyal customers. These loyal customers spend massively on your products and services, do word-of-mouth marketing for your brand, and always prefer it over your competitors.

Here are some other benefits of loyalty app development.

1. Send exclusive offers

Customers want to feel special, so make them feel special. By integrating loyalty programs into your business app, you can leverage customer data and their buying preferences and send them exclusive/personalized offers on their favorites or on birthdays. This strengthens your bond with your customers and creates an exciting brand-customer relationship.

2. Even big brands do it

A loyalty program app caters to businesses of almost all kinds and sizes. Even the big names in the market like Starbucks and Nike run loyalty programs on their app. There remains no question on why you shouldn’t!

3. Increase Average Order Value

Brands generally set a threshold value for customers to earn loyalty points. And to be eligible to receive loyalty points, customers do not ponder to add extra items to their cart or spend more than they intended. This eventually leads to an increased average order value. Even while redeeming loyalty points, customers tend to use them as a discount for higher purchases.

4. Build a loyal customer base

By building a rewards app for your business, you can offer some loyalty points to customers on every purchase they make, which would drive them to your store for future purchases in order to utilize those points. This would help you build a loyal customer base for the long run.

5. Convenience

A loyalty app allows your customers to shop from any part of the world, provided that the brand store is located in that area. For example, Starbucks, a giant coffeehouse chain, allows its customers to redeem loyalty points in the Starbucks app on any Starbucks store around the world.

Essential features of a loyalty application

Building a great reward app requires integrating the right set of features into it. Here are some popularly-used features of a sterling loyalty and rewards-based app.

1. Points Balance and History

Customers should be able to check how many loyalty points they have earned in their lifetime, how much balance is remaining, and how much they have redeemed so far along with where they have spent these points.

2. Location-based push notifications

With this feature, you can send push notifications to your customers about some exciting ongoing deals and offers when they are nearby your store. What an amazing way to capture more sales! Isn’t it?

3. Easy redemption of points

The process to redeem earned loyalty points should be effortless. At checkout, customers should be provided the choice as to whether they want to adjust the loyalty points in their current purchase or not.

4. Gamification

Gamification in your loyalty app can be a very effective way to engage users. You can host quizzes related to your business or add something like Spin and Win, and offer them enticing rewards in return.

5. Remote pick-up

This allows customers to pay for their order from the app and pick up the order from the nearest store, thereby saving their time from standing in a queue.

Other features include easy onboarding, push notifications, and social media integration. Although you may find several other features to include in your loyalty program app, it’s up to you to decide which are the most beneficial for your business.

Loyalty app development- How to create a loyalty program app?

Assuming you have done thorough market research and have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, we will skip this part and proceed directly to the design and development phase. The process to build a rewards app is as follows-

1. Wireframes and Prototypes

Start by preparing an information architecture (IA) and then create all the possible user flows describing how the users will move through your app from the entry point till the desired outcome is achieved.

After you are done mapping out the user flows, you can start drafting wireframes that depict how the pages in your loyalty app will appear to the users. You can then proceed to create high-fidelity mockups and prototypes after these low-fidelity designs (wireframes) that would demonstrate how the user will interact with the loyalty app features. There are tools, like Invision, that allow you to integrate mockups into a single prototype.

If UI/UX is not your specialization, you can outsource these services to a design consultancy.

2. Create an MVP

Once the job of UI/UX designers is finished, it’s time for the developers to take over and put that prototype design into reality through code. Programmers/coders make use of the relevant software development kits (SDKs) and APIs to achieve the desired functionality of your loyalty application.

We would suggest building an MVP for your loyalty app instead of going with a full-fledged application from the beginning. If you are hiring a loyalty app development company, make sure that they follow an agile methodology. This allows to catch bugs early in the development process and fix them before they turn severe. Furthermore, you can make adjustments to the application when it isn’t a costly deal.

3. Test and Launch your loyalty app

Post loyalty app development, do not forget to test your app thoroughly. It’s important to ensure that all the bugs are eradicated and a bug-free loyalty app is made available to the users. Once everything seems to be in place, go forward with launching your app on the app store(s). Whether you build an app for Android or iOS, make sure to comply with the app store guidelines to avoid any troubles during or after your app upload.

That’s it on how to create a loyalty program app for your business. It is time that you develop one and work towards improving your custom retention rate.

Thoughts might be revolving around your head regarding loyalty app development cost but it would entirely depend on the feature sets, the platform for which you want to build the app, etc. You can reach out to our experts here and get an estimation.

Dew Solutions holds prowess in building top-notch loyalty apps. We build an app called Timesclub which is aimed towards Indian expats residing in the US. The iOS app allowed the users to earn cashback on their purchases which they could transfer to their bank account or utilize to purchase rewards for their family members back home.

Tell us your requirements and we would be more than happy to deliver a great loyalty app to you as well.