50% of Starbucks US sales come from their loyalty program. If you’ve had any experience with the app, you understand why.
I had a friend in college who was obsessed with Starbucks. Like, name his friends after different drinks obsessed. He only ever made purchases through the app so he could earn points. His budget didn’t decide whether he went to Sbucks or not; his points did.
What am I getting at here? Loyalty and referral programs are proven ways to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). But unlike Starbucks, most of these programs have low engagement. One study found less than 50% of customers who join a loyalty program are active members.
AMP for Email can help solve for engagement and act as a catalyst for loyalty and referral programs. It’s a great tool to encourage customers to join, provide progress updates, and re-engage inactive customers.
Read on for a wealth of loyalty program email examples and five ways AMP emails can improve your CLV and retention rates.
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Encourage Loyalty Program Members to Customize Their Profile
At the center of every loyalty program is the user profile — the connection between the user and the brand. If this profile has missing information, a brand can’t deliver all of its potential value. The whole experience suffers.
The reason here is simple: The more information a user gives you, the more you can personalize their experience. Completed profiles give you the opportunity to tailor rewards and deliver maximum value, giving people more reason to stay.
With AMP for Email, you can get more people to complete their profiles when they join your loyalty program.
The Benefits of AMP for Email
A key step in every loyalty program user journey is onboarding. Right off the bat, you want to set expectations and remind users why your program is worth joining. It’s also the right moment in the journey to ask users to complete their profile.
AMP emails cut out unnecessary steps in the user journey. You can give users the ability to complete their profile, directly in a loyalty program email.
Let’s take the example of OkCupid’s onboarding email:
The email lays out a few steps of the onboarding process for new users. The goal is to get people to fill out their profile, so they can get more value out of the platform.
The copy is great and the steps are easy to follow. The only problem is that people have to leave their inbox to continue on the user journey.
With an AMP email, users could complete all three of these steps without leaving their inbox. They could upload photos to their account and add details to their profile.
Okcupid could even email questionnaires to users. With an AMP email survey, users could answer those questions with minimal clicks and steps. And less steps leads to higher conversion rates.
Motivate Users With a Live Count of Points or Rewards
Every time my husband flew on American Airlines, he would login to the AA website and check to see how many miles he’d earned.
Points are a great way to reward specific behavior. In my opinion, the best programs are the ones where you actually feel like you’re making progress. But it’s not just my opinion — the success of reward-based programs is rooted in psychology.
Making progress on our goals increases our subjective well-being (SWB), which motivates us to take further action and make even more progress. See how that works?
But what good is making progress, if you can’t keep track of it? I’m a member of the rewards program at my local pharmacy, and I have NO idea how many points I have. I use my rewards card every time I make a purchase, and I never get anything in return!
That’s an example of how not to run a rewards program. Always notify your users when they’ve earned points, and tell them what they can use those points for.
The Benefits of AMP for Email
With AMP, you can send a point status email to your loyalty program members that’s always accurate — no matter when they open it.
Any time, my husband and I got an email from American Airlines telling us how many points we had, it was a static number. Depending when we opened it, we couldn’t be sure it was an up to date count. With an AMP email, you don’t have that problem. AMP emails share live, dynamic content, meaning you can include a live point tracker, directly in your loyalty program emails.
Let’s look at this loyalty program email example from Emfluence:
Smiles Davis opens his email and sees how many points he’s earned from Emfluence. He can see what badges he’s earned, and which ones he can achieve next.
Depending on Smiles activity on Emfluence, he might have earned more points between the time the email was sent and the time he opened it. The number might be completely wrong.
Sub in AMP and no matter when Smiles opens this loyalty program email, the points and the badges will be live and up to date. He can even save the email and refer to it later when he wants to check his points, directly from his inbox.
Boost Revenue With Personalized Recommendations
One of the first rules of marketing is simply this: Know your audience. If you don’t know your audience, you won’t know where to find them, and you won’t know how to persuade them to do anything. But it’s not enough to just have data about your customers.
You have to use that information in a strategic way.
Studies show personalization drives a 10 -15% revenue boost. For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that revenue boost can hit 25%. Loyalty program email marketing is a great opportunity to use first party data to deliver a personalized experience. (After all, these types of emails are inherently personalized!)
The Benefits of AMP for Email
With an AMP email, you can get the most out of your first party data. You can send live, personalized recommendations to your customers and let them take action without delay.
Check out this email example from Starbucks:
What’s better than buying a pumpkin spice latte and earning points? Answer: Buying the same PSL and earning triple the points. That’s the mindset behind Starbucks’ loyalty program email marketing here.
Campaigns like this are a great way to boost engagement with your rewards program. By leveraging AMP for Email to take personalization even further — while also shortening your conversion funnel — you can get even more engagement on an offer like this.
With AMP, you can personalize the type of drink that’s featured in the email… down to the minute. What do I mean by that? Let’s say Ellie usually buys a PSL in the morning but goes for an Iced Green Tea Lemonade in the afternoon. With an AMP email, you could make sure your email offer features a PSL if she opens it at 9am, or a lemonade if she opens it at 3pm. Cool, right?
You could also give people the opportunity to purchase the drink, directly from the email itself. These two small tweaks cut out friction from the buying process, which leads to (you guessed it) higher conversion rates.
Make Your “Refer a Friend” Emails Actionable
One point five million new subscribers in 18 months. That’s how much growth the Morning Brew newsletter experienced starting from 2017 when they only had 100k subscribers. How did they do this? Partially, through referrals.
Over 450k new subscribers joined through their referral program.
Tyler Denk (former senior product lead at Morning Brew) wrote a Medium article about how Morning Brew achieved that growth. He brought up the referral program and said, “It’s helped turn readers into evangelists and evangelists into walking advertisements. It’s the ultimate 1 + 1 = 3 scenario that makes all of our acquisition channels X times more effective.”
If you subscribe to the Morning Brew newsletter (an email that features the daily news), you know how persistent they are with promoting their referral program. Clearly, it’s paid off. And it could have an even greater impact if they implemented AMP for Email.
The Benefits of AMP for Email
As I write this, we’re a few weeks away from “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and Morning Brew is running a “12 Days of Giveaways” extravaganza, which enters people into a lottery when they refer a friend to the brew.
Here’s the email where they announced the giveaway:
First off, it’s a great offer. But the email features a link to the Morning Brew website where you’re given a couple of options to refer a friend.
As you can see, the only way to refer a friend to Morning Brew is by visiting their website.
With an AMP email, every action you see above could be done from the inbox instead.
The Brew could empower people to enter their friends’ email addresses and send referrals in literally a click or two — eliminating reasons people might drop off before completing a referral, like slow load times.
They could even include a live tracker of how many referrals people have sent so far. All told, this would reduce friction for the user. And seeing a live count of referrals (as well as potential prizes!) would incentivize subscribers to refer more of their friends.
Improve Engagement With Quizzes and Games
Remember how less than 50% of customers who join a loyalty program are active members? Sending loyalty program marketing emails is a great way to move your engagement metrics up and to the right.
The problem is, inboxes are a competitive space. Sending an email and getting someone to open that email are two very different things. So you want your emails to stand out. Best case scenario, you want people to be looking forward to your next email.
A simple way to stand out is to feature fun quizzes and games in your emails. Out of all the newsletters I subscribe to (too many…), only one features games in the email, and that’s Morning Brew.
At the end of every Brew newsletter, I can look forward to a crossword puzzle, quiz, or a game where I have to guess how much this totally ordinary looking house costs. Spoiler alert: It always costs more than I think.
The downside of these games is that most of them can only be played on the Morning Brew website. AMP for Email can fix that.
The Benefits of AMP for Email
Here’s one of the latest games I got in a Morning Brew email:
To play the game, I have to leave my inbox… and that’s not at the top of my to do list when I’m trying to catch up on emails.
By leveraging AMP, the Brew could feature their crossword directly in the email itself. People who might otherwise have ignored the crossword, could see questions they know the answer to and be incentivized to give it a try.
By switching up games and quizzes in emails, and giving users the ability to engage from their inbox, you remove friction from the experience. (Yes, there’s a theme here!) And just seeing the game can be an incentive to take a break and blow off some steam.
Upgrade Your Loyalty and Referral Program Emails With AMP to Boost CLV and Retention Rates
Keeping current customers happy can have huge benefits for revenue in the long run. Some of the biggest companies in the world are founded on over delivering for the customer. (Maybe you’ve heard of Amazon and Apple?).
The bottom line: Loyalty and referral programs are a proven way to deliver extra value to your customers and keep them engaged with your brand. Not only that, over 70% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand if it has a good loyalty program.
And AMP for Email is a great way to upgrade your loyalty and referral program emails. By reducing friction and incentivizing action, AMP emails encourage even more engagement. Getting started is easy too: That’s what Dyspatch’s library of precoded interactive AMP email apps is for!
