Dig Deeper: How to Best Utilize the New Foursquare for Business
Evaluating Your Current Loyalty Program: Is It Working?
How do you know whether your loyalty program is successful? Companies have long asked a form of the question, “How likely are you to recommend company X to a friend or colleague?” And that question remains the best indicator of loyalty. But the key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be tailored to fit your individual industry and goals.
“If customers are already using mobile and location-based applications then making them more convenient to use as they interact with your business should make sense,” says Emerson. “Anyone who is listening effectively can see that there is already a great amount of activity online related to just about any business. Rewarding these customers for their loyalty should be a priority. Customers are creating valuable content such as tips and reviews around these venues and being a part of the conversation should not be seen as optional.”
Still, there are four general metrics to measure most loyalty programs on:
- The percentage of customers who are participating in the loyalty program
- The percentage of customers who actually earn a reward
- The percentage of customers who redeem the earned award
- The time it takes to earn that reward
“I think any company that has customers checking in regularly is ripe for linking a loyalty program to a location-based service,” notes Strout. “This activity will likely be better suited to the B to C space for at least the next year or two but over time, nearly any business could benefit from combining the power of these two types of loyalty programs.”
Before you can decide whether or not LBS services are good for you, you need to evaluate your program. And just like with marketing, loyalty needs to be a multi-faceted approach, which combining traditional and new loyalty programs can do. Foursquare’s “Specials” platform allows locations to grow business by offering both traditional deals (like a discount or special upon your first check-in) and loyalty incentives (rewarding customers who return and check in repeatedly.)
“Once you realize that satisfaction is the lowest level of acceptable service, you at once understand the power of loyalty,” writes Jeffrey Gitomer in Customer Satisfaction is Worthless; Customer Loyalty is Priceless. “How you achieve loyalty is a process, not a single action.”
Dig Deeper: The New Rules of Building Customer Loyalty
Foursquare and Your Loyalty Program: Time to Combine the Two—What Do We Do?
So you’ve evaluated your existing loyalty program and also recognized you want to combine it with a digital reward. How do you go about actually pulling it off?
Since so many consumers have smartphones in their pockets, brands and businesses can deliver customized experiences or offers at the most relevant time or the most relevant place, based on prior check-in behavior and more. So if a consumer checks in [on Foursquare] at a particular location, you might be able to push a direct offer to them to head down the street to your place of business.
Before doing anything, evaluate the Foursquare Developer site to understand what is possible with their open API. From there, there are a few options to connect your loyalty program (again dependent upon your industry) with Foursquare:
- Create a Foursquare Deal for all customers based on a set amount of check-ins
- Email Foursquare to create a custom program
- Bring an existing partner in and tie that to the check-in activity (similar to what Safeway did with Pepsi)
“Don’t think of Foursquare as competitive, but as additive,” Walker adds. “Reaching out to us and allowing us to help you think more about Foursquare and how it can and should augment your existing program, it’s a way to onboard a new demographic.”
At the end of the day, whatever you call loyalty marketing—CRM, retention marketing or more, it’s a business strategy to improve customer retention. And why wouldn’t you want to test out new technologies to do so? The best part about experimenting with Foursquare for Business is that it involves a relatively small investment, and only makes consumers more likely to recommend your company to their friends and colleagues, that one metric that truly matters.
“TastiRewards members can also connect their accounts to Twitter and Facebook and earn extra points when their loyalty activity is shared on those networks,” Emerson adds. The adoption rate of Foursquare among these networks by our members is about 18 percent. In other words, of those TastiRewards members enable connections to a social network, 18 percent have enabled Foursquare.”
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