65% of businesses use loyalty programs to attract customers. So, here’s the million-dollar question. Why should you be a part of the rest 35%? Loyalty programs are a great initiative to retain customers. After all, who likes a going customer? Right?
But, the dynamics of creating a loyalty program have changed greatly during the decade. Now, you don’t hand out loyalty cards to customers. Rather, you bring them to your loyalty app. But, what’s included in loyalty app development? This is the question that we’ll answer today. Let’s dive into it. First, we’ll explore what a loyalty program app exactly is.
What is a Loyalty Program App?
Loyalty program apps provide rewards and incentives to customers to promote repeat purchases of a product or a service.
Now, what are the types of rewards that loyalty programs offer?
Loyalty program rewards can range from small things such as cash rewards, to larger things such as access to exclusive products and premium deals. To keep your customers engaged with the app, you can also include features such as:
- Gamification: Provide a meter that tracks a user’s loyalty points, or assign levels that are achieved after earning a certain number of loyalty points.
- Push notifications: Send users a push notification that includes a promo code with a discounted offer.
- Community building: Create a community of like-minded people who are part of your loyalty program to share ideas, product reviews, and information about product features.
By creating a loyalty app you’re giving and receiving for your business. Loyalty apps provide you with access to vast amounts of data, such as regular consumer behavior. This can help you make future decisions for your business.
In essence, creating a loyalty app is greatly beneficial for your business.
Now, we’ll look at three scenarios where loyalty app development becomes important for your business.
Scenarios Where Loyalty App Development is Important for Your Business
Scenario 1: You Have Never Developed a Loyalty App Before
Whether you own an online or an offline business, if you’re only selling goods at a fair price, you can take it one step further to attract more customers, by creating a loyalty app. The loyalty app will let you capture more customers because of the added incentives that you provide.
Scenario 2: You Have an Offline Business
This is similar to the first scenario. If you have an offline business, that only gets money from customers walking into brick-and-mortar outlets, it’s time that you create a reward app. The reward app will provide an incentive for the un-tapped online market to buy from you. As a result, you’ll have more customers by your side.
Scenario 3: You Have an E-commerce Platform
The e-commerce market is crowded. According to Statista, the number of users in the e-commerce market is projected to reach 3.6 billion by 2029.
Thus, we can see that within half a decade, the e-commerce market potential will increase.
So, how can your business make the best of this booming market? By designing an e-commerce rewards app.
Creating a rewards app will prompt your customers to buy more from your platform because of the added incentives.
Thus, customers will switch quickly to your e-commerce platform from other platforms.
Now that we know of the three scenarios where your business needs loyalty app development, we’ll look at all the steps needed to create a successful loyalty program app.
Steps to Create a Loyalty Program App
The following is the step-by-step process for successful loyalty app development:
Step 1: Define Your Requirements
Before you start loyalty app development, your first goal should be to understand exactly what you are looking for in your app. So, decide what features you want, such as reward points, push notifications, or a progress meter.
Step 2: Conduct Product Discovery
Once you have defined the general requirements that you’re looking for in your app, go for product discovery. Product discovery is the process of analyzing the deeper requirements of your app. In this case, decide what it is that you want your product to specifically achieve. In this case, put yourself in the shoes of the user. Analyze what things you expect the user to have in the app. It can be a user-friendly interface or ideal touch responses. This is the ideal set of requirements that you want to convey to the loyalty app development team.
Step 3: Get Hold of a Good Loyalty App Development Partner
Once you have decided on the right set of requirements through product discovery, now is the time to get hold of a good loyalty app development partner. When choosing a development partner, understand which development methodology they use, such as the agile and the waterfall model.
Moreover, take reviews from industry peers, and analyze their culture. Assessing the culture of the organization helps you understand things such as how long it takes for approval, and how much open communication they follow.
Step 4: Develop an MVP
Before going all out with your reward app, prepare an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). The MVP is the nearest-to-functional prototype of your app. This allows you to assess user response to your app. You can use the feedback that you receive from the user to make your app better and more friendlier to use.
To develop an MVP, your loyalty program app development partner would need a good tech stack. The tech-stack would include:
- An app development framework such as React Native or Flutter to develop a cross-platform app.
- UI/UX design tools such as Figma and Adobe XD.
- App testing tools such as Appium, Selenium, Robotium, and Katalon Studio.
- A loyalty engine that records rewards and purchases.
Also, take care of data privacy. User information is crucial and requires lots of security measures. You can enhance your app’s security by:
- Storing app data safely within the internal storage.
- Asking for user credentials before showing sensitive information.
- Adding network security configurations to your app.
Step 5: Develop and Launch the Final Product
Once you have rectified all the findings from your MVP, now is the time to launch the final product and put it into the market. So, put your app up on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Step 6: Support and Promote Your App
Loyalty app development just isn’t enough. You also need to support and promote it as well. For this purpose, you can leverage social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, and also create a website for your app. Through these methods, you can pull various audiences toward your app.
Now that we know about the six steps involved in loyalty app development, it’s time to recap what we learned throughout the blog.
The Recap
Most businesses around the world use loyalty apps to retain customers. There are scenarios where you might need a loyalty app. Either you have never developed a loyalty app before, you have an offline business, or you have an e-commerce platform.
To create an MVP, you need a good tech stack, which includes an app development framework, UI/UX design tools, app testing tools, and a robust loyalty engine. Moreover, you also need to ensure that you account for security to maintain data privacy. You can do this by storing data safely within internal storage, asking for user credentials, and adding security configurations to your app.
Next, you need to launch your rewards app and support it through different channels, such as social media and your website. Keep these steps in mind to ensure the best loyalty app development for your business.
