Are you using next-gen technologies to fuel the growth of your business but still facing difficulty in maintaining a loyal consumer base? Well, we might have the answer to your problem. A customer loyalty app is what your business needs to enlarge your consumer base and enhance your consumer retention rate.
Customers want to feel valued, and rewarding them to stay connected to your business might enhance the growth of your business. With the help of customer loyalty rewards apps, you are giving them certain perks that make them stick with your business despite the offer campaign of your competitors.
Studies suggest that businesses with customer loyalty mobile apps have more sales as compared to those who don’t have that app. It has also been revealed that existing customers are more likely to buy products and services from your business than new ones. However, in the current times, businesses often focus on gaining new customers but often neglect the value of existing ones. If you are planning to develop a customer loyalty app for your business, it is recommended to stick with a strategy. In this blog, we will be discussing the features, tech stack, and strategic development process of a customer loyalty program app.
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Why is a Customer Loyalty App Necessary for Businesses?
Building relationships with your customers is a health practice that results in a long-term benefit. As per studies, a customer is only one bad experience away from changing the brand. However, on the other hand, if your business has a customer loyalty app, you can get your customers to buy from you, and even after a bad experience, it allows you the feasibility to compensate for the same with reward points. The global market of customer loyalty apps is projected to cross the mark of 216 billion US dollars by the year 2022. Here are some of the reasons why businesses should invest in a customer loyalty app.
1. Never Lost the Connection Between You & Your Customers
When your business delivers loyalty rewards in the form of points and discounts, customers are more likely to stay with you. Maintaining a good connection with your user base will take your business to new levels of success. With this app, customers are more likely to respond to your app’s push notifications about the launch of a product or some offers.
2. Personalize Offers for Increased Engagement
Everyone likes a little personal touch; your customers are no different. When your app uses its shopping history and browsing patterns to create a list of recommendations especially made for them, customers feel obliged. This creates a placebo effect and makes customers think that they want the recommended product as it matches the personality of their shopping behavior.
3. A Loyalty App Keep Things Homeostasis
Not every customer wants a huge discount every time they visit your store or app/website, all they want is to keep things the way they are, and a customer loyalty app is a perfect fit for the same. All you have to do; deliver the same quality and retain their trust.
4. Enhance Your Business Growth
When customers get the feeling of being respected by a brand in terms of discount, quality, and more, they are least likely to switch brands. As per a study, a single customer is connected to more than fifty others; that’s a lot of business coming your way if you manage to impress them.
5. Get Ahead of the Competition
Even if a competitor is delivering way better quality than your brand but if your customers are loyal to you, they are least likely to switch. A customer loyalty app plays a huge role in keeping your user base intact and, most importantly, the revenue figures.
How to Make a Customer Loyalty App?
If you wish to develop an app that excels at retaining your consumer base, the first thing you should do is; research. Gathering data about the most important parameters is the key step for any development process. The second thing that you will need is a team of dedicated developers from a full-fledged mobile app development company.
After you are done with the research, it will make you more aware of the things that you want in your app and the things that you should avoid. The decision in the process should be deciding the type of app you want, for instance, Native or Cross-Platform App.
Native Apps: These are the apps that only perform on one platform, as we know that the world has more population of android users and iOS users. If you wish to proceed with a native app, you have to develop two separate apps for android and iOS. Not to mention, it will put a burden on your budget.
Cross-Platform App: These apps can be described as amphibians of the digital solutions world. They can operate on any platform, which gives you the feasibility to attract more customers at the cost of one app. The only catch with these types of apps is their functionality. These apps are not capable of handling advanced functionalities.
Now that you have all the information about types of apps, you can be a better judge for the type that suits your business. However, you can always hire a reliable mobile app development company like Matellio that delivers unmatchable performance and an efficient customer loyalty app for your business.
List the Features of Your Customer Loyalty App
Features can be termed as the USP of any app; while developing your project, it is mandatory to choose the features that align with the expectations of the users. Users often choose any app based on the functionality but feature also play a key role. In customer loyalty apps, features are available in abundance; it is up to you how you integrate them into your project as per their relevance. Here are some of the features that can attract a whole lot of users.
Instant Reward Point Credit
The user’s account should be credited instantly whenever they purchase a product. It can be any type of reward point that you wish to deliver. It makes them feel valued. Along with that, you can also reward them for leaving a review of any product, referring the app to anyone, and more.
Reward Category
Set a time-based reward system that makes your user base shop more. For instance, when you have a tier-based system, let’s say Gold, Silver, and Diamond, and assign a number of purchases that should be made to get into each level. Then decide the perks each level would get in increasing order. What do you think will attract more customers?
Notifications Based on Geographical Location
In case your business has a franchise system scattered all over the country or city, you can integrate this feature that prompts users based on the location of your nearest store with an offer or any perks based on their shopping behavior. It can awake a lot of dormant customers.
Gamification
Customer loyalty apps should have a game for your customers to kill time and earn reward points at the end of a game. It will benefit you in a couple of ways, the customers will spend a whole lot of time on the app, and they are most likely to redeem that earned reward point which translates to more sales.
Repeat Order
When customers are presented with a lot of options, they often get confused, which results in delayed sales. You can solve this problem by delivering them an option in the order history that says repeat order; they are most likely to buy the same item again. It will save their time and yours as well. One more thing can be introduced, give your customers an option to redeem their reward points at the time of checkout; it behaves as a kind of discount.
These features are a must-have apart from the common ones such as sign-in, profile, push notifications, and more. Now that we have an idea about the must-have features of a customer loyalty app let’s move to the fuel of these features; the tech stack.
Tech Stack
Technology integrated into your app plays a key role in the overall operation and needs to be selected carefully. You can put your market research data to use and integrate the most preferred tech stack in these kinds of apps, or you can simply ask your mobile app developers or the mobile app development company to integrate one for you based on the functionality of your features. Here is a generic tech stack that is present in most of the customer loyalty apps.
Application and Data: Ubuntu, Ruby, Amazon CloudFront, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft IIS, Handlebars.js, .NET, Cassandra, Groovy, Azure Storage, Splunk
Utilities: Google Analytics, Optimizely, Chartbeat, Flurry
DevOps: GitHub, Git, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Visual Studio, Bitbucket, Sublime Text, VirtualBox, Vim, New Relic, Terraform, Vagrant, Grunt, Datadog, Prometheus, SonarQube, Chef, PagerDuty, Puppet Labs, Rancher, Octopus Deploy, Concourse, Azure Service Fabric
Business Tools: Slack, Jira, Confluence, Skype, Qualaroo, Join.me
Design, Testing, and Launch
Before moving on to the next level, you have all the facts and information you need to develop an efficient customer loyalty app. When a customer visits your website or application and uses your platform integrations, the first thing they notice is the design of the UI/UX. You need to focus on the interface of your customer loyalty app; it should be elegant and simple at the same time. Don’t overdo the design; overcoming something can be fatal to your project. Hire a designer who will design according to your expectations.
In the next step, ask your mobile app development company to submit an MVP of the project. Perform robust testing of that MVP for errors or bugs. Test all your features, navigation, and more. Early testing saves you time and money. Detecting an error or bug at an early stage allows you to fix it before it reaches users.
Once your projects have achieved significant results during the testing phase, you can continue with the start-up phase. Integrate it into your business and allow the customer to leave feedback for further improvement. In case of any error or malfunction, you can contact the development partner to fix it. Various companies offer a 30-day free maintenance period after the project is handed over.
Develop Your Customer Loyalty App with Matellio
With more than a decade of experience in the field of software/mobile app development, we understand the importance of customer loyalty. You can either deliver excellent service or deliver them perks and rewards that keep you ahead at all times. Building a customer loyalty app can be complicated at times, but our team of highly skilled developers is ready to take on the challenges and come up with a flawlessly engineered app.
With a team of developers who possess a diverse experience background and expertise in next-gen technologies, it becomes easy to develop an app that suits your business needs. If you are thinking of developing a customer loyalty app that keeps your user base around for good, let’s discuss in detail the project over a 30-min consultation call!
