Optimizing loyalty programs for mobile

This post is adapted from the Mobile-first brand loyalty strategy guide, on how to design a more effective customer loyalty and engagement program on mobile.

Among many audiences, mobile platforms are customers’ primary interaction point with brands—their mobile device is how they research products, make purchases, communicate with customer support, and more. And as tablets become more common and the mobile form factor becomes the primary computing device for many users, mobile platforms will oftentimes be the only interaction these customers have with the brand. So as the channel users will grow to engage with most, expectations for brands’ mobile apps have never been higher. How can they earn their place alongside the Instagrams and Snapchats of the world?

It’s important to remember that just because a brand offers a mobile app on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store doesn’t mean that audiences are going to use it. Most consumers only have around 36 apps on their smartphone, and use only a handful of those on a regular basis. Once you control for popular third-party apps like Facebook and Gmail, the opportunity space for branded apps looks increasingly slim. How can brands ensure that the apps they build will stand out among the crowd?

Simply put, unless a brand’s app is providing real value over and above what a mobile website could offer, it shouldn’t exist. The easiest question to ask about a theoretical digital product is what about the idea necessitates a mobile app. Is it using the customer’s location consistently? Does it need to deliver push notifications to provide the user any value? Unless the experience relies on the unique capabilities of native platforms, it probably shouldn’t be an app at all.

Unless a brand’s app is providing real value over and above what a mobile website could offer, it shouldn’t exist.

Beyond that foundational question, there are some best practices that can help ensure branded loyalty apps are impactful on mobile native platforms. In fact, the native operating systems themselves are designed to facilitate just this kind of system-wide engagement: both iOS and Android offer a wide range of opportunities to extend apps and be relevant to users across the device. Crucially, this toolset goes beyond just distributing a pass that works in the iOS Wallet app.

Using mobile to be more accessible

When many brands consider the “mobile wallet” concept, their focus is narrowed to the Passbook-era distribution of passes with barcodes that could be scanned at the point of sale. But Passbook hasn’t been Passbook for nearly a year now—it’s Wallet, and Apple has included new features that give brands even more tools to extend their apps into users’ daily lives. Geo-fence–sensitive Passbook passes were a great way to remind users of their coupon or membership card directly on the iOS home screen when they were nearby a retail location—and in iOS 9, they still are. But Apple is making big strides with Apple Pay, and has introduced tools that allow brands to come along for the ride.

Beyond passes, iOS 9 introduced Value Added Services Protocol cards that operate just like Apple Pay cards and can be distributed by third-party native apps. This means that brands’ rewards cards can coexist within Apple Pay alongside users’ credit cards, can use the NFC antenna on iPhone 6 and 6s at the point of sale, and can facilitate transactions that use customers’ rewards points from directly within Apple Pay. This is yet another channel that brands can access to make their engagement programs a valuable part of customers’ lives, and also gives users a new opportunity to use their phone’s cool new features.

But loyalty programs go beyond spending money, and so iOS and Android offer tools to extend them across the operating systems, as well. Making engagement programs more valuable means extending their functionality to other corners of the system, and extension points on both platforms help put valuable information in customers’ hands immediately—even if they never touch the app itself. Home screen widgets on Android can provide a bird’s-eye view of essential progress indicators, and Notification Center widgets on iOS offer an at-a-glance view of rewards or coupons earned. Building new experiences for form factors like Android Wear or Apple Watch can help make information instantly relevant, and both offer multiple areas to update users with micro-moment–ready data points.

And, of course, there are push notifications. Funnily, while push notifications are frequently the first tactic people recommend to boost user engagement and augment retention, abuse of push notifications are also one of the fastest ways to get your app deleted. However, smart use of push notifications with targeting and messaging informed by persona research can offset any negative user perceptions around notifications and have the desired effect. But going one step further, some of the more sophisticated brands on mobile have made use of interactive notifications to offer users quick actions to common tasks, actionable from their lock screen or wearable device. It depends heavily on the nature of the engagement program, but allowing users to complete common tasks from the notification itself capitalizes on micro-moments and helps deliver real value to users.

Using mobile to be more contextual

Apart from making loyalty and rewards information accessible to mobile users, it’s critical that brands optimize their mobile experiences to be contextual based on the user’s present circumstances. The best messaging feels not only relevant to users based on their interests, but also contextually applicable to their current objectives or tasks throughout their day. And some of the best sources of data that can inform this kind of contextually relevant messaging is where the user is.

Geo-location, and geo-fences in particular, are a massively common tool in brands’ arsenal to understand when users interact with physical brand spaces over time. But beyond sending a notification when users are nearby, brands can use geo-location to understand how they fit into users’ daily routines and when communications are most relevant. This isn’t just when they interact with the retail presence, but also how: based on location data sourced over time, apps can begin to understand how the brand fits into customers’ daily routine and time messaging when it’s most relevant.

But location is more granular than GPS. Tools like iBeacon can help brick-and-mortar retailers understand customers from a micro-location perspective and begin to draw conclusions about how audiences interact with their physical spaces. iBeacon doesn’t have to seem like a toy—while many brands have dabbled with beacons to limited degrees of success, others have begun using the hardware to understand how users flow through a physical retail space and deliver targeted messaging to customers in a specific retail context. iBeacons aren’t magic—they certainly can’t do all of the things that many mobile marketers seem to want them to do. But they aren’t toys either, and a strategic beacon deployment can help retailers improve the in-store experience for customers and more intelligently target messaging to them even after they’ve gone home.

Walgreens: using mobile to be more personal

Taking advantage of everything mobile platforms have to offer doesn’t need to be a wholly technical endeavor. In fact, Walgreens’s smart use of native technologies has empowered them to introduce new rewards criteria to their Balance Rewards program that tracks users’ physical activity and overall wellness to offer new rewards based on customers’ healthy lifestyle choices.

Walgreens is way out in front when it comes to their mobile loyalty program—they were among the first to adopt Value Added Services Protocol cards for use in Apple Pay, and offer a suite of native loyalty apps that boast a richer feature set than many competitors’ flagship apps. But by sourcing data from Apple’s HealthKit and Core Motion in iOS 8, Walgreens has been able to catalog a snapshot of users’ physical activity throughout their days and map those behaviors to rewards within the Balance Rewards program. And this is an experience that would be impossible without direct native access to the iPhone’s motion co-processor, a feature that no mobile website could deliver.

What’s remarkable about this feature of Walgreens’s program is that it’s rewarding customers for behaviors that are not only qualitative, but also don’t interact directly with the brand in any measurable way. It’s simply a way for Walgreens to reinforce its image as a brand that cares about its customers’ healthy lifestyle choices, and encourages ongoing loyalty among those users who have similar priorities.

Best practices

• Look for opportunities to extend the loyalty experience and provide value on mobile—outside the confines of the app.
• Define a messaging strategy that is proactive and contextual to users’ actual needs.
• Remember that, in order for customers to adopt it, a mobile app UX has to be exponentially better than the website’s.