Leverage Social Media For Your Rewards Program

Social media has become ingrained into our lives becoming part of our daily routine of checking our phones, posting, and consuming content. It’s become so normal, those rare friends who don’t have a social media profile are viewed as an anomaly. And if you’re an e-commerce business not on social media, it can be difficult to scale and grow. Social media has changed the way we connect with people, consume content and interact with our favourite brands. It’s estimated that there are 4.74 billion social media users around the world (as of October 2022). That is 59.3 per cent of the population. It’s become normal to head to your favourite brand’s Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram page or at the very least see their content on your feeds. From the business perspective, whether you’re an established brand or a new business, the potential to build a community and a loyal following on any social media platform is an easy start.

Social media is a communication tool with the compacity to build a community and a relationship with your customers. Customers can interact with your brand at any time of the day, whether it's a DM for support, comments left on your content, being tagged in a review, or someone looking up your product before they make a purchase decision. These interactions offer an engaging experience that builds trust with your brand, making it the perfect tool for promoting and improving your loyalty program.

You can leverage social media for your rewards program by letting customers earn rewards for taking social actions, promoting your loyalty program creatively, and using your social media analytics to make decisions on how to reach your audience.

Incorporate social media actions into your loyalty program

Rewarding customers for social media actions is one of the easiest ways to engage new loyalty members and have them earn points right off the bat. Involving social media actions such as earning 100 points for a follow on Instagram or 200 points for posting on TikTok, immediately engages your customers by introducing them to your social channels. Incorporating social media actions into your loyalty program will make customers feel like reaching a certain points balance is attainable. This will in turn increase the likelihood of your customers participating in your program and coming back for a repeat purchase. Social media is becoming the landing page for first-time visitors. The first place where visitors will head to view your product in action, read reviews, your brand presence, and determine if your business is credible. TikTok is quickly becoming a top search engine for Gen Z consumers, while Millenials find user-generated content on social media, 50% more trustworthy than brand imagery.

For example, if you’re a cosmetics brand with a large presence on Instagram, you should reward members for following you there, not on Twitter.

Encouraging customers to earn points by sharing your products on a channel that most of them don’t use will cause frustration and lower your redemption rates. Instead, find a way to incorporate popular channels like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter into your rewards program to give your customers more opportunities to earn points before their first purchase!

Detour Sunglasses has built its community on social media, so rewarding customers for a follow and sharing on social media platforms was a natural part of its loyalty program. Detour Sunglasses rewards 10 points for every follow on Instagram and 15 points for shares on Facebook. “We have our program set up so customers get reward points for every dollar they spend but they can also do things like to follow us on social, share our page, sign up for their birthday, etc. They can even earn points by doing these things before a purchase,” says founder and CEO Chris Venturini.

“Seeing how close they are to a reward right off the bat definitely helps them pull the trigger on a purchase and then keeps them coming back!”

In these ways, rewarding customers for performing social actions is a win-win: finding ways to integrate popular platforms into your rewards program will create a more engaging experience for your customers, while also resulting in more exposure for your brand.

Use social media to promote your rewards program

It’s estimated the amount of time people spend on social media is an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes a day. With so many users across the world and often the first place people are heading to for information, social media is an incredible resource to help you create awareness about your rewards program on a global scale. Once you’ve determined which platforms your target audience is most likely to interact with, you can begin sharing rewards content that’s been designed with your audience in mind.

Not all rewards and loyalty programs are set up to succeed. Reward programs fail because of how they are set up in the first place. Not optimized for growth, doesn’t cater to a brand's audience, and the biggest mistake…businesses fail to promote their programs in the first place. Creating a rewards program with the set-it-and-forget-it mentality, will not drive retention, loyalty, or repeat purchases. You can’t be successful if you never tell people you have a loyalty program they can join.

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Mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube all have unique benefits that give you a number of ways to communicate the value of your program. From letting customers know your program, how to join and what customers can earn.

Yes Darling Tea, is a tea brand focused on providing wellness tea blends. To remind users of unused points and how to register for their loyalty program, they created a visual walkthrough on Instagram and Facebook. They showed users how to sign up for their program on both mobile and desktop, as well as log into their accounts.

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