How to Select the Right Loyalty Platform for Your Business

Brand loyalty programs are no longer nice-to-haves. Consumers have grown to expect brands to incentivize and reward repeated engagement, making loyalty programs essential for maintaining engaging customer experiences, collecting data to derive meaningful insights, and leveraging those insights to drive business growth. Whether you're a local shop or an international enterprise, choosing a loyalty platform that meets your customers’ needs and the enterprise’s business goals will be critical to your program's success.

Unless you’re still operating on some analog punch-card system (do not recommend), choosing the right technology for your loyalty program can feel overwhelming. Does the tech platform offer the needed flexibility to bring your loyalty strategy to life and integrate easily with the other tools in your MarTech stack? Can it support your changing needs as your loyalty program scales? How robust are its personalization and gamification capabilities? How can you determine which platform is right for you?

Forrester has evaluated the landscape of loyalty program platforms, but reports like this cannot account for the specific nuances that your loyalty program requires. At WillowTree, we are platform-agnostic: we always take a bespoke approach to client objectives and have implemented many different loyalty management software and end-to-end loyalty experiences.

However, several themes can help clarify this crucial decision.

How to Choose the Best Loyalty Platform for Your Brand in Three Steps

How to Choose the Best Loyalty Platform for Your Brand in Three Steps

1. Define your loyalty strategy

Your loyalty platform exists to effectively and efficiently enact your vision for an engaging customer loyalty program. So, before exploring potential platforms, a critical first step is to clearly define your loyalty strategy. Some questions to consider:

• Will your program run a traditional "earn-and-burn" model, where members receive points based on spending?
• How will members accrue and redeem rewards?
• Will members be given any choice in benefits (for example, a rewards store)?
• Are gamification elements, like challenges or contests, featured in the program?
• Does your program include multiple benefit tiers?
• What rules are in place to address the expiration of points and/or tier levels?
• Will your loyalty program include partnerships with other brands?

2. Determine your capacity for program maintenance

After your team has defined your loyalty strategy and identified integration necessities, it is also essential to consider how involved your team will be in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the tool once implemented. Platforms vary widely in user-friendliness, UX complexity for intended audiences, and the scope of available support services. Depending on your team's technical expertise, all are important considerations for finding the right tool to enable ongoing success. Once you have your strategy and tech assessment, you're ready to explore the many loyalty platforms available to determine which is best suited to deliver on your functionality needs and desired business outcomes.

3. Consider loyalty platform functionality

At their core, loyalty platforms are “rules engines,” dictating how program members are rewarded for their behaviors (e.g., if a customer X takes action Y, give them Z benefit.) As you research each loyalty platform and its available features, anchor your inquiries to your defined loyalty strategy. You need to ensure the platform you choose has flexibility in its rules engine to empower the loyalty program you have designed — and that the rules engine is customized with the level of complexity necessary to execute your vision.

Interoperability is paramount: loyalty schemes cannot operate in silos, and their efficacy depends on smooth integration with your existing marketing technology suite. Take segmentation, for example. Many MarTech tools offer segmentation functionality, whether in your customer data platform (CDP), mobile analytics tool, customer relationship management (CRM) tool, or customer engagement platform (CEP). If segments defined in one system don't flow seamlessly into your loyalty platform, you'll face significant obstacles orchestrating the program.

The same applies to other integrations, such as campaign deployment, reporting, and analytics. You must explore how each loyalty platform will integrate with your specific MarTech stack to ensure data can flow back and forth freely in an automated, ongoing way while minimizing implementation lift and the need for custom configuration.

Success hinges on your loyalty program’s ability to communicate fluently across all your marketing tools. Other platform functionalities to consider in your research include:

• Gamification features for unique customer interactions (e.g., challenges, badges, quizzes, and leaderboards)
• Support for various reward types (e.g., rewards stores)
• Scalability to handle your program as it grows (whether through increased customer volume or campaign velocity/complexity).

Additionally, consider any web/app development required to power new features in your loyalty program and explore whether the platform you choose can support frontend experience changes without excessive backend development work.The right loyalty platform will have the features and integration capabilities you need, balanced against your team's capacity to get the most value from those capabilities.

The Right Loyalty Platform Deserves the Right Partner

Selecting a reputable and experienced partner to orchestrate the implementation, integration, and setup of your new loyalty experience is as crucial as choosing the right platform. WillowTree, with our deep understanding of loyalty programs and proven track record across industries, offers invaluable insights and support. We can guide you through the entire program lifecycle — from defining your strategy and modeling financial impact to evaluating platform options. We’ll support you in designing and deploying a best-in-class customer loyalty experience, implementing it technically, and managing it over time. And we bring a fun, collaborative approach to working with clients like you. Don't let the complexities of loyalty marketing overwhelm you. Let WillowTree light the way.