Prioritizing the Top Digital Customer Experience Touchpoints

In a world where many brand to customer interactions occur in the digital space, sometimes before in person, the digital customer experiences are critical to drive the desired outcomes of your loyalty program. Whether it is simply exploring a brand and the products and services they have to offer, or coming back for their 10th purchase, customers are influenced by how easy it is to navigate a brand’s digital ecosystem and that influence can impact their relationship and loyalty to the brand. Even more, digital natives are growing to be a majority percentage of your customer base, and they are more fickle than others when it comes to the threshold for switching. Understanding your brand and program’s digital experience and focusing on priority touchpoints can help you grow your customer loyalty in 2024.

At Kobie, our approach to assessing brand digital customer experiences focuses on both the brand and the program delivery to the customer. We identify brands’ areas of strength and opportunity to elevate the customer experience. For every touchpoint assessed, we address three key questions to serve our proposed approach:

1. What is the role of the digital touchpoint in program delivery?
2. Is the touchpoint effective in serving the program and members today? 
3. How might we assess priorities to maximize the impact and value of the program as quickly as possible?

Universal Themes of Digital Customer Experience: To serve your goals in 2024, first dive into the universal themes of the digital customer experience to better understand what is foundational to delivering a positive customer experience.

• Purpose: Avoid unclear delivery of the program and value proposition through disjointed customer journeys; define a common vision for loyalty program delivery, across channels.
• Clarity & Consistency: Eliminate fluff and inconsistent messaging, visuals, and personalization for the program; create consistency in communicating the value proposition of the program through high impact copy and visuals across the entire digital ecosystem.
• Value Proposition: Clear up elements of the customer experience that are vague, hidden or missing, leaving customers and members to hunt for and interpret the loyalty program what, why and how; elevate the holistic customer experience and member journey ensuring members see and feel the value proposition no matter where they experience the program.
• Access & Convenience: Fix disconnected paths within the customer experience that make it difficult to find and navigate to the program destinations within and across channels; build a guided, intuitive, and connected journey where members can easily access and experience the program, while understanding how and why the program serves them.

Kobie’s customer experience assessment looks at 100+ touchpoints in the customer experience; for example, for a recent client we assessed 70+ touchpoints across 5 digital ecosystems to sharpen their focus and prioritize their efforts for the greatest impact. Fueled by Kobie’s deep expertise in customer loyalty and experience and in ranking all touchpoints by intended impact and assessing by universal theme, we know that these are the top 8 digital touchpoints your program should be prioritizing.

Top Digital Touchpoints to Prioritize For Your Customer Experience & The Best Practice Attributes to Consider for Success:

Program Presence & Awareness: These touchpoints are critical to the customer awareness of the brand’s loyalty program and ability to explore and learn more, with the intent to convert non-members to members easily.

• • Home Page: A brand home landing page is one of the first moments to introduce and elevate the loyalty program and value proposition to drive acquisition or engagement from a consumer to learn more. Placing the program below the fold (more than 3 scrolls) creates a barrier to entry and reduces the effectiveness of acquisition and engagement in this moment.
    • Promote the program prominently on the landing page with no more than 1-2 scrolls required to view program marketing content.  
    • Market the program both in the header and footer for consistency and easy access. 
    • Make the account / profile quick view and access easy to navigate to within the upper right navigation bar.
    • Ensure clear, consistent language, tone and imagery for program marketing; the landing page sets the tone for further navigation and recognition of the program.
  • Loyalty Program Landing Page: The membership landing page is a crucial touchpoint in the membership journey as one of the first experiences learning about the membership program and the value proposition to join. The intent of this touchpoint should be to drive awareness, education, and excitement to drive acquisition and early engagement.
    • Continue clear, consistent language, tone and imagery through to program landing page.
    • Elevate a strong value proposition with WIIFM (What’s in it for me) messaging for the customer.
    • Ensure easy navigation and understanding of member benefits without additional clicks or navigation required.
    • With tiers, add a benefit chart for simple understanding of tier reward progression and value to customer.
    • Create quick access to sign-up, sign-in or learn more through FAQs and T&Cs.
  • Help Page / FAQs: The program help page and FAQs further elaborates on the details of the program, value proposition and how to get the most out of the program for customers. This should be easy to access and digest to mitigate confusion that may create a barrier to sign-up or engage.
    • Elaborate on specific ways to maximize the value of the loyalty program and link out to learn more on program or member landing pages.
    • Simplify content where possible, reducing potential overload of information that may result in a customer not reading or understanding.
    • Keep core elements of the program clear and consistent.
    • Include CTAs to sign-up, sign-in to drive acquisition.
    • Include a chat pop-up to make it easy for members to get 1:1 help.

Program Access & Navigation: These touchpoints bring the customer into the ecosystem as a member and should advance the member’s relationship with the brand through purchase conversion, engagement, and retention.

• • Member Profile: A loyalty program member profile is the membership hub where members can share who they are, what they do, what they want and can see everything summarizing their membership status. The intent of the Membership profile should be to drive engagement with the brand, program, and redemption/use of member benefits.
    • Elevate the program value proposition consistently; display program benefits, tier rewards, services available, etc.
    • Personalize the experience with member name and tenure in consistent location and use personal, celebratory tone, language and imagery in profile.
    • Drive hype and engagement with a member status tracker within the profile including points / rewards tracker and tier status.
    • Create quick access for profile management for members; rewards, personal information, shopping information, preferences, shopping history, etc.
    • Centralize rewards available to redeem with CTAs and links to easily redeem rewards from profile.
  • Purchase Funnel: Incorporating a loyalty program into a brand’s purchase funnel fosters customer retention and brand loyalty. By introducing the program early in the funnel, during the awareness and interest stages, the brand can attract customers with exclusive perks and benefits. As customers progress through the funnel, the loyalty program serves to solidify their intent to purchase, incentivize repeat transactions, and ultimately cultivate a cycle of ongoing engagement, advocacy, and sustained loyalty.​
    • Prominent program messaging across digital touchpoints to drive awareness as a member browses the website or app.
    • Personalized messaging based on the member’s behavior and preferences to increase the program’s relevance at various stages in the purchase funnel.
    • Integration of program benefits into the purchase process; point earn visibility on products, rewards available at checkout, sign-up/sign-in at checkout, etc.

Program Communication & Personalization: These touchpoints go beyond the customer led stages of the customer experience and focus on communicating and engaging with member’s in a more personal way. When done well, these continue to grow the customer’s emotional connection with a brand, deepen their engage & drive retention throughout their lifecycle with the brand. 

• • Program Evergreen Positioning in Email: Evergreen program positioning within general emails are used to elevate and reinforce the membership value prop in a clear, consistent and not- overpowering way. They can be used to drive authentication, engagement and spend.
    • Use clear, consistent, and concise messaging and imagery to reinforce program presence and value.
    • Simple promotion of member benefits available with a CTA to explore more in web/app.
    • Elevate the highest engaged benefits with a mix of hero and foundational benefits where possible.
    • Personalize with member data such as name, member status, points balance, progress to next reward or content based on profile preferences.
    • Include a points or reward tracker in top of email to drive engagement and conversion.
  • Onboard / Welcome Series: Onboarding emails are aimed at welcoming new members and engaging them early on in their lifecycle. This is the first step to get members engaged (or make them “stick”) with the brand. They should feel personal, welcoming and educational; driving early habit formation and engagement with benefits.
    • Execute a multi-stage onboard email campaign welcoming and educating new members to the program.
    • Use welcome and celebratory language, tone and imagery to drive hype.
    • Reinforce member benefits, value proposition and how to use/access/redeem benefits.
    • Encourage engagement with the program with CTAs to access shopping, member profile, community or drive non-transactional engagement actions.
    • Include the program and/or brand mission statement; members show more affinity to brands their values align to.
    • Include ways to engage beyond membership if applicable.
  • Member Milestones (Birthday, Anniversary, etc): Marketing campaigns celebrating members with personalized, scheduled milestone rewards or recognition can grow emotional connection and drive conversion through reward redemption.
    • Lead with program branding.
    • Execute a multi-stage campaign; 1: to build hype prior to milestone, 2: to celebrate milestone and prompt reward redemption or encourage desired behavior.
    • Personalize with basic data attributes such as name, tenure and/or content based on preferences.
    • Create a sense of urgency with reward expiry terms or time-bound CTAs.
    • Lean into reciprocity when delivering.

At Kobie, we know the digital customer experience can make or break a customer’s decision to stay loyal to a brand. With a rise of digital natives in your customer demographics, nailing your digital touchpoints and experience is even more critical to your loyalty program’s success than it has been before. Kobie has a rigourous approach to assess your Loyalty Customer Experience in order to designing the right customer experience for your loyalty experience to serve your program and business objectives.

To learn more, contact us.