Americans are no strangers to rewards and loyalty programs. In almost all fields of consumer business, loyalty programs are the prime tools used for customer retention. For e-commerce businesses, loyalty programs are really important to keep shoppers coming again and again. News about exciting rewards is spread by existing customers through social media and word of mouth, and this can also help bring in new customers.
Loyalty programs need to be innovative and in tune with the interests of people visiting or buying from your e-commerce store. It’s also inevitably connected with the products and services you offer. Let’s look at TemplateMonster.
TemplateMonster’s Loyalty Program
TemplateMonster offers a great selection of professional templates for your e-commerce site. Excellent web design is essential to attract potential customers. It offers themes for Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and Magento as well as templates for X-Cart, ZenCart, OpenCart, VirtueMart, and MotoCMS. It also provides a loyalty program for customers.
In addition to that, TemplateMonster offers 30% cashback on the cost of new orders. When customers place a new order, they get these cashback bonuses which will be shown on their balance. Customers can use these bonuses with their future orders.
The bonuses must be used within a year. The cashback percentage increases along with the total cost of the order and the number of orders placed.
The loyalty program is offered with any theme or template that comes with the icon of the loyalty program. The more themes you buy, the more cash-back bonuses you can get. This means you are continuously provided with more purchasing power.
If you are a vendor selling your themes or templates on TemplateMonster, the loyalty program can be a great way to grow your earnings since buyers are attracted to products offering bonuses. Also, you could also benefit from return customers. The vendor control panel helps you to control the sales and stats of your products.
And you get to decide whether you want your product to be part of the loyalty program. You can earn bonuses of up to 30% from your products.
A Saturation of Loyalty Programs
As a result of the meteoric rise of loyalty programs that span retail, travel, financial services, software and tech solutions, etc., the 2015 Colloquy Loyalty Census states that the average American household takes part in 29 various loyalty programs. Ultimately, it becomes all very confusing and cumbersome for consumers. They have to deal with an array of points systems, rewards schemes and points redemption options.
And the process of exchanging these points among the various program partners is no less of a burden. And, with so many individual loyalty programs spinning around them, customers don’t get to benefit from all of those, and they ultimately end up not using them or abandoning them altogether. As a result, the businesses handing out these loyalty programs don’t get customers to shop with them repeatedly.
The loyalty program industry is, therefore, due to a disruption. Guess why? Say hello to our new friend, blockchain!
How Blockchain Can Simplify and Streamline Loyalty Programs
Blockchain could have quite a disrupting influence on loyalty programs. By “disruption” we don’t mean anything negative, but rather a transforming influence to make loyalty programs easier to manage and thereby even better. Small-scale as well as large technology companies are collaborating for developing blockchain infrastructure just for efficiently administering rewards and loyalty programs.
With blockchain technology, e-commerce businesses would be able to maintain and add loyalty programs without increasing complexity. They would need to partner with a tech giant, but it will help them make these loyalty programs suit customer requirements even better.
Personalized rewards and dedicated web apps with loyalty programs could contribute to increased customer satisfaction. Since blockchain is a decentralized network, it can help decentralize the loyalty rewards segments and unify something that is fragmented.
Elements Cryptocurrency for Rewards
There is even a cryptocurrency dedicated for rewards, Elements (ELM). The Elements cryptocurrency makes use of the X11 chained hashing algorithm for “Proof of Work” calculations. This cryptocurrency is set to be adopted by various merchants globally as the standard for loyalty programs.
Because of the proof-of-work nature of these Elements, anyone with a computer having the required processing power can mine this cryptocurrency just like Bitcoin. They can then be rewarded with Elements loyalty coins which they can use for their daily shopping.
For businesses, the loyalty coin makes it easier for them to administer loyalty points and provide a more engaging experience for customers. It can help customers use their loyalty points for whatever they like of wherever they want to, instead of just restricting them to buying stuff from a particular retailer’s e-commerce outlets, which could significantly contribute to retaining customers.
Merchants can also trade blockchain-based currency for the fiat currency that can enable them to recoup part of the sales that have been made with the loyalty points. This can’t be done with conventional loyalty points that do not provide merchants with any monetary value after they’re spent. Thereby, it enables merchants to get their loyalty liability reduced.
BitRewards Blockchain Loyalty Platform
BitRewards is a GIFTD network-based loyalty platform and ecosystem that helps retailers reward their customers with cryptocurrency tokens when they make purchases. These tokens are called BIT.
Retailers will be provided free access to the BitRewards platform and technology. This would increase adoption rates among retailers who wish to simplify the challenges involved in administering a loyalty program. BitRewards can fix broken loyalty programs, generating more value for consumers and retailers. Here are some of the features BitRewards offers for effective management of loyalty programs:
- The primary advantage is that each customer gets a single wallet that can be accessed either from any of the merchant websites participating in BitRewards or from a mobile or web app. So, the customer does not need to register with an individual loyalty program of any retailer. The customer can redeem the tokens acquired by any of the network members.
- BitRewards offers low redemption rates since it transfers the value into tokens and directly credits them to the wallet above of the customer. And as cryptocurrency keeps growing, the value of any cryptocurrency denominated reward is set to increase. And the customers will also be getting regular offers and reports from stores they’ve made their purchases from. That will encourage them to spend their Bitcoins accumulated in their wallet with the retailer, or any of the other retailers in the network.
- Since smaller retailers will no longer be providing their customer service support for rewards, BitRewards can offer a centralized customer support system for the registered retailers. That can include quality assurance, support, and technical guidance as well. It helps these small retailers to reduce the costs and resources for maintaining customer support infrastructure.
- There are reduced marketing costs as well. This centralized rewards system keeps customers engaged and attracted to retailers. And new customer acquisition is a great deal more expensive than customer retention. The centralized rewards make that happen. And that’s a lot of marketing hassles dealt with.
Loyalty programs are certainly set to increase. But, with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, they won’t be confusingly divergent but unified and easier for customers to use.
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