5 Keys to a Successful Online Retail Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs can help online retailers improve customer retention, increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and expand margins and revenues. However, poor user experiences can impair customer satisfaction and hamper loyalty programs. Today’s consumers expect fast, friction-free and secure interactions from any device. To unleash the full potential of their loyalty program, retailers need to accelerate website and mobile app performance, streamline digital engagements, and safeguard sensitive data. Here are five surefire ways to attract customers, increase brand loyalty, and improve business outcomes:

1. Provide a simple and seamless user registration process. Long and drawn-out registration processes can frustrate customers and dampen enrollments. By making sign-up quick and easy, and supporting social login and single sign-on across all your properties, retailers can improve customer experiences and curb abandonment.
2. Optimize website and mobile app performance. Web performance is central to the user experience. Slow websites and mobile apps can repel shoppers and diminish conversion rates. By optimizing web performance — ensuring quality experiences across devices and locations — retailers can improve customer impressions and boost business results.
3. Lure customers with high-quality images and videos. Rich media content can help entice shoppers and improve loyalty. Sluggish page loads and video streams can turn off customers and impact the bottom line. Retailers can enhance user experiences by using adaptive media management tools to optimize images and video content for mobile devices and web browsers.
4. Protect against credential theft and abuse. Loyalty programs are ripe for fraud and abuse. Hackers and scammers can resell or redeem stolen rewards for big payouts. One loyalty fraud prevention group estimates that $1 billion a year is lost to loyalty program crime. Retailers can defend against credential theft, stuffing, and misuse by implementing advanced customer identity and access management, as well as bot management solutions.
5. Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations. Online retail sites are subject to a wide variety of data privacy regulations — e.g., GDPR, CCPA, PCI-DSS, etc. By instituting strong data security systems and practices, retailers can improve regulatory compliance and avoid steep fines and bad press.

Engage Customers, Breed Loyalty, and Improve Outcomes

Your business can improve digital engagements and mitigate risk by streamlining customer onboarding, accelerating website and mobile app performance, and protecting confidential data and IT systems. There are comprehensive solutions that can help retailers maximize quality of experience, increase digital trust, and boost business results. This is what your technology should help you do:

Stop Credential Abuse

• Advanced bot detection with granular visibility into bot traffic
• Protect website, login pages, and web and mobile apps
• Filter out bot traffic from human traffic and give better insights into real-user behavior
• Protect against reward points theft and loyalty-card balance checking
• Keep ahead of the evolving bot landscape

Optimize User Experience With Regards to Image and Video Quality

• Automatic media optimization and delivery
• Drive online engagement with high-quality images and videos
• Deliver beautiful digital experiences with superior performance
• Automatically resize images and videos according to the device screen size
• Lighten the image weight while maintaining best visual quality

Maintain Compliance and Privacy

• Comprehensive, secure and seamless customer onboarding
• Introduce multifactor authentication (MFA) and strong security controls
• Comply with data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, PCI-DSS, CCPA, PIPEDA, etc.)
• Scale to support millions of global customers
• Support social login and single sign-on

Regardless of where the retailer’s business is with the maturity of its loyalty program and the web properties used for it, it's always a good idea to review a checklist with the IT and management teams to ensure that your organization is in alignment when it comes to your customers’ online shopping experiences.

Tara Bartley is senior manager of the retail industry at Akamai Technologies, a global content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services.