In Part 1 of this series about marketing a new loyalty rewards program, I covered the importance of setting goals, knowing your customer, and understanding more about your real competition.
Now, once you've figured out the ideal target customer for your new cashback rewards program and you understand more about their motivations, you can start to think about how you're going to prove your rewards program's benefits for them.
This is when you start developing the key messaging and positioning for your cash back program. So let's dive in!
Step 4: Connect with your customers through messaging and positioning your cashback rewards program
Here's the fun (and probably the hardest) part of your cashback rewards program marketing strategy! Now that you know what will connect with your customer, what you're up against in the market and the targets you want to achieve, you're in a position to create your plan to market to them.
You will need to outline your customer journey; how someone goes from not even knowing your cashback program exists --> to signing up for it. Determine which different marketing outlets you'll be deploying to reach the right customers for your rewards program.
These are your marketing channels. They can be channels that are fully owned by you such as your website and email list, or paid channels like PPC or social ads, or organic reach channels like your social media pages or SEO.
Once you know your marketing channels and the frequency of your messaging, you can determine what types of messages you need and how many assets you need per channel. Are you sending 1 email or 6? Hint: you're definitely sending more than 1 email.
When you get to the development stage of your messaging, you'll need to be clear on the position your brand is taking in the market for your new cash back rewards program. By knowing your customer and competition, you should be clear on why your brand has a rewards program.
One successful tactic is being very direct with customers in emails about why adding a rewards product makes sense for their relationship. Use your position and customer centric value to develop your value proposition.
A value proposition refers to the unique benefit or solution that a product or service offers to its target customers. It outlines the value that a customer can expect to receive from a company's offerings, highlighting the specific problem it solves, how it solves it, and why it is better than other alternatives in the market. The value proposition aims to differentiate a company's products or services from its competitors and to communicate to customers why they should choose it over other options.
This value proposition will be your main message, repeated throughout all of your marketing assets.
- It's mentioned in every single email.
- It's the headline for your web page.
- It's the description of your rewards program name in search results.
- It's in the cashback browser extension product FAQ.
- It's everywhere.
How do you develop a value proposition, you wonder? I'm so glad you asked!
Here are a few tips on how to develop a value proposition statement that you can creatively turn into headlines or statements for your cashback program's marketing materials.
First, go back to the Know Your Customer section of the previous Cashback Rewards Marketing blog post.
When going through the exercise of discovering what is most valuable and important to your ideal customer, what was the thing they wanted most and why?
From this exercise, you should land on a transformation statement and the struggle that customers are currently experiencing that they feel is keeping them from this transformation or end result.
Leave some room in your assets for optimization of the messaging as you start to execute and see results. This means to make it flexible.
For example, if you're outsourcing the creation of a landing page, make sure that the content is editable by you so that if you learn that one type of messaging is winning over another, you'll have the flexibility to edit it quickly without breaking anything.
(Revisit Part 1 or proceed to Part 3)
Download the 6-step marketing checklist for your cashback rewards program:
