How to Make a Loyalty App

Surely, there are a bunch of ways how businesses can deliver their loyalty programs to consumers. However, with mobile devices dominating the market & bringing the most traffic, many companies opt for an app. Additionally, 66% of businesses that experienced a lowering of customer loyalty don’t have a mobile app for their programs.

In fact, more than 70% of customers are more likely to take part in a loyalty program if it’s easy for them to access rewards & loyalty cards on their mobile devices.

So, if you want to build an app for your business or get to know how to improve an existing solution with loyalty features — keep on reading!

🚀 How a Mobile App can Boost Your Loyalty Program

Having a well-thought-out loyalty program itself can be highly beneficial for your business. However, with an app, you can boost these benefits, as well as deliver additional value for your clients by improving customer experience.

Retention Rate & Engagement 🔄

Increasing the retention rate by 5% can boost your sales up to 95%, which sounds like quite a deal. Since loyalty features are one of the greatest ways to improve this metric, an app can help you go for an even higher retention rate than you have now.

Let’s say that you have a CRM with several customer lists that you want to share with the app. With a custom solution, you can embed the Admin Panel of your loyalty program into the CRM or set up data exchange between the Panel and the CRM.

🎁 Rewards & Loyalty Strategies

Basically, loyalty strategies are the heart of your app, as well as the main tool for improving customer engagement and retention rate. That includes multiple features that you can combine to find the best fit for your use case.

In this section, we’re going to review top strategies you can use and specific details that you might want to pay attention to when building a loyalty app.

# 1: Points 💯

A points system is one of the most widely-used reward strategies that are effective for improving loyalty & KPIs. You can give users points for a bunch of activities:

• Achievements.
• Purchasing your goods and/or services.
• Spending certain amounts of money.
• Inviting friends. You can go even further here and offer an X% of points that your invited friend will get if he or she actually joins.
• Being part of a loyalty program for a certain amount of time.
• Sharing on social media.
• Writing reviews, etc.

Additionally, points can be the basis of other features like rewards that clients can get by collecting points and then redeeming them.

This feature can work in different ways. If we take Starbucks, they offer their customers to shake their device for the barcode of the Starbucks card to pop up.

Even though the feature is called Shake-to-Pay, the last component of this phrase can be functionally tailored to your use case.

📊 The Admin Panel for Loyalty Apps & Strategies

To be able to digitally manage the processes regarding your loyalty program and have an overview of the statistics, you’ll need some sort of a dashboard with access to all of the features.

This feature can include:

• The registration of new members.
• Access to and ability to change personal details. For instance, if you need to connect a user’s phone number to their account, it’s important to be able to do it manually from the admin panel. Especially, if you have physical branches.
• The management of events and campaigns.
• Updates and management of loyalty strategies.

Another essential part of this screen is analytics. It’s important to ensure that you can measure how successful (in all respects) your project is. This implies calculating: the total revenue, the revenue over a certain time span, the total number of users, the total number of new users and active users, the retention rate, the average time spent on the app, and other KPIs that are important to you.

🤖 The Tech Stack for Loyalty App Development

Even though most of the features can be built without using third-party APIs, there are many time-saving options on the market that you can implement into your custom loyalty app:

• Rewards API, Currency Alliance API for a points system.
• To enable rewarding, you can use RewardOps, Codemojo.
• For digital stamps and coupons, you can integrate Stripe, Coupons API from Paymentwall, MagicStamp.
• For digital loyalty cards or other FinTech services: SolarisBank, Railsbank, Marqeta, etc.

💰 What Affects Loyalty App Development Costs

It’s necessary to correctly calculate the cost of building a loyalty app to prevent troubles such as lack of financial means in the middle of the development. However, it’s quite hard to correctly predict the exact amount of costs since each case is unique.

However, there are a couple of factors that you should consider when planning the budget:

1. Complexity, as well as the number of features.
2. Chosen technology.
3. Third-party integrations (if you need them).
4. Hourly rate of your development team.

💡 Takeaways

A mobile app for your loyalty program is a great complement that can boost the benefits you get from having such a program.

In addition, it allows you to use more extended and digitally advanced loyalty strategies, access more detailed information about your members, and generally provide a better customer experience.

Furthermore, we’d like to give you 3 important recommendations for loyalty app development that we know from experience can be relevant for any type of business:

1. Be user-friendly when it comes to your UI/UX design.
2. Be consistent. Make sure that the app corresponds to the general mood and style of your brand.
3. Be flexible. Try different kinds of loyalty programs, combine them to finally define what works best for your use case.

If you need any help with the development or have some questions left, feel free to contact us. We’ll find a way to help you!