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Your business works hard to gain customers, but how can you ensure they keep coming back? Providing a great purchasing experience and product is a great place to start. In addition, many businesses, including some of the world’s most successful and well-known ones, have found that creating a customer loyalty program can be a winning strategy for their customers and their bottom line.
A successful customer loyalty program wins over customers now and for the long-term, enabling businesses to gain more revenue over time, while gathering a wealth of data about their best, most loyal customers. Customers literally buy into the added value they gain as loyalty members. Then, as icing on the cake, these happy, repeat customers can help bring in new customers—at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.
Rewarding customer loyalty isn’t new. In fact, retail loyalty programs can trace their beginnings to the 1890s with stamp or box top collection and redemption programs. The modern customer loyalty model took flight in the early 1980s with the airlines’ frequent flyer programs.
However, with today’s digitally savvy and discerning customers, it’s imperative that businesses have a sound customer loyalty strategy in place. At the same time, it’s easier than ever to get a customer loyalty program off the ground, whether your business is a small retail boutique or a big OEM.
Here are 3 steps to building a winning customer loyalty management strategy:
1. Know your objectives (and your customers)
First, define what it is you want to achieve. Is it more referrals, increased revenue, higher customer engagement, or all three? Make sure your customer loyalty goals are measurable.
It’s also critical that you have a solid understanding of your customer base. Analytics tools, such as Tableau from Salesforce and Agentforce Sales can provide AI-powered insights for a clear, real-time view of your customer base, what they value, and what motivates their purchasing decisions. With a solid data foundation and tools in place, you can get answers to key questions, such as “What’s the next best action for the customer?” or “What’s the best channel and timing for customer engagement?”
2. Design your loyalty program
Once you have determined the objectives for your program, which customers you want to target and what motivates them, you’re ready to start designing your loyalty program. That begins with choosing the right loyalty model. Whether you build a program based on points, tiers, subscriptions, or gamification, you want to select a model that fits your program’s goals, your customers’ behaviors and preferences, and what your business can deliver. Using analytics to better understand your customers can help you offer the kinds of rewards that they’ll really value—and that will make them feel appreciated and recognized by your business.
With this in mind, personalization can go a long way toward building an effective customer loyalty program. Businesses can use tools like Salesforce’s Customer Loyalty Solutions in order to build personalized marketing campaigns and tailored offers based on customer profiles.
Because your loyalty program is all about putting your customer at the center, you’ll want to make sure it’s user-friendly. The easier it is to sign up and earn rewards, the more likely more customers will take part. For example, when Amazon Prime launched in 2005, it simply offered free shipping for an annual fee. By 2023, 75% of all U.S. households were Amazon Prime members. Of course, Amazon Prime has evolved over time, but Amazon has kept it simple for their customers, even as their loyalty program has grown.
3. Set Your Rewards in Motion
When you launch your customer loyalty program, you’ll want to promote it across your customer-facing channels. Then, with Customer Loyalty Solutions, you can keep the momentum going with referral marketing incentives, which reward your loyalty members when they spread the word.
Customer Loyalty Solutions can also track a rewards program’s performance in real time with pre-built dashboards to view engagement and acquisition trends, partner preferences, and customer satisfaction. With the ability to gather zero- and first-party customer data with every interaction, Customer Loyalty Solutions can enable your business to deliver even more personalized rewards and promotions as your program evolves.
Beyond transactions and offers, you’ll also want to foster a sense of community among your loyal program members. Exclusive forums and events, and social media outreach are great ways to make these best customers feel valued and recognized. For example, The North Face gives their XPLR Pass members points when they make a purchase or attend special events. When Starbucks launched its Secret Menu contest in the summer of 2025, it gave Starbucks Rewards members exclusive access to a “Secret Menu” tab in the Starbucks app. These kinds of relatively simple gestures can help businesses create even stronger connections with their most loyal customers.
Whether your business has thousands of customers or millions, the right loyalty management strategy can enable your business to create personalized rewards that can make every customer feel like they’re one in a million. In turn, the rewards for your business can be exponential with loyal customers bringing repeat sales and drawing in new customers, too.
To learn more about building a winning customer loyalty management strategy, reach out to one of our experts today.
