How your loyalty program emails can be improved with real-time updates

Customers love to know what’s happening in real-time.

They want to know where their packages are, where their delivery person, when their flights start boarding, and more. It’s one facet of improving the customer experience; you can give your customers even more data so they can always stay on top of the information they want.

Real-time tracking doesn’t have to end at packages; you can do it for all sorts of stuff, even eCommerce and your loyalty program emails.

With real-time emails, you can give your loyalty program members and VIPs all sorts of information. You can cover everything from the program and their standing when it comes to points and tier levels. Plus, there are all sorts of loyalty campaign emails you can set up to trigger when members hit certain milestones.

Those are just a few of the ways you can improve your loyalty program emails, here are some more examples.

Moment of open emails

Most of your customers probably don’t know exactly where they stand when it comes to the points, miles, or rewards they’ve racked up as members of your loyalty program.

Usually, to figure it out, they have to sign in to your site and check their account.

One super-easy way to tie real-time data into your loyalty program emails is with instant points updates. There are a few ways to do this.

First, you can feature your customer’s points total in every single email you send. But, that’s only a start. Take it a step further, and have your emails update at the moment of open. That means every time your customer opens an email, even if it’s a week old, the points totals will still be correct because the data updates when your customer opens their email.

So, no need to go searching for the information on your site, they can know exactly where they stand anytime from any email.

Notification bar

Another approach you can take is using an email notification bar. These bars sit right at the top of your email and update when your customer opens their email.

While notification bars are awesome for abandoned cart notifications and package tracking, you can also set them to highlight loyalty program rewards and tier levels.

This way, regardless of what kind of email they get, from a sale announcement to a shipping confirmation, they can know exactly where they stand with points.

Rewards and redemptions

Pulling the data from your loyalty program management tool, you should be able to track how far users are from being able to redeem points or earn their next reward.

Use this information to your advantage. Set up a triggered loyalty campaign that automatically sends out emails to your customers alerting them that they can redeem their points or claim a reward.

This way, your customer is getting an email from you, in real-time, that tells them they can use their bonuses right now.

Another approach is to send your customers these alerts as soon as they are one purchase or set dollar amount away from triggering the next reward level. By sending this email while they are on your site shopping, in real-time, you could end up triggering them to buy more to hit those rewards.

Post purchase emails

Even if your customer is completing their entire transaction online, your eCommerce system triggers a receipt email. Transactional, or post purchase, emails tend to have higher open rates than many other emails, which means you can do a lot with these emails precisely because they get seen more often.

Here again, it is a perfect opportunity to use real-time updates in your loyalty program.

When you have your receipt set up to send out, also make sure you include a real-time update on your member’s standing in your loyalty program.

At the minimum, you can list their points and tier. If you want to go even further, you can also highlight how far away they are from the next level. That way, every receipt they get reminds of them of your loyalty program.

As you can see, there’s plenty you can do with real-time loyalty reward emails. These emails serve as a great reminder about your program, while at the same time, giving your customers the information that they want, directly to their inboxes.