For the past couple of weeks, our team here at Swell Rewards has been working nonstop to release the latest (and greatest) version of our Customer Retention Suite. The Retention Suite is now available in the Shopify App Store, and we’ll be going live with a few new partners in the coming weeks as well.
Our latest series of updates includes some awesome new campaigns for our merchants, as well as a series of big-time improvements for our consumers. While our consumer-facing features won’t go live until over the weekend, all of our new campaigns are now ready for each of our registered merchants to begin using!
What’s New for Merchants?
Whether you sell your goods online or you’re a “brick and mortar” business with a website, we’ve built something meaningful for you with this latest series of updates. While we made our debut in Shopify’s App Store with “Purchase”-oriented campaigns (“Spend $X, Get $Y” and “Make X Purchases, Get $Y”), our intention was always to create a broader offering that allows you to incentivize all of the actions that lead up to a repeat purchase (as well as the repeat purchase itself).
Our philosophy is (and always will be) that customer retention is a complex problem that can’t be solved simply by providing a discount; some customers simply aren’t ready to buy yet, but by nurturing them and keeping them informed about your business, they’re more likely to buy from you when they’re ready. Earning repeat business – whether you’re a brick and mortar or e-commerce business – comes down to encouraging a series of actions along what we call the “Repeat Purchase Pathway”. We went into more detail on the Repeat Purchase Pathway in a previous blog post.
Today, we’re happy to announce that 7 of the campaigns that make up the Repeat Purchase Pathway are now available to our merchants!
Below is a quick overview of our new campaigns. You’ll note that we group them into two categories: “Engage” (meant to help your customers recall and develop an association with your business) and “Learn” (meant to educate your customers leading up to a purchase). Many of our “Purchase”-oriented campaigns have existed for some time now, although we’ll certainly add more options in the coming months.
New Engage Campaigns
- Facebook Page Visit – You’ll be able to automatically award Swell Rewards to any registered user who visits your Facebook Page – you just tell us the Page, and we’ll track the visits and distribute the rewards. Facebook doesn’t allow you to provide a financial incentive for your customers to Like your Page, but many of your visitors to your Page will choose to Like it on their own. Given the value of each Facebook Like, this campaign should be included in the lineup for any business that wants to get serious about boosting their social media presence.
- Twitter Follow – For newer businesses in particular, attracting Twitter Followers can be an incredibly difficult task. In fact, it’s something that our team here at Swell Rewards even struggles with. By providing a small financial incentive to the consumers who are already interacting with your business, this campaign will be able to help you dramatically increase your Twitter presence.
- Tweet About Business – Providing a reward to the customers who are willing to Tweet about your business doesn’t just help new potential customers discover you – it also boosts engagement from those who Tweeted about you in the first place. Your loyal Tweeters will feel like evangelists, and are sure to stick around for a long time to ensure that your business is successful.
New Learn Campaigns
- Retweet – Have a piece of exciting news that you want to make sure reaches the masses? Give your Followers and customers an incentive to share it with their Followers to exponentially increase its reach. This campaign is great for sharing updates about your company, new product launches, sales, and more!
- Newsletter Signup – Your company Newsletter is arguably the most powerful customer retention tool in your arsenal; by subscribing, your customers have indicated that they want to constantly be informed about your business, and in many cases your emails can prompt multiple (and frequent) purchases. We recommend that all of our merchants not only send a regular Newsletter, but that they use this campaign to boost subscriber rates.
- Page Visit – Have a new product you want to push? Special landing page that you designed for a new sale? Any other page that you want to make sure your customers don’t miss out on? Use our Page Visit campaign to incentivize them to take a look. All you have to do is specify the page, and we’ll help get your customers there.
- Read Content – This campaign is similar in principle (and design) to the Page Visit campaign. Whether it’s a blog post, article about your business, or virtually any other type of content, this campaign allows you to reward your customers when they read content which helps them learn more about your products or services.
In the coming weeks, we’ll cover each of these campaigns in more detail in a series of blog posts, where we’ll talk about how you can use each one to engage and retain your customers. We’ll also provide some guidance in terms of how many points you should offer customers for completing each of the promotions – we’ll continue to update that guidance as we gather data on the effectiveness of each campaign option.
Stay tuned in the coming days for an announcement about all of the great changes we’ve made for consumers as well! Until then, we’d always be happy to get your feedback on these new campaigns – simply leave a comment below and tell us how we can improve (or which new campaigns you’d like to see).
We hope that you’re as excited to use these new campaigns as we are to deliver them!
