Just like your customers…
Persistence deserves to be rewarded.
No one has exhibited more persistence when it comes to trying to find the best way to reward customers than Gautama Swamy, the co-founder of Perfect Locks, an online seller of authentic virgin Indian hair extensions, weaves, and wigs.
“We wanted to reward our customers uniquely,” Swamy says. “The hair industry is extremely competitive and we needed to offer a rewards experience as authentic as the hair we sell.”
Unfortunately though, Swamy and his co-founder wife Priyanka, were offering customers anything but the unique experience they deserved. Instead, Swamy suggests the company’s original rewards platform was disjointed, impersonal, and not integrated with the rest of the Perfect Locks site.
The couple even tried several off-the-shelf plug-in rewards solutions but was disappointed in their poor design and performance.
“We weren’t happy and neither were our customers,” Swamy says. “Everything we tried was lousy.”
Earning real loyalty, the kind that retains customers and lifts average order values, isn’t accomplished with a one-size-fits all loyalty program…
What Perfect Locks needed was a custom rewards program uniquely tailored to the company’s business objectives and its customers’ perception of value.
Weaving Loyalty Like Hair Weaves
Just like hair weaves and extensions…
Rewards programs should blend in naturally with your site, not stick out or appear as if they were hastily tacked on with little thought or care. That’s why Perfect Locks recently partnered with Swell Rewards, which creatively uses incentives to help ecommerce merchants attract, engage, and retain customers.
Swell offers a platform that includes rewards, referrals, and email capture that merchants like Perfect Locks can use to tailor loyalty programs to achieve specific business objectives, increase sales with rewards, and offer customers one-of-a-kind rewards experiences.
“Swell Rewards is definitely above and beyond the best loyalty platform out there,” Swamy says. “Every other rewards program offers fixed experiences that are dictated by the platform. With Swell, the merchant comes first and everything is customized and built specifically for us and our needs.”
Integrating rewards throughout the customer journey is something Perfect Locks now prides itself on:
- Perfect Locks now has a dedicated rewards page customers can easily access to earn and redeem points
- Rewards are now integrated with the Perfect Locks checkout making it quick and easy for customers to redeem the points they’ve earned
The results?
Since implementing the loyalty program powered by Swell Rewards, Perfect Locks has generated a 7.2X return on investment.
“It feels really good and Swell gives us a competitive advantage,” Swamy says. “We are able to add value for customers looking for great quality hair.”
While the core features of the Perfect Locks loyalty program have undoubtedly contributed to the program’s performance, Swamy credits three unique customizations with providing customers the unique rewards experience now driving growth.
Three Unique Loyalty Customizations
Ecommerce merchants don’t have to settle for a rewards platform built without them in mind…
In fact, today’s cutting edge merchants now expect rewards programs to be ultra-flexible and tailored to suit their specific needs. This is why Swell Rewards built its Javascript SDK, an innovative tool merchants can use to embed specific rewards program elements, such as points balances, directly on their site.
The Javascript SDK offers unparalleled flexibility and was used to create the following three customizations perfect Locks credits with helping to grow its business:
Customization #1: Rewards For Photo Reviews
Social proof like customer reviews can be persuasive…
Reviews can offer the nudge a hesitant shopper often needs to pull the trigger and become a customer. However, next generation product reviews that also include a picture of the customer leaving the review, like those offered by Stamped, can lift conversion rates by as much as thirty-percent.
“Reviews with customer photos are more believable and authentic,” Swamy argues. “We feel really good about the photo reviews customers leave because they are more genuine.”
To incent customers to leave product reviews with customer photos, Swell rewards used its Javascript SDK to integrate the Perfect Locks rewards program with Stamped. Now, customers willing to leave photo product reviews can earn points redeemable for discounts on future purchases:
“We’re offering our customers a unique way to earn points by doing something that can have a significant impact on our bottom line,” Swamy says. “The photo reviews connect real people with our brand and allow us to offer those customers rewards they value for doing something very valuable to us.”
Customization #2: Vanity Referral Links
It’s called a double sided reward…
When a Perfect Locks customer refers a friend and the friend makes a purchase, the friend receives a discount and the person making the referral earns a reward. “We love rewarding our customers creatively,”
Referral programs are a powerful way to increase sales and leverage your existing customer base to acquire new customers, but Perfect Locks wanted to create a unique referral program that would also boost its brand marketing efforts. Instead of offering customers a standard referral link customers can share socially and via email with those they influence similar to this example:
Perfect Locks relied on Swell Rewards to customize a vanity referral URL consistent with the #MyPerfectLocks hashtag it uses to build its brand and community. Instead of providing customers a generic referral link, Perfect Locks customers now use a vanity link patterned after its hashtag:
“This is really different and extremely important as we brand and build our community,” Swamy says. “Vanity referral links increase engagement in our community which is key, especially when you are selling high end products like us.”
The touch of personalization vanity referral URLs offer have also, according to Swamy, helped Perfect Locks grow its community faster. The referral links are unique and suggest to customers that’s how they’ll be treated when they become a Perfect Locks customer.
Customization #3: Dynamic Modals
Offering rewards can actually harm conversion rates…
Customers expect to be able to easily redeem the points they’ve earned. When redeeming points isn’t intuitive and quick, customers often abandon cart and leave your site without purchasing and likely less loyal than when they arrived.
Integrating rewards with the checkout, as Perfect Locks has, is one way to ensure rewards are easily redeemable, but Swamy and his team wanted to make it even easier. That’s why the Swell team created dynamic modals that pop up and allow customers to:
- Earn points instantly in the modal by performing the desired action
- Redeem a discount offer instantly within the modal which automatically generates a discount code rather than forcing customers to retrieve a code sent to their email
Here’s how it works; the modals are personalized to the individual rewards enrollee and are accessible anytime a customer is logged in and on their VIP rewards page. When a customer wants to earn or redeem points and clicks or touches the appropriate link, a modal pops up and allows the customer to complete the process inside the modal rather than whisking them away to another page and starting the process from scratch.
“It’s a unique way for customers to redeem points right there on the spot without having to wait to do it at the checkout,” Swamy says. “The modals are part of a robust rewards program that makes it easy for customers to participate and see that we really do want to reward them.”
Customizing The Future
Perfect Locks may offer hair extensions that leave no room for improvement...
But Swamy is constantly making adjustments to improve the customer experience and plans to leverage Swell’s flexibility and Javascript SDK to experiment with additional customizable incentives such as:
- Offering customers double points for a particular purchase or sale
- Split testing different promotions to identify which incentives result in the best engagement and ROI
“Swell allows us to create custom experiences,” Swamy says. “The customization not only makes the experience personal for customers, but the great UX also makes it extremely easy for customers to accomplish whatever they’d like to do.”
It seems Swamy’s persistence in searching for the right loyalty program, much like his customers, has been generously rewarded.
