For the last ten years, loyalty programs, platforms and strategy have all looked about the same. Meanwhile, everything around them has changed. The paid advertising landscape has changed. Data regulation has changed. Consumer buying patterns have changed. 

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It’s time to modernize the loyalty playbook.

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In order to build an evergreen loyalty strategy in the modern world it’s imperative to use loyalty to truly activate your customers. The beauty of Toki is that we provide many activating activities which you can easily reward your customers for doing. These activities can help you understand your customers better, get more user generated content, get more social activities and more.

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Here are the steps toward implementing loyalty activation for your brand:

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1. Deciding what types of activations fit your brand

2. Creating a calendar for these activations

3. Promoting them on email, SMS, push + social

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Let’s dive in..

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Deciding what types of activations fit your brand

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The two types of activations that will probably feel a bit new to you we call 1) Challenges and 2) Voting Activities.

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Challenges

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Challenges are a series of activities to be done in a period of time. The purpose of a challenge is to really activate your customer to the activities that will help your brand in that moment and to make your most loyal customers feel like they are a part of the growth of your brand.

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Some examples being:

Social Challenges: Get your loyalty members to really boost your socials, asking them to like your content on a regular basis (like daily for seven days) or getting them to follow you on new social channels (like Threads)

In person Challenge: Get your loyalty members to shop your product in multiple venues (in stores, retailers and more) or get them to take pictures in your product in multiple physical locations. The options are endless for in person activations!

Referral Challenge: Really want to push for growth? Challenge your loyalty members to bring in a series of referrals in a period of time and give them a big prize in return like a gift or opportunity to win a big giveaway!

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Voting Activities

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Voting activities are decisions your customers can vote on related to your brand. A popular phrase that is being used to describe this this year is "co-creation". With voting activities you can ask your customers questions and have them answer in written word, single choice or multiple choice. Voting activities can be permissioned based on reward tier. Maybe only your top tier members can vote. Maybe your top tier members votes count for 3x the votes! Up to you.

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Some examples being:

- What flavor should we launch next?

- Who should we do our next collab with?

- What celebrity do you want to see wearing our products?

- What retail chain should we open in next?

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Creating a calendar for these activations

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One of the most important parts of launching successful activations is implementing it into your content calendar in a seamless way and fully integrating in your CRM (for Email, SMS + push).

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Questions to ask yourself include - how often do we want to launch voting activities? Weekly, monthly? Who do we want to be able to vote? Everyone on our newsletter list? Only certain loyalty tiers? 

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Same for challenges… how often do we want to launch challenges? Weekly, monthly? Who do we want to be able to complete challenges? Everyone on our newsletter list? Only certain loyalty tiers?

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Here is an example of what it might look like over a two month period if you were to launch a few challenges and a few voting activities every few months.

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Promoting them on email, SMS, push + social

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From there, it’s important to decide how you are going to communicate these activations. This is going to depend on whether your community is more email focused or more SMS focused. We suggest connecting your CRM with Toki so that you can connect all the customer tags you like so the emails/SMS messages feel very personal. Please visit our help center for more details on how this works.

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Examples of Voting Activity Emails:

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Examples of Challenge Emails:

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One communication channel that should not be forgotten is push notifications. With Toki, if your loyalty member has an Apple Wallet Card then you are able to send them push notifications. We HIGHLY suggest pushing this. Push notifications have a 28x higher click through rate than emails! Don’t have the Apple Wallet Card set up with us? Set up a demo for more details.

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Your customers can complete challenges or voting activities either on branded landing pages hosted on your website or within your branded wallet. It's up to you! The most important part is remaining consistent so your loyalty members get used to this regular behavior and get excited to do it again and again.

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Let's get creative

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We hope this helps get your creative juices flowing. We are always here to brainstorm with ideas and help implement awesome activations. Think this might really help your brand? Schedule a demo with us today.

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