Reward high-value members with lifetime benefits

What better way to acknowledge your most steadfast members for their continued allegiance to your brand than to grant them lifetime status in your loyalty program? It's the ultimate reward, giving them irrevocable access to the program's most desired benefits. Plus it confers a special stature to these members. Having reached the pinnacle of your loyalty program, they now enjoy the richest set of rewards - forever.

Strategy

Award membership in a lifetime tier to long-term, high-value members.

Here’s the scenario: The Arctic Airways' loyalty program has four tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. While reaching a higher tier in the loyalty program earns the member a richer set of rewards, reaching the Platinum tier is a unique achievement it awards lifetime membership in the Arctic Airway's loyalty program.

And what's more, they have earned those benefits for life! They no longer have to accumulate the designated number of points each year to remain in the Gold tier. A lifetime tier eliminates this requirement. Once members achieve lifetime status, they can never be downgraded and are always entitled to top-tier level benefits.

Let’s look at how to implement the Platinum tier in a SessionM loyalty program.

See What is an example of a tiered loyalty program? for more information on tiered loyalty programs in the SessionM platform.

SessionM solution

The SessionM loyalty platform enables you to forge stronger, more loyal and more profitable relationships with your members. The platform provides an integrated set of capabilities - including data management, loyalty management, offer management, campaign orchestration, and analytics & optimization - that enable you to build compelling member loyalty programs.

Key capabilities

The strategy described in this article features the following SessionM capabilities:

Loyalty Programs

  • Point banking
  • Rewards for high value behaviors, advocacy and spend
  • Status and tiering rules plus outcomes
  • Benefits management with frictionless redemption
  • Extensive tracking on point liabilities

See SessionM Features for a full discussion of SessionM platform features and functions.

Implementation workflow

The following procedure describes the workflow for implementing the loyalty program described in this article. The procedure captures the workflow at a high-level, providing you with a sense of the scope involved in implementing this program in the SessionM platform.

For step-by-step procedures for implementing the functionality in a SessionM module, see the Procedures section in the SessionM Help Center.

Take note

As you follow this workflow, take note of how the Arctic Air loyalty program uses the following point accounts:

  • Spendable points – Points earned by purchasing a brand's goods and services. Members redeem spendable point for offers and awards. Spendable points expire after a year of member inactivity.

  • Tier qualifying points – Points earned by purchasing a brand's goods and services. During tier maintenance, tier qualifying points determine the tier to which a member belongs. Tier qualifying points expire one year after they were initially earned.

  • Lifetime tier points – Points earned by purchasing a brand's goods and services. Lifetime tier points determine when members advance to the Lifetime tier. Lifetime tier point never expire.

Having separate accounts for each type of points allows you to apply different expiration policies to each account. For example, you can expire tier qualifying points on a rolling basis while lifetime tier points never expire. See What are points in loyalty programs? for more information.

The following steps describes how to implement the Platinum tier in a SessionM loyalty program. The Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers would follow similar steps.

Step 1. Point Management module: Create Lifetime tier points account

Create the Lifetime tier points account. Set the expiration policy for the point account to none, indicating that Lifetime tier points never expire.

Step 2. Economy Rules module: Add Platinum tier to loyalty program

Add the Platinum tier to the program and define its purchase and tier entrance rules. Note that a tier maintenance rule is not needed since members do not need to re-qualify for the Platinum tier.

  • Define a purchase rule that awards Lifetime tier points.

    • In the Tier Purchase Behavior section, select "Customer must make a purchase."

    • Define the outcome for the purchase event: Select "Points (Variable)" and set it to "Award points based on eligible spend". Award 1 points for each dollar spent.

  • Define a tier entrance rule for the Platinum tier:

    • In the Tier Entrance Behavior section, select "Customer must have current point balance." Add a constraint of equal to or greater than 250,000 points.

    • For the outcome, select Trigger Event and set the event to "entered_platinum_tier. Save the rule. Now, when a member enters the Platinum tier, the "entered_platinum_tier" is triggered.

      See the Welcome members to gold tier with bonus points strategy for more ideas on welcoming members to a new tier.

Step 3. Economy Rules module: Adjust tier entrance rules for Silver and Gold tiers

After adding Lifetime tier points to the program, adjust the tier entrance rules for the Silver and Gold tiers. Place an upper limit on the number of Lifetime points that a member can have earned and still remain in these tiers. Add a constraint of less than 250,000 lifetime points.

Follow-on step: Encourage members approaching Platinum threshold

The procedure above shows how to implement the Platinum tier in the Arctic Air loyalty program. As time passes and members accumulate points, you will want to encourage them to keep striving to reach the Platinum tier. See Encourage members approaching next tier to reach threshold for entry for ideas on how to motivate your members to reach the next level.

Analysis

Successful loyalty programs adapt and evolve. It’s crucial to evaluate your program to determine where it is performing well and where it needs to improve. Built on a series of intuitive dashboards, the SessionM Insights reporting & analysis tool enables you to understand program performance by measuring key performance indicators such as customer spend and customer frequency.

This strategy addresses how to use tiers in a loyalty program. Within Insights, you can use the Summary dashboard and the Incentives tab to dig deeper into how tiers are performing in your loyalty program.

The Summary dashboard provides interactive visualizations that track revenue generated by different membership tiers and other powerful metrics. For example, the visualization below tracks average order value, average revenue per user and transaction frequency for each loyalty tier.

The Incentives tab provides a detailed breakdown of total points by current loyalty tier. Performance for each tier can be analyzed with the points status counts. Lower-performing tiers can be further analyzed and improved. For example, you can quickly answer the question: Are most of the points for tier X being redeemed before expiration?

For detailed information on SessionM Insight features and functionality, see About Insights in the SessionM Help Center.

Key takeaways

Reward your most loyal members by giving points earned in the past value in the present

Give the points earned by your most loyal members real value in the present. By incorporating a lifetime tier into your loyalty program, you signal to your members that their longtime commitment to your brand earns increasingly valuable rewards.

Use multiple point accounts to apply a separate expiration policy to each account

Having separate accounts for each type of points allows you to apply different expiration policies to each account. For example, you can expire tier qualifying points on a rolling basis while lifetime tier points never expire.