This is an important question that every brand should consider, then build a strategy. While traditional marketing approaches suggest getting the attention of your audience as often as possible, practical knowledge and analytics show that there is an ideal interval for touching base with your loyal repeat customers - and that it's not the same for everyone. 

When customers join your loyalty program, they intend to build a partnership. They are trusting you to reach out when it's useful and beneficial to them. Of course, being loyalty customers also means that you don't have to use dramatic attention-getting tactics to keep their loyalty, but you also don't want to fade into inbox obscurity. So what is the right balance between loyalty relationship maintenance and pestering your best customers? How can you optimize loyalty customer satisfaction and repeat purchases with regular updates?

Let's talk about both overall and individual strategy for your loyalty outreach pacing.

Loyalty Program Updates: Baseline Outreach vs Personal Preference

• Baseline Outreach Frequency
  • Twice-weekly promotions and/or
  • Weekly Reports, Digests, or Newsletters
• Personal Preference
  • Daily deal shoppers
  • Passively curious
  • Only-Special-Deals customers

Baseline Frequency

First, let's acknowledge that there are two standards, and you will need both of them to optimize your loyalty customer relationships. First, you need a baseline pace for sending emails and notifications through your loyalty program. It's been generally found that once a day is too often for most people. 1 in 4 users say email frequency is their reason to unsubscribe entirely. Brands that stay out of the spam folder are those whose emails are each individually considered valuable and worth looking at. 

Twice a week or one high-quality weekly email is a good baseline pace for loyalty program emails. Today, there are so many personalized app programs that a weekly personalized report is expected and often opened. Your loyalty program could join the ranks of the weekly personal fitness app reports and news digests.

Personal Preference

Of course, your customers also have personal preferences. Some are avid deal-shoppers and may enjoy a more frequent deals-based email on what's low-cost each day. On the other end of the bell-curve are customers who only want to hear about special sales and seasonal events - with emails less frequent than once a month. In between are the passively curious, those who will open the weekly email just in case there's something good.

Quality and Personalization: What Makes Loyalty Customers Read Your Messages?

Your loyalty customer's willingness to open emails may also depend on how personal they are. Your customers didn't join the loyalty program to get the same generic messaging - they want personal attention and care. Fortunately, programmatic marketing makes this easy - especially with a CRM full of personal data on each of your signed-up loyalty customers. 

Deals, updates, and even interest stories relating to your customer's shopping and reading history will enhance the value of each email and notification you send. While you may sometimes email-blast announcements about holiday sales, more frequent messages should also be more personalized.

Here are just a few ways to easily personalize emails sent to loyalty customers that will pique their interest and increase the chance of return shopping:

• Deals in their most-frequented item categories
• Featured products in their favorite colors (most often chosen)
• Special offers for birthdays and known celebrated holidays
• Deals for products in their wishlist or Saved-for-Later (hint: have a wishlist feature)
• News stories related to blogs they have read
• Relevant regionally-related news (ex: local shipping delays due to weather)
• Updates on order status and customer service cases

Offering a Personalized Pace for Loyalty Messaging

So let's say you have a weekly digest baseline. Loyalty users who first join the program will receive a dashboard of deals and news related to their CRM-determined interests. This will be too frequent for some, and not frequent enough for others. Optimizing results means catering to every customer on the spectrum of contact frequency preferences.

If given these options in their profile settings, some customers will even set up their email preferences immediately after making an account as part of their profile-building routine. This is ideal, as your outreach can immediately conform to their own personal preferences.

Alternative to Unsubscribe

Naturally, you want to put the optimization into customer hands. There are two places this needs to exist. First, give your customers options other than to unsubscribe.

At the bottom of your newsletter, ask if you're sending emails at the right pace. Use copy like "Personalize Email Frequency" or, depending on your brand voice "Want to receive more or fewer emails? Click here!". This gives your customers the opportunity to personalize instead of just receiving or unsubscribing.

Personal Frequency

Now you want to build a page in the customer profile that allows them to personalize not just the pace, but what they see in their emails. First, let customers choose how often and what type of emails they see. Provide options like

• Daily deals
• Weekly digest
• Seasonal sales and events

You can even let them build their own calendar and receive emails on a day that matters to them. If they shop online every other Wednesday, become a willing part of their preferred routine!

Personalized Content

From there, give your customers some option to further personalize their content. Ask them what kind of messages they want to see from your programmatic categories. You might offer them

• Newsletter updates and stories
• Cart and wishlist savings opportunities
• Personalized special offers
• New and seasonal product spotlights
• Subscribe to watch specific items and product lines

You might even consider making a widget where customers can build their own emails from a WYSIWYG template. Loyalty customers today love feeling completely in control of their inputs, while maintaining a relationship with favorite brands.

Engaging with the Loyalty Program

Finally, don't forget that loyalty programs have their own incentive to interact. If you want to increase your contact frequency while still placing the power and satisfaction of control in customer hands - use your loyalty program!

Your loyalty program should be more than just an email list. Points and rewards are the most motivating aspect of a well-built loyalty program. Customers will often tolerate - even enjoy! - more frequent emails if it relates to gaining levels and earning rewards. Everyone wants to see "You just earned a free gift!" in their inbox. Especially when it really is a personal response to their shopping activities.

To this end, find ways to share points and rewards for interacting with the site. Reading blog articles, building wishlists, and sharing social media links can all earn reward points that will increase the willing and satisfied frequency of contact with your loyalty program members. You can even add games and activities on your site and mobile app  that can keep some of your loyalty population engaged daily.

Conclusion

How frequently should you touch base with your loyalty program customers? That depends on their preference and the valuable content your brand has to share. For some brands, a once-monthly exclusive email might be the perfect pace. For others, a weekly newsletter with daily reward-points interactions might be ideal. Most importantly, put the power in your customers hands. Give them choices beyond subscribing and un-subscribing, and be certain to personalize your content to what your loyalty customers want to see.

Joining your loyalty program is customers asking to be catered to. Optimizing that relationship means using today's programmatic marketing to provide that personal touch to every single loyalty customer - at the pace they prefer.

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