Enrollment Best Practices

Enrolling new loyalty guests is the cornerstone to both new and mature programs. The enrollment conversation by your operations staff not only insures you replace guests who move, quit, or age out of your program, it continuously reminds current guests that they should identify themselves to get points (and so you can continue to track their behavior). The five magic words all it takes are “Are you a Loyalty member?” A “yes” results in the guest identifying themselves how they prefer and what you are setup to accept (card, phone number, check-in code, or presenting a bar code in the phone app). A “no” is an opportunity to say “Would you like to join? You can earn points for today’s visit.” Some clients opt to include a brochure (particularly with new programs) and/or offer a longer explanation if needed, but the basic value proposition is simple: "Identify yourself when you visit and earn rewards".

The primary goal with enrollments is to get as many as possible. The more people in your program the larger audience for promotions (give you a bigger lever) and the larger the ROI of the core program. If you are worried about getting low engagement guests that dilute your response rates you can always use the Paytronix segmentation tools to remove them from your campaigns. One of the primary goals of a loyalty program is increase the frequency and spend of the guest and these low engagement guests have the most potential for being a part of that ROI.

To illustrate the importance of getting as many guests as you can we can look at the loyalty impact model:

(Number of Guests Enrolled) X (Number of Guests Active) X (Change in Spend) = Total Loyalty Impact

Increasing any of these three numbers will have significant impact to your program ROI. Of the three variables, enrollment is typically the most straightforward to change and the easiest to measure success. For new programs (and existing programs with less engagement) this is the best place to look at to increase the value of your program. Getting enough guests enrolling also tends to have an added side benefit of helping the other two variables. The better engagement around enrollments at the POS level the more likely guests are to stay active. Additionally, the more enrollment is pushed the larger the number of initially lower engaged guests you will get in the program. The guest who visits once a day is probably going to find out about your program eventually anyway. The guest that visits once a month may not though if you aren't always pushing enrollment. It is generally more achievable to get the guest who visits once a month to have an extra visit than increase the frequency for the guest who is already coming every day.

Any enrollment drive starts with the five magic words mentioned above and every cashier asking every guest. Having several options to join the program and making it easy for the guest to join are important, but enrollment success is largely dependent on operational buy in. The highest conversion rate is always going to be with someone who is already visiting your location and the value is immediately clear to them. So, the best place to focus on for conversions is your cashiers and servers and encourage them to get guests to enroll and register.

You can run the "Cards Issued by Cashier" report to find your best store and best cashiers for enrollments and registrations. This report can also be used to run store and cashier contests on getting the most enrollments and registrations. This can be highly effective in launching programs and doing an enrollment push when the message is slipping. After an initial push, the activation dashboards are helpful in looking at store performance and identifying top operators to help evangelize to lower performing locations. This is also useful to give to the stores on a regular basis to see how well they are performing.

The more enrollment methods you have the more guests and wider audience you will have in your program to influence. It might not be a surprise that you are expecting to engage with more of your younger guests with a smartphone and you expect your older guests to prefer physical cards. Even within those demographics though the preference for engagement will still vary at the individual level. Some guests will prefer a smartphone app to check-in (or show a bar code), some might prefer to enroll via text message and be identified with their phone number, and others may prefer the tangible physical card. Some clients will even do tablet devices in store and encourage guests to sign up online while in line or at their table and use their phone or email to be identified. All of these options are available in Paytronix, but may require a conversation with your account representative to setup.

While many clients will heavily emphasize and push their app or another digital method, having a card option tends to be key in operational success. The main reason is that it’s a fall back for less technologically savvy guests. If you don't have a card options for these guests the cashier pitch is going to annoy and potentially upset these guests. More importantly a cashier who has a bad experience with a guest who didn't want to download an app is less likely to pitch to the future guests (or just as bad is profiling and only pitching to select guests). The physical card is always the easiest sell as well cause it can be swiped and they get points for that visit.

Enrollment is important to your program's ROI and the one of the most straightforward strategies to help up the program ROI. Success really boils down to asking every guest "Are you a Loyalty member?” and relies heavily on good operational training and execution. Paytronix has several reports to help understand what stores and cashiers are doing this best and provide data to help your organization target an enrollment goal.