11 Best Strategies to Improve Loyalty & Rewards Program Participation Rates (2025)

💬 It's one thing to have a loyalty/rewards program in place, but to really make it fire, you've got to activate customers to engage and encourage them to participate and take ideal actions (i.e. purchase more, over and over).

I can tell you right now from experience from what I've seen from top brands, once you 'unlock' the bottleneck and can create an awesome experience for customers that want to genuinely participate with your loyalty or rewards program, it can lead to serious compound growth (greater LTV, repeat purchasing, referrals, advocacy, and many other benefits.

What are the key strategies and initiatives to implement to help drive loyalty and rewards program customer engagement

💬 Here are some key areas for these types of reward-based programs and questions to ask yourself if you currently run one (like doing your own mini-audit).

First and foremost, you can't "half-effort" it when it comes to creating a good quality landing page to sell the loyalty/rewards program.

Make sure to have a clear value prop, by communicating the benefits and clearly stating the value customers can receive through participation.

Use compelling and concise copy - after all, if your perks and rewards are good, then clearly ensure they understand and can see the potential. When it comes to the actual page itself, I've got a good guide on breaking down a loyalty program page structure.

Touched on this a bit above in terms of importance on the landing page, but need to make sure information and USPs are clear across channels.

In terms of the page and within CTAs across the site, make sure to use high-quality visuals, from icons to imagery, that resonates with the brand/top-selling products.

Highlight stories, testimonials, UGC videos and star reviews aligned with customers who love the program. Best way to remind through building trust and credibility fast for anyone not actively participating.

Great UX for running these sorts of programs is paramount, and there's nothing worse than a poor experience if people can't easily signup, or easily go back and access points to claim (been through bad UX before and it's annoying). Fortunately, there are great affordable applications on the market which sort a lot of the UX and capability work for you (well worth the investment for a robust solution).

One of my favourite reward types when it comes to activating loyalty participation is by encouraging social and UGC actions - for example, "earn 20 points if you share content via Facebook".

The primary reasons why I love incorporating this particular reward type strategy so much is that it's easily attainable for people to do, helps with brand awareness, referrals - and through referrals, it helps generate new customers and a lower CAC.

Many brands tend to do this if they have a program in place, and don't highlight/promote the program enough to audiences via their key channels.  

Make sure to clearly highlight on your website, as well as using smart pop-ups based on behaviours. If you use a slider carousel on the homepage/key pages, highlight it there too.

This is aligned to my UGC/social actions point above - if you're having issues with users not levelling up and becoming 'inactive', then more attainable levels of points/rewards they can unlock can really help.

To encourage progression, consider offering special periods for bonus points, limited-time bundle offers, social actions for certain campaigns (i.e. share X for Y points) or even the likes of exclusive events.

Similar to the above, but when you run certain sales-focused campaigns, or even doing other campaigns for promoting products (through the likes of bundles, BOGO, etc) - why not tie in your rewards program as part of the offers?

For instance, provide a limited-time offer for people to purchase X amount in a certain period, and earn X bonus points - like you see with many top programs from major brands. The reason why I love this strategy/tactic is that you can highlight greater value, without necessarily giving away more product - hence, increase AOV whilst keeping margins.

Run personalised offers for those who haven't signed in/participated or even claimed rewards for a certain period of time.

Whilst you don't need to building a community forum per se (although I'd always encourage this as a marketing initiative to consider), you do want to encourage 'community-like' participation for anyone who's part of the program.

That means running exclusive networking events, special promo releases, special contests and more.

Referral systems are a powerful strategy already, so why not intertwine it with your rewards systems and perks?

Make it a points perks and in theory, you're achieving two key objectives at once - customers referring their friends (that make purchases), and customers actively participating and becoming advocators.

As mentioned earlier, get smarter about how perks/points can play a role in increasing value to help with conversions.