Lotus Communications’ rock radio station KOZZ/Reno is finishing a clever loyalty promotion that connects their brand values (Classic Rock) to their audience (men) through a familiar, popular event (NCAA March Madness) and highlight their music image (core artists) while involving the audience interactively (audience chooses the top artists of all time).

KOZZ started with their top 64 bands of all time, creating a head-to-head competition in the familiar “bracket” format.  As in the NCAA, the better bands were paired against the weaker.  That’s why you see Van Halen vs. Stevie Ray Vaughn in the first round.

The bracket is displayed prominently on the main page of their website, and is featured in each week’s email newsletter.

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Encouraging long-term participation in your loyalty program involves a promotion and marketing strategy designed to maintain member activity and interest.  Naturally, some participants will lose interest over time, but a consistent engagement strategy will keep the database activity fresh.  One of the ingredients in the success recipe is demonstrating the benefits of participation through promoting winners.  Here are five ways to do it:

1)  Promote Networked Prize Contest Winners.  Some affiliates are shy about promoting winners of items offered in their prize closets that are not generated in their local program.  Be bold!  Promote aggressively!  Those prizes have value, are offered to YOUR members and are very promotable.  Promoting the winners by listing their screen name is a very effective method of communicating the benefits received by participants.

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In our Triton Loyalty programming and promotion audience engagement strategy sessions….sign up to attend one here…we emphasize the importance of promoting the benefits of offers, rewards, opportunities and prizes instead of the mechanics of membership.

Your fans will become members because of the benefit to them, not because of the club itself.  When you promote “join the club to earn points and win prizes”, it introduces a decision to be made:  ”Do I want to join the club or not?”.  I don’t know about you, but if I evaluate whether to join or not, it’s much more likely that I’ll decide not to join.  It sounds like too much work.

However, promote something that appeals to me, that sounds like fun, and I’ll do whatever it takes to participate.  If that means registering in the process, I’ll do it.

Providing content and offers with carefully selected language that appeals to the interest of your audience will naturally result in membership growth.

Increasing audience engagement on your website is a goal of nearly everyone, and we spend a lot of time adding more content to make our sites more attractive to all visitors, and particularly members of the loyalty clubs.

As the Triton Engagement Team visits and analyzes dozens of sites every week, we notice some recurring obstacles to participation, many of which our affiliates overlook for various reasons, often because they are just too close to it to see their sites the way the audience does.  Here’s a short checklist that can help your site improve activity and effectiveness immediately.

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KHRD (Red 103.1) in Redding, Ca. has launched a creative idea to drive new membership and engage current participants.  Dave Shakes, Matthew Reisz and PD Don Wilson developed a campaign involving several features inside loyalty to connect a community event (hatching of three Eaglets) with the upcoming Eagles concert.  Here’s how it works: (more…)

Most marketers are now employing some form of social media presence, even if it’s as simple as creating a FaceBook Fan page or Twitter account.  Your strategy for using these social media tools requires thought and development.  They can be effective methods of connecting with an audience, and provide the means to drive more activity back to your web site and loyalty club, where you can not only extend the engagement opportunity but create new revenue from the traffic.  While many are using social media, a large percentage are stuck on exactly what to do with it.  Here are five ideas to leverage these tools and drive activity into your loyalty clubs.

1) Post a daily question of the day.  Allow participants to answer with comments on Facebook, but provide a link to a poll (inside surveys) in your club to “vote”.  Find a daily question that is compelling, emotional and provocative and suggest they invite Facebook friends to come in and participate a well.

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Carl’s Jr. has introduced a new loyalty program, and in it are a few simple lessons you can use to improve your club immediately.

1)  While you can find the loyalty club through the main page of their web site, it has it’s own url www.burgerslayer.com.  This helps the customer find it much easier, as they don’t have to sort through dozens of competing messages on the Carl’s Jr. home page and makes the club easier to promote.  Instead of directing customers to their home page, then click on ______, it’s a simple message:  Go to BurgerSlayer.com.  Lesson:  Consider registering a separate url for your loyalty club, and redirect that site to your loyalty login page.

2)  The club has attitude, just like the restaurant  Big, bold graphics with easy to navigate icons take me though the site.  All text and graphics are presented in the same “voice” as  would expect from their marketing messages.  Lesson:  Who is responsible for writing content, offers, surveys, etc. in your loyalty club?  Do you realize that every message you send impacts your brand-positively or negatively?

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This is the third in the three part series of  ideas to increase engagement on your Triton Loyalty program.  Today, we encourage you to sharpen your FOCUS and promote the key offers or benefits of the loyalty program instead of the loyalty club itself.

Many times, club promotion becomes little more than promotion to “join the club, collect points and win prizes”. Not only is this a tactic that only attracts a small percentage of potential members, it also leads to a lack of sustainability in the club over time.  Your goal should not be to convince consumers to join your club or get points…it should be to engage them in interactive content and promotions that happen to be taking place inside your club!  That’s a huge difference.

Today’s idea is to focus your promotion strategy on member benefits, not on the mechanics of participation.   Here’s how to do it in three easy steps:

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This is the second in a series of three best ideas you can use to increase the value of your loyalty club.

Our culture has trained us all to respond to the power and appeal of NOW.  Your members are no exception.  They expect to be rewarded NOW.

That’s why Triton Loyalty introduced a new feature recently.  Instant  Win can take audience engagement to a new level in many ways.   Adding Instant Win keeps existing active members interested, and has the potential to resonate with parts of your audience who have not yet become members.  The chance of Instant Win can entice a passive audience to participate.

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This week, we will feature three new ideas you can adopt, execute and activate THIS WEEK in your loyalty program.  We’ll show you how to do it, and in some cases, provide examples.

The first idea is to  Use Personality Endorsement. Among the many good reasons to consider this is that involving personalities increases the likelihood that they will actively promote it!

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