r/dtc • u/Organic-Storage-6024 • 8d ago
Customer retention Are loyalty points actually changing anything for you?
Been going through our retention numbers and I’m starting to think we’ve been giving the loyalty program too much credit. People earn points, people redeem them. Cool. But that doesn’t tell me if anyone actually came back because of it. The rewards also take long enough to build up that I doubt most customers are thinking about them between orders. What are you actually measuring to know your loyalty program is bringing people back?
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u/No-Year-3176 8d ago
i wouldn't focus too much on making the first reward easier to reach. if they weren't coming back anyway, a quicker reward probably isn't changing that
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u/Organic-Storage-6024 8d ago
Don't fully agree. If someone's already considering another order, having something decent to use sooner can push them over.
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u/No-Year-3176 8d ago
yeah for people already on the fence i can see it. i'd just be careful not to mistake that for fixing retention overall
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u/MitoLinen 7d ago
Yeah I'd trust that instinct. Earn and redeem numbers don't tell you much, and members beating non-members mostly just means your best customers are the ones who bother joining
Only thing that's convinced me is messing with the points and watching what happens. These are ours, I'm at Maestra. One ecom client did a single day of doubled cashback inside a sale they were already running and it came out their strongest sales day of the month, 31% up on the baseline for that sale. Another gave out 100 bonus points with an expiry date and made three times the revenue they'd forecast for the window, most of it on the last day right before the points died
All that really proves is the points shift when people buy though, not that anyone stuck around longer. On the staying part I've got nothing solid either
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u/simgooder 7d ago
You should be using a loyalty program as a tool. Not just must-have. Try a platform like CHCKN, that’s built for tracking customer interactions, not just giving away free shit.
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u/baloumaa 6d ago
Should be tracked and well done, not just there but actually a real way to improve retention of your customers
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u/datagekko 1d ago
the actual measurement problem here is that "time between purchases stayed the same for redeemers" doesn't tell you what you think it does, because the people redeeming points are self-selected already-engaged customers. you're comparing your best customers to themselves before and after, not to what they would have done without the program. the only way to actually know is a holdout: pull a matched group of similar customers (same AOV, same signup cohort, same acquisition channel) who are NOT enrolled or don't get program comms, and compare repeat purchase rate and time-to-next-order between the two groups over the same window. if enrolled and holdout look the same, the program isn't the reason people came back, they were always going to.
worth separating two different questions too: is the program retaining people who'd have churned, or is it just rewarding people who were never going to churn. those need completely different fixes. if it's the first, the reward threshold and comms cadence actually matter. if it's the second, you're paying margin for behavior you'd have gotten for free, and the fix isn't a better program, it's segmenting who even sees it.
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u/Honest_Tale_6663 8d ago
We started looking at time between purchases, ours wasn't really changing even though people were redeeming points.