VIP Programs with Thanx: Reward your top customers automatically

Rewards program

Your top customers are responsible for a huge chunk of your revenue. Thanx’s VIP programs automatically identify and engage those top spenders, keeping them happy and loyal long-term. Here’s what makes our VIP so effective (and how we’ve improved it recently).

One of the major draws of a loyalty program is having the tools to identify, engage, and retain your best customers. But even within that segment of loyal guests, there’s an even bigger opportunity: your VIPs. Your top customers will spend a disproportionate amount of money with your business this year. Here’s how to best engage them and keep them loyal long-term with a VIP program.

The Power of the VIP Guest

Your customers are a diverse set of people. They have different spending patterns, different visit frequency, and different relationships with your brand. When you gather customer data, you can differentiate customers based on their behavior.

One easy way to immediately leverage your customer data? Create a VIP experience. There’s a reason why most airlines, hotels, and even Amazon all go out of their way to recognize their top spenders:  According to the millions of transactions we’ve tracked over the past 5 years we’ve learned that VIP customers can account for nearly 50% of revenue.

The takeaway? When the top 10% of customers are responsible for almost half of your revenue, it’s too risky to treat them like every other customer.

How Thanx Proactively retains your VIPs.

Thanx merchants already know how valuable their VIPs are – Many of our merchants run VIP campaigns to award their top guests with custom experiences, free gifts, and personalized outreach. Beyond delighting customers with recognition, there’s a business imperative to run a VIP campaign with Thanx — merchants who activate VIP see 17% increases in spending from their top customers.

However, we never rest on our laurels, so we’ve been spending the summer improving our VIP campaign to drive even more ROI for our merchants (and an elevated experience for their top customers).

So, what’s changing?

First, you should know a little bit about how the program works: In the current version of VIP, the threshold that customers must spend to earn VIP status is adjusted monthly based on consumer behavior. In the new version, we’ve made that threshold a fixed value and creating a rule that consumers must cross this threshold in two consecutive months in order to earn VIP status.

Why? We found that the old program — which awarded VIP status for a single month of hitting the threshold — would reward consumers for their single out-sized purchase events (catering orders, birthday parties, etc) and often leave your true, loyal VIP customers out. We’ve updated the algorithm to be more inclusive of those real loyalists, capturing more consistent customers by requiring consumers to cross the VIP threshold in two consecutive months.

We wanted to make sure we captured your most loyal customers, not just your one-time big spenders.

Our VIP campaigns are proven to increase the spend of your top customers, as well as increase their engagement in your loyalty program. As always, you’ll be able to track the ROI of your VIP campaign and understand the impact of the campaign on your bottom line.

Thanx merchants: want to learn more about VIP (or activate it within your existing program)? Email your Merchant Success Manager today!

The data you collect in your digital loyalty program should give you the intel to know exactly who your top customers are and proactively engage them with data-driven, customer-focused VIP campaigns. If you’re not using your customer data to its fullest capacity, what are you waiting for?