How to design your membership or loyalty programme

There’s no standard way to design a membership or loyalty programme, so start by thinking about the behaviour you want to encourage, alongside how your customers or guests currently engage with your business.

You might want to drive repeat visits, increase average order value, recognise key customer segments or collect useful first-party data. Whatever your goals, define them clearly at the start so you can measure performance later.

Depending on the scale of your programme, you may want a data specialist to analyse how your customers currently spend and engage.

We also recommend talking to loyal customers or guests to understand how they’d like to be recognised and rewarded.

Tiers can be visible to members and shown on your membership landing page (example) to encourage specific behaviour.

You can also keep them hidden and use them behind the scenes to show your team who your most loyal customers or guests are, and to automate service accordingly. Premium and luxury brands often take this approach.

If you're running a more traditional membership programme you might opt for a simple, single tier programme - for example, a premium club or spa membership.

Each tier can be free or paid, or you can combine the two. For example, a free entry-level tier with basic benefits could sit alongside a paid premium tier with ongoing savings and enhanced benefits.

Progression can be based on spend, visits and other behaviour, or members can simply choose and pay for the tier they want.

Think about what your plan offers as a whole and how the benefits differ between tiers. Benefits are created centrally in Glu and then assigned to individual tiers, so it's worth knowing what you want to offer before you start building.

You're also able to deliver specific offers, incentives and rewards based on the members behaviour or profile - for example a bronze member who is tagged as a VIP might receive different perks from a bronze member.

We recommend planning this out on a basic spreadsheet (like this) before you build...

When you're ready, head to the Memberships product in your admin dashboard or click here to go straight there.