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APIs have the potential to transform businesses looking to introduce rewards into their loyalty models. Traditional strategies tend to rely on time-consuming and expensive measures. However, forward-thinking companies are reducing the costs and time spent on establishing their digital loyalty programmes by accessing API-driven solutions.
Considering the loyalty factors
Loyalty has become a fundamental component to business success, especially when attempting to earn growth purely through the support of a faithful customer base. One of the ways to maintain stronger customer relationships is through loyalty programmes. Whether it’s offering a freebie after a certain amount spent or rewarding customers with gift cards for their loyalty, digital rewards programmes are critical as both an attraction and retention mechanism and therefore essential to staying competitive.
However, obtaining great loyalty seems to grow more difficult year after year. In fact, a single transaction today crosses an average of 35 different technology systems or components, compared to 22 only five years ago – an overly complex process without having proper systems in place.
Integrating with an API
APIs have grown to be the glue that not only empowers businesses to grow, but also enables them to develop new revenue streams, streamline their go to market strategy, and deliver better loyalty experiences to their customers.
Businesses that don’t prioritise leveraging APIs in their loyalty strategies are missing out on the plethora of benefits that they bring, as they make it easier to integrate and connect people, places, systems, data, and algorithms to create new experiences, products, services, and business models.
In retail, APIs enable the creation of personalised, seamless, app-powered experiences for customers. They let businesses adjust on the fly to the changes in customer preferences and market conditions. And, when coupled with new technologies, they incorporate recent transaction histories to extend offers that actually anticipate their wants and needs.
Examples of API success
To put it simply, APIs allow companies to move into markets they may have never considered. And early adopters may be able to expand revenue by joining forces with other enterprises.
For example, instead of building their own mapping, payment, or communication services, Uber used the best of those programmes and connected them all via APIs. And those who witnessed the early days of Twitter could recall that their user interface wasn’t always so intuitive. However, TweetDeck built a better UI on top of the Twitter engine, which led to a more seamless user experience. Furthermore, a third-party application allowed Google Maps to show real estate locations on a map, leading to an exponential increase in popularity. Years later, Google has expanded API access to Google Maps and other products in its stack.
The benefits of API-driven loyalty
Businesses that leverage APIs to run their loyalty and rewards programmes can expect to experience the following benefits:
1. Increased productivity
If businesses continue to spend their valuable time building applications from the ground up, when a similar solution is already available as an API, it can negatively affect overall productivity. APIs offer a powerful mechanism for faster development.
2. Saved costs
Since APIs significantly reduce development effort, using them to create applications is a great way of reducing costs. With APIs, developers can fetch most of the functionality they need to create applications from elsewhere, without the need of starting from scratch.
3. Enablement of new tech
APIs are now central to application architecture because they enable loosely coupled integration, as well as being the data conduits behind mobile apps. This also can empower internal innovation by providing the agility and flexibility needed to do so.
4. Improved connectivity and collaboration
API’s core functionality include connectivity. They enable different systems, applications, and platforms to connect and share data with one another and perform varied types of functions.
5. Enhanced customer experience
By leveraging API capabilities, businesses can create new and effective ways of interacting with loyal customers, especially in the current digital age when consumers demand top-notch experiences.
Reward with Yoyo API
When businesses integrate with Yoyo API, they get to make the savvy move by leveraging off an extensive retail network of 15,000+ stores – through a single integration – to reward customers against certain activities: such as healthy living, spending a certain amount, or just settling a bill.
Businesses can decide when and how to reward their customers. Whether it be free products, gift cards, or retail vouchers. Alternatively, businesses can hand their customers the reins to spend their hard-earned loyalty with our range of retailers, as they wish. The most important part is: businesses get to control the amount that’s spent – changing the parameters when they need it, based on real-time reporting. And they get to control the customer journey as Yoyo’s rewards embed seamlessly into their digital channel.
What’s more, they get to grow the rewards programme with all of the operational support we offer – a level of support that’s been honed with running (and scaling) large programmes for big businesses with millions of customers.
