Preparing Your Loyalty Programme for Summer

Summer is the height of activity in the UK. Though our summers may not last as long as we’d like, we make the most of every moment by heading out to the shops, engaging in leisure activities and eating out more frequently. With such a strong uptick in consumer activity and with such a willing customer base, summer becomes an important time of the year to ensure your loyalty programme is fully functioning and optimised for your goals.

Industry data from July 2024 shows that UK consumer spending rose 5% compared to June 2024, highlighting how holidays, social events, and seasonal shopping can drive customers to your door. If you're looking to capitalise on summer's heightened activity, refresh your seasonal customer engagement strategies, learn how you can boost customer retention with seasonal offers, or simply want some summer marketing ideas for businesses, Loyalty Works has all the help you need.

Let’s begin by having a look at why seasonal incentives are so potent and how we can use them to drive loyalty to your business.

The Power of Seasonal Incentives: How Summer Campaigns Drive Loyalty

Loyalty is created when a customer connects to your brand and business on an emotional level. Loyalty can be driven by rationality too, but more often than not, it is the emotional connection a customer feels towards a brand that determines whether they keep on returning, recommending it to others, and whether they’d choose a brand even over competitors with better deals.

So, how do we utilise the summer months to create those connections with your customers? We do this by tapping into what your customers are thinking and feeling throughout the summer and joining them in their celebrations, helping them get ready for their holidays and activities, and providing a platform by which they can engage with the business and be rewarded for it.

The summer season evokes the joy of warm weather and jetting off on holiday, the community of garden parties and BBQs, the freedom of late nights, and the nostalgia and excitement of childhoods and summers past. This makes summer rife with emotional energy and ripe for the picking when it comes to utilising our loyalty programmes to drive customers to us and deepen their loyalty.

At Loyalty Works, seasonal campaigns form a core part of our offerings, where we have many years of success and experience at crafting tailored programmes designed around you and your customers. We specialise in both consumer (B2C) and business (B2B) incentives, so whether you're a customer-facing retailer looking to bring more customers your way, or wanting to use the summer to enhance your business relationships, Loyalty Works utilises gamification, tailored rewards management, and robust analytics to create and measure success effectively.

Gamification provides one of the main elements of our loyalty programmes that promote continuous engagement, which, of course, is a prime factor in dictating loyalty, so let’s take a quick look at how we utilise gamification to improve our loyalty programmes.

Using Gamification and Interactive Elements for Summer Rewards

By now, you’ve probably heard of gamification, but if you haven’t, it is a simple concept whereby we take elements that make games intrinsically engaging and hard to put down and weave them into loyalty schemes, promotions, websites or anywhere else they might fit. The crux of gamification really comes down to 2 things:

• Does the gamified element encourage interaction?
• Does the gamified element provide a sense of reward and progress for the participant?

If we can find mechanics that offer both of these things, we have found something that is inherently gamified and can utilise these qualities to encourage our users to interact with the brand, website, or loyalty programme. By ensuring the gamified element also incorporates a visual cue of progress or reward, such as collecting a badge or earning points, we create a feedback loop in which the customers' interactions are encouraged.

By incorporating this into loyalty programmes and separating the 'gaming' element entirely, we can utilise this feedback loop by attaching it to a purchase made in-store. So, each time a person makes a purchase and earns loyalty points, they get the opportunity to interact with the gamified element, which may be in the form of a ‘spin-the-wheel’ game, for example. By completing a purchase, the customers can then spin the wheel to win bonus points, exclusive offers or even products.

Each time the customers spin the wheel, they feel a rush of excitement from the mystery and anticipation around what they will receive, and they then receive something for that interaction. Couple this with the points made on the purchase, and this little gamified element of your loyalty app becomes an impossible opportunity to ignore. Thereby reinforcing the customer's excitement and anticipation associated with your business, leading to a greater desire to purchase with you and to do so more frequently.

This is just one of many examples of gamification that can be implemented in the way that best serves you, your business, and your customers.  So, if you’d like to explore more about how gamification can boost your customer engagement and drive loyalty, reach out to Loyalty Works today, and we’ll be happy to explore just how effectively gamification could enhance your business.

Creative Summer-Themed Promotions to Boost Engagement

Following on from our gamification elements, we wanted to offer some examples of themed promotions to help understand a wider range of our campaign capacities and how they can boost your summer loyalty campaigns, so let’s get started:

• Double Points on Summer Essentials: Now’s the time to dial in on what your summer essentials are and drive purchases by offering double points on those products. Whether it's barbeque supplies, picnic supplies, walking gear or travel holidays, aligning your points rewards with summer-themed purchases will help enhance engagement and drive sales.
• Summer Scavenger Hunt: Scavenger hunts are a wonderful pastime, but we're not all able to get out into the world and play like we used to. Luckily, digital scavenger hunts are easy to create and accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world. By hiding summer-themed items, beach balls, parasols, sunblock and so on, and asking customers to find them across your channels in exchange for points and prizes, you simultaneously reward your customers whilst increasing engagement across your platform. And better still? You can strategically guide customers to exactly where you want them to be based on where and how you place the items to be found!
• Limited-Time Summer Rewards: Change up your rewards portfolio and dress it up for the summer. By jumping in with the summer theme and aligning rewards with where your customers' minds are at, like offering festival tickets, outdoor equipment, or travel vouchers, you’ll find customers even more ready and excited to earn rewards and engage with your brand. And if you need help sourcing better prizes? Loyalty Works is also an expert in prize fulfilment and can help you every step of the way.

From cool campaign ideas for the summer heat to past examples of successful campaigns, let's take a look at some of the more popular and well-known loyalty campaigns that have worked out for others.

Case Studies: Successful Summer Loyalty Campaigns

We have two well-known examples for you, one a success story from last year and one a revitalised campaign for this summer. Let's look at what makes them both winners:

• McDonald’s “Surprize Fries” (Summer 2024): McDonald’s turned a routine purchase into a fun experience with their peel-and-win fries promotion. Customers could instantly win festival tickets, cash, or food rewards, driving increased visits and boosting app engagement significantly. This campaign successfully used gamification and seasonal appeal to strengthen loyalty.
• Coca-Cola “Share a Coke” Revival (Upcoming Summer 2025): Coca-Cola’s iconic campaign is returning with a digital twist, allowing customers to customise virtual Coke cans through a custom-built online hub. This improves upon the old campaign by allowing customers who cannot find their name on bottles and cans in store to create their own digital Coke product and share this with friends and family, creating a digital hub of interaction centred around the Coke brand. High engagement and increased loyalty are practically guaranteed for this one and will resonate well with the Gen Z audience.

These examples demonstrate how creative, seasonally relevant loyalty campaigns effectively engage customers and deliver tangible business results.

Conclusion: Embrace Summer for Maximum Loyalty Impact

So there you have it! The summer season is an excellent time to assess how your loyalty programme is performing and whether it needs upgrading, changing, or adjusting for the summer rush. Your customers will be more enthusiastic and ready to spend during the vibrant summer months, which gives brands the perfect opportunity to increase engagement, boost loyalty and drive sales.

By partnering with Loyalty Works, you gain access to a team of experts who know how to create tailored experiences for you and your customers, leverage creative incentives and apply gamification seamlessly across platforms. With loyalty management platforms like no other and robust data analytics to drive campaigns that work, as well as being able to source the perfect prizes for your promotions, Loyalty Works has all you need to heighten your seasonal rewards and promotions and supercharge your summer loyalty campaign.

To find out more, ask all the questions you need and speak to the experts, contact Loyalty Works today and let's see how we can prepare your brand for the upcoming summer months.