Revitalising Your Rewards Strategy: Aligning with Q2 and the New Financial Year

April brings spring and fresh beginnings - not just for nature, but for the businesses too. April marks the start of a new financial year, and it brings with it a natural pause point. It’s a moment to breathe, review, and reset. Just as we’d tidy up our balance sheets and clarify our business goals, this is the time to look at our customer rewards strategy with fresh eyes. What’s been working? What’s been quietly underperforming? And how do we build something stronger from here?

If you’ve been looking to revamp your rewards programme strategy, enhance customer retention through rewards and loyalty schemes or reevaluate your loyalty incentives for the new financial year, now is the time to do it.

Evaluating Your Current Rewards Programme: Key Metrics and Insights

To better understand how our reward programmes function, we can use a series of different metrics to give us a clear indicator of what is working well and what is not working so well. These metrics are:

• Customer Retention Rate (CRR): CRR measures the percentage of customers that are retained by your rewards programme and is the best metric to ask whether your rewards programme is bringing people in for the long haul or just a passing fad to your customers.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Our CLV score is a measurement of how much money a customer brings to you throughout their life and is a simple calculation of a customer’s spend per year multiplied by the expected lifetime of that customer.
• Redemption Rates (RR): Redemption Rates are simple tallies of how many rewards a customer could have had and claimed versus how many they actually redeemed.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is a measurement of how likely your customers are to recommend, or ‘promote,’ you to others. This feedback doesn’t lie. If loyalty isn’t translating into advocacy, something’s missing.

By gathering our data from the previous financial year, we can begin to get a good overview of how well our customer loyalty programmes have performed and how best to optimise them.

If our customers are coming through the loyalty door but not sticking around, we can ask ourselves why and what we need to do to improve our CRR.

If our customers are sticking around for the long haul but have a low CLV, we can ask why our customers are only making small purchases, how we can leverage that, and how we can get them to pivot.

Our RR score can tell us if our rewards are landing and help us decide whether to implement similar rewards moving forward or whether we need a complete overhaul of our rewards systems.

Using these scores to see where we are now is the first step to setting ourselves up for the new financial year.

Aligning Rewards and Strategy with Budgets and Business Goals

Now that we’ve taken stock, the question becomes: where do we want to go? Our loyalty strategies need to work hand in hand with our wider business goals, and that starts with planning:

• Budget Allocation: How much should you invest in rewards this year? The answer depends not just on what you can afford but on what you hope to gain in return, whether it’s higher spending, stronger retention, or more referrals.
• Goal Setting: Be specific. Maybe it’s increasing average order value by 15% or improving redemption rates by 20%. A clear target gives your rewards programme direction.
• Internal vs. External Support: Can your in-house team deliver what’s needed? Or would expert support help, like that offered by Loyalty Works, to bring your vision to life?

Once we have our clear goals in place and our budget has been managed, we are ready to get started, so let us look at some ways our strategy can innovate on what we have done before to help improve all our metrics.

Innovative Approaches to Customer Rewards and Retention

Once the strategy is grounded, it’s time to inject energy into it. Modern loyalty programmes are no longer just about points, they’re about creating memorable, motivating experiences. Loyalty Works offers several ways to do just that:

• B2B Incentives: For businesses that rely on partner relationships, tailored B2B incentives can build loyalty where it matters most.
• B2C Incentives: For customer-facing businesses, designing reward schemes that feel personal, valuable, and habit-forming are the key to success.
• Gamification: By adding a playful twist to your marketing, you can partner with the power of game mechanics, such as challenges, levels, points, and badges, to keep customers engaged and coming back for more.
• Seasonal Campaigns: By aligning rewards with seasonal activities, we can add relevance and build affinity, creating the sense that your brand understands and reflects the lives of your customers.

Harnessing Data and Personalisation for Effective Rewards Programmes

The best loyalty strategies will speak directly to your customers and not simply be pleasing the crowd, and for that, we need data:

• Personalisation: Segment your customers, learn their habits, and deliver personalised customer rewards that actually resonate. Whether it’s birthday surprises or spend-based perks, relevance is everything.
• Predictive Analysis: Go beyond reacting and start anticipating. What are customers likely to do next? How can you meet them there before they even ask?
• Feedback Loops: Don’t forget to listen. Build in ways for customers to share what’s working for them and what isn’t. That feedback is golden.

When you combine data with creativity, a loyalty scheme becomes more than just a programme. It becomes a relationship. With the right support, that relationship grows stronger with every quarter.

Take Your Rewards Strategy to the Next Level in Q2

The start of a new financial year offers clarity and a fresh canvas. By reviewing your current rewards programme, aligning it with your business goals, exploring creative approaches, and using data to personalise and refine, you set yourself up not just for another year but a better one.

Loyalty Works is here to help you make that happen. Whether you're evaluating your Q2 business rewards and planning ahead, rebuilding from the ground up or simply refining what already exists, we offer the tools and expertise to transform your customer rewards into something that genuinely works.

So why not take this moment to rethink your rewards, re-energise your relationships, and make Q2 the start of something smarter?