7 Customer Loyalty Trends to Watch For in 2024

Customer loyalty is always evolving, and so are your consumers’ needs and the ways they engage with your brand.

2023 has been an amazing year of change, so obviously we’re all asking the same question: what will be the biggest loyalty trends in 2024?

We’ve gathered our expert loyalty predictions so you can get ahead… and speaking of getting ahead, have you seen our free 2024 Promotion Calendar? A month-by-month calendar with promotional opportunities, links to resources, and exclusive tips for loyalty campaigns.

What is the future of loyalty programs?

The evolution of loyalty programs in the future hinges on customer-centricity, prioritising a deeper understanding of individual preferences, needs, and behaviours.

It will transcend traditional benefit-focused approaches, emphasising tailored experiences that resonate with customers' diverse interests and financial commitments.

Retailers and financial institutions are poised to cultivate stronger and enduring customer relationships by leveraging data-driven insights to craft personalised and relevant loyalty initiatives.

The future of loyalty programs lies in the ability to connect authentically with customers, offering customised value propositions that align with their evolving expectations and lifestyles.

What are customer loyalty trends in 2024?

Based on the trends we’ve seen in 2023 and what we think is the future of loyalty, some of the customer loyalty trends in 2024 will be a new approach to loyalty management, a focus on predictive analytics with the help of AI, and bringing value and differentiation to customers.

1. Community building and social engagement

In 2024, brands will start focusing more on community building and social engagement - on every social platform, but especially Instagram and TikTok. 

They’ll start rewarding customers for engaging with their content, such as visiting blogs or community portals and sharing on social media. Social media platforms offer companies an invaluable opportunity to foster brand loyalty through networking, communication, and community-building.

Brand communities online, on the other hand, help companies keep track of consumers’ changing expectations, bringing customers together and letting them interact with each other and the brand.

It only makes sense that brands all over the world will start focusing more on engaging with customers outside of just the buying experience.

2. Focus on differentiation

Nowadays, there’s a sea of loyalty programs out there. What are you doing to stand out?

Brands will start focusing more on what they can offer to stand out from the competition and really form meaningful relationships with customers.

You could do a points-based loyalty program or launch a paid VIP loyalty program and offer rewards so exclusive that your customers will feel the need to pay for them. 

You could focus on ethical messages and sustainability with purpose-driven loyalty programs or even use NFTs as digital rewards - when it comes to rewards, your imagination is the limit!

In 2024, they’ll need to start seeing loyalty programs as a channel of engagement and use those to communicate with their consumers, engage them and speak to their needs.

Engaging with customers means having a loyalty program that resonates with individual customers to provide unique experiences.

Brands need to understand their audience really well and design the loyalty program around who they are and what they want.

3. Offer real value to your customers

Speaking of unique experiences, solely transaction-based relationships aren’t enough to differentiate your brand.

Economic value alone won’t be sufficient if you want your customers to see more than discounts coupons and promotions. Companies need to shift from just economic motivation to more psychological mechanisms of delight.

What does this mean?

It means that in 2024, brands will start adding more soft benefits and rewards and brand experiences, such as VIP events or personalised shopping experiences, to create strong emotional connections and truly offer something of value.

Creating a stronger emotional connection with your customers could also mean having a focus on sustainability and using your loyalty program for social good, rewarding more sustainable behaviours.

4. New approach to loyalty

Companies are starting to feel the need for a larger loyalty strategy, not just a single loyalty program. A customer-centric vision of loyalty, driven by emotional engagement, needs a new strategy and a new approach.

We’ve mentioned that cookie-cutter loyalty programs aren’t gonna cut it anymore in 2024, but the more diverse and complex a loyalty program is, the more simplified, consolidated and connected the technology behind it needs to be.

No matter if you’re looking for a data capture solution, a loyalty mobile app, a referral module or a number of different integrations: White Label Loyalty has your back.

Having a single program structure to manage all interactions across multiple channels will be essential for brands next year, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us - and let us worry about the tech, while you focus on your customers.

5. Focus on customer retention

From speaking to companies around the world, we've noticed a clear trend of paying more attention to customer retention. This is true even in historically acquisition-reliant industries, such as FMCG. 

In our opinion, this is long overdue so we cannot wait to see what 2024 brings. One thing is clear, however, customer retention is finally getting the well-deserved recognition and focus from marketers.

Brands will invest more heavily in customer retention, focusing more on sustainable growth, rather than growth at any cost.

This means an overall bigger focus on loyalty programmes and the economics around creating return on investment (ROI), customer's lifetime value (LTV) and orchestrating the customer lifecycle.

6. The return of tiered loyalty programs

We’ve recently examined hundreds of brands across several countries and released a list of the 101 best loyalty programs worldwide - and we noticed a few trends that might be useful for the future.

We found that a whopping 30 loyalty programs of the best 101 programs are in fact tiered loyalty programs, proving that this specific type of loyalty still works really well.

37% of customers are willing to pay to upgrade to an enhanced tier of a loyalty program, and a lot of customers agree that they would engage more with brands that offer different tiers.

Tiered loyalty programs can attract new customers but also cultivate lasting relationships with existing ones, and we definitely think they’re still gonna be a big hit in 2024.

7. Predictive AI analytics

Unless you’ve lived under a rock in 2023, you know that one big topic of conversation has been generative AI - and while generative AI can be a great help, predictive AI can be an amazing instrument to organisations in driving loyalty in 2024.

Leveraging machine learning algorithms, predictive AI lets you analyse the vast amounts of data generated by loyalty programs and uncover valuable insights about customer preferences and behaviours.

This analysis lets brands personalise rewards, incentives, and recommendations - which is exactly what we talked about when discussing how to bring more value to your customers.

This is exactly what White Label Loyalty's AI module does: it uses AI modelling to find business insights from your data, comparing different combinations of data points and finding the factors driving results.