10 Best Customer Loyalty Software and Apps to Increase Customer Retention in 2020 [Full Review]

Are you a small business owner or a marketing manager?

Then you probably know about the struggles of keeping your customers loyal and increasing retention.

We have the solution to this problem: loyalty software. It’s easy to integrate, doesn’t cost much, and it has lots of benefits for your company.

In this article, you will talk about the top 10 loyalty apps for increasing retention.

Regardless if you own a small or a large business, there is a solution for everyone.

How To Evaluate Loyalty Software and How We Rate Them

Before we get started, here’s how we rate loyalty software and which factors you should use when choosing loyalty software for business:

1. User reviews.
2. Demos & trials availability.
3. Price range.
4. Product features & functionality.

And now, here are the top loyalty programs to use!

1. Social Spiral

Social Spiral is a customer loyalty software based on SMS text messaging. It has excellent time-saving customer engagement automation which works perfectly at all times. This makes Social Spiral perhaps the best customer loyalty program software you could find.

Pros:

1. Send out promotions, coupons, reminders, and reward programs as SMS messages.
2. Access your business dashboard to manage your campaigns.
3. Use all the features including campaign and keyword tracking.

Cons:

1. No email marketing software integration.
2. It doesn’t work for online businesses.
3. Does not work for brick-and-mortar ones.

Pricing: Based on an individual quote basis.

P2Pmarketing Rating: 9/10

2. Candy Bar

Candy Bar is a web-based loyalty software for brick-and-mortar stores. It aims to create reward programs for engaging repeat customers. With every visit, customers earn a stamp that resembles a digital version of a standard loyalty punch card.

Pros:

1. Collect valuable customer personal data and access the ‘analytics dashboard’.
2. It’s a two-way messaging concept at the base of the software.
3. CandyBar is available on desktop computer or mobile device.

Cons:

1. Loyalty programs are based on store visits rather than total spend.
2. No automation and POS integration.

Pricing: 30-day free trial, then $45/month.

P2Pmarketing Rating: 9/10

3. Perkville

Perkville is perfect for membership-based businesses that are looking to reward their customers. Perkville integrates with various industry-specific POS systems allowing you to give out rewards to those who complete certain actions.

Pros:

1. Integrates with many popular POS, membership, and CRM programs such as Mindbody, Lightspeed, and Vend.
2. Rewards your customers for a wide variety of actions such as purchases, referrals, and more.
3. A lot of flexibility.

Cons:

1. Only businesses that require customers to sign up for an account can use this software.

Pricing: Starts at $99/month per location.

P2Pmarketing Rating: 8/10

4. Splick.it

Splick.it is a gamification platform that simplifies online and mobile ordering, payment, and marketing. It develops mobile and web ordering applications with features such as loyalty and rewards programs, in-app payment, analytics, and more. Splick.it mainly works with businesses in the food industry.

Pros:

1. Choose their app platform or ask your own developer to integrate their ordering and payment API.
2. Splick.it personalizes every app according to the brand they are working with.

Cons:

1. It can be hard to understand how it works at first.

Pricing: Available upon request.

P2Pmarketing Rating: 7/10

5. Loopy Loyalty

Loopy Loyalty helps you to create custom rewards programs with a digital loyalty card that your customers can store in their mobile wallets such as Google Pay or Apple Wallet. You can do many things, but if you combine it with translations, it will work better. You can translate your content with online translation services such as The Word Point or an equivalent.

Pros:

1. Website dashboard for businesses to manage accounts.
2. A separate Stamper app for employees to scan the customers’ loyalty cards.
3. Send push notifications and use location-based beacon marketing to signal customers that they are near your business.

Cons:

1. Customers need to have and use a digital wallet to be able to participate in the rewards program.
2. There is also no POS system integration.

Pricing: $15-$50/month

P2Pmarketing Rating: 8/10

6. LoyaltyLion

LoyaltyLion is loyalty software suitable for e-commerce stores. It helps online stores improve their retention and raise engagement with the help of custom rewards programs, personalized emails, and referral programs.

Pros:

1. From real-time ROI to MailChimp, Shopify, and Yotpo integration, LoyaltyLion seems to have all the features you could desire.
2. Different plans have different features, but even the free plan has enough options for a small e-commerce business.

Cons:

1. The reward programs are more complex and there is no text messaging feature.
2. Only suitable for e-commerce stores.

Pricing: $0-$699/month

P2Pmarketing Rating: 7/10

7. SpotOn

SpotOn is a loyal software best used by brick-and-mortar businesses that want to increase new foot traffic. It has various additional features such as online review access, marketing solutions, and an analytics dashboard. There is an app for customers to find your business, search for deals, and track rewards from multiple businesses.

Pros:

1. Customers can see all the deals in your store through their app and check the points they earned.
2. Create multiple reward options for your customers and track which opportunities they take advantage of.

Cons:

1. Customers can’t earn points for actions other than purchases.
2. It requires your customers to download the app to be able to participate.

Pricing: $35-$195/month

P2Pmarketing Rating: 7/10

8. Loyalzoo

Loyalzoo is a loyalty software that uses the gamification concept to help businesses improve their retention. Just like CandyBar and SpotOn, it works with digitized punch-cards. LoyalZoo strives to increase the interaction between the merchant and customers.

Pros:

1. It supports both stamps and point-based loyalty programs.
2. Customers can check-in from their phones, so there are no problems when using QR-codes.
3. The app also integrates with Facebook.
4. Customers can post automatically to their feeds when they check-in.

Cons:

1. Customers are required to download the app to participate.

Pricing: Free trial, then $27-$7-/month per store.

P2Pmarketing Rating: 7/10

9. Belly

Belly is a loyalty software that uses gamification concepts and customer interaction tools to help businesses improve engagement and retention. Customers can track their points through the app and business rewards, view purchase history, and find businesses.

Pros:

1. An email marketing feature is available to reach customers more effectively.
2. BellyBites offers demographically-based discounts, coupons, and offerings that guide customers to your store physically.

Cons:

1. It relies heavily on social media marketing which may not be the best option for some businesses.
2. Customers have to download the app.

Pricing: $129-$179/month

P2Pmarketing Rating: 7/10

10. Smile.io

Last but not least, our favorite loyalty software, Smile.io.

Smile.io allows you to launch a program with features such as VIP, points, and referrals. It currently serves over 50 million members and keeps growing.

Pros:

1. Easy to operate.
2. It has a good reputation.
3. You can reward customers for a variety of actions such as product reviews, social media sharing, and others.

Cons:

1. There are not enough placement and customizable options.
2. Some members keep creating multiple accounts which confuses other members.
3. It’s not cheap.

Pricing: $59-$299/month

P2Pmarketing Rating: 10/10

Our Picks

For those of who are still unsure about what loyalty software to use, here are our picks:

• Best overall: Smile.io has the best features a business of any size could desire.
• For brick-and-mortar businesses: CandyBar is perfect thanks to the punch-card concept.
• For e-commerce stores: Loyalty Lion is the best choice for all kinds of online stores.

Final Thoughts

All in all, loyalty programs are perfect for raising loyalty levels and increasing retention. These are definitely the 10 best tools around. So, if you use one of these, you will definitely succeed in your job.

About the Author: Anna is a specialist in different types of writing. She graduated from the Interpreters Department, but creative writing became her favorite type of work. Now she improves her skills while working as a freelance writer and translator for TheWordPoint and has free time for other types of work, as well.