LoyaltyLion vs Smile: Which loyalty platform is best for you?

A sophisticated customer loyalty program is vital to increasing sales and customer lifetime value (CLTV) for any business.

A loyalty program is key to sustaining long-term growth and improving customer retention. It costs five times less to retain an existing customer than it does to acquire a new one. And research shows that a customer who signs up to a loyalty program is 47% more likely to buy from you again. It pays to invest in a rewards program for your most loyal customers.

LoyaltyLion and Smile.io are two of the most popular loyalty schemes in the market. Both provide insightful analytics, enable customisation and allow strong integrations, but which one is better for your business?

It is important to choose a loyalty platform that suits your brand and your customers. Here’s a breakdown of how LoyaltyLion and Smile.io compare in the way they approach analytics, customisation and integration.

Analytics

Analytics allow you to make informed decisions and can make a big difference when you are competing against other businesses within your market. Data and insights help you become more aware of what your ROI is and allow you to discern what’s driving sales and where you can make improvements. Analytics for your loyalty program is just as important.

Both Smile.io and LoyaltyLion offer analytics and insights across their loyalty products, but we’ve found that LoyaltyLion provides a more comprehensive approach with deeper analytics and more advanced tools.

Smile.io:

Smile provides only basic analytics around members, points and referrals. Customers have to upgrade to get dashboards that offer more in depth reporting.
Their basic plan focuses on value generated, rewards issued, referral purchases, referral traffic, points earned/redeemed and program members with granular details for the past 30 days.
Smile only provides custom reports on their Enterprise plan which is their most expensive option.

LoyaltyLion:

On the other hand, LoyaltyLion offers enhanced analytics and insights on customer behaviour. You can use these insights to target high value and at risk customers and increase CLTV.
LoyaltyLion has a feature called ‘Customer Value Snapshot” which gives you access to a comprehensive analysis of your customer’s buying behaviour. With this information you can build a better understanding of your customer’s value and you can create more revenue-driven marketing efforts.
Loyalty Lion also has advanced A/B testable tools which will allow you to test in real-time, iterate and optimise your strategies to ensure they have the greatest impact on your loyalty program.
Additionally, Loyalty Lion’s Recommendations Board uses your data to prioritise loyalty tasks according to the ROI they will deliver ensuring that you can accelerate your marketing efforts and increase the impact of your loyalty program.

Customisation

Having the ability to customise your loyalty program is key to ensuring your customers have access to on-brand loyalty experience. You’ll also be able to reflect your brand values across your loyalty program. Both of these elements are key to building loyalty, customer retention and increasing revenue.

Also as your store grows, you need a loyalty platform provider that is able to scale with you. Customisation is key when it comes to scalability.

Smile.io:

Smile only works with a pop-up loyalty widget with limited customisation. With Smile, there is no SDK available and a full-page program is not an option. Any decent level of customisation required by a merchant will be either tough to accomplish or extremely expensive because Smile is a plug-and-play loyalty solution.

Smile’s loyalty program isn’t meant for advanced merchants who may have headless Shopify, multiple sites or a B2B channel and therefore is not an ideal loyalty solution for merchants who want more freedom to customise.

LoyaltyLion:

LoyaltyLion offers a fully integrated, customisable loyalty page that offers different levels of customisation based on the resources, capabilities and size of your team. Through LoyaltyLion’s Loyalty Page Editor you can create and customise a loyalty page displaying your customers’ loyalty information and alter the page’s colour palette to align with your brand.

LoyaltyLion provides comprehensive SDK and API support which means you can work with developers and e-commerce agencies to build a loyalty experience that mirrors your brand identity and create a fully interactive page within your store’s code with no iframe or pop-up.

Integrations

Strong integrations will allow you to use your whole marketing suite seamlessly to power your business and drive internal productivity. The importance of a strong and easy-to-use customer rewards program that integrates with a variety of solutions can’t be underestimated. It could be the difference between you and your competitor.

Smile.io:

For Smile.io, integrations are one of their strengths. Smile has integrations with leading email marketing solutions like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor Commerce, and with customer review platforms like Yotpo, Okendo and Gorgias.

LoyaltyLion:

LoyaltyLion takes pride in their integrations with best-in-class technology providers. While Smile.io offers an array of integrations, LoyaltyLion provides greater depth with their integrations, particularly with Email Service Providers (ESP).

For example, LoyaltyLion has a market-leading integration with Klaviyo for email triggers including custom activities. While Smile pushes across only five fields with no pre-built triggers, LoyaltyLion pushes over twenty-four dynamic fields enabling extensive integration with Klaviyo.

Why we prefer LoyaltyLion

LoyaltyLion is our preferred partner over Smile.io because LoyaltyLion offers more insightful analytics, a greater level of customisation and stronger integrations with best-in-class technology solutions.

With their enhanced analytics and insights we can target high-value customers and reliably increase CLTV. Equally, LoyaltyLion allows a high degree of customisation which enables us to experiment and create a loyalty program that reflects our values. On top of that, LoyaltyLion’s strong integrations enable us to produce a broad and cohesive tech stack.

LoyaltyLion is a loyalty platform powerhouse that is helping BlendCommerce reach new customers, strengthen relationships with existing customers and exceed our loyalty program goals.

Want to learn more about how a loyalty program can take your business to the next level? Get in touch with LoyaltyLion.

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