How to Create an Omnichannel Loyalty Program (2025)

Now more than ever, ensuring customer loyalty is a challenge. However, with the use of omnichannel loyalty, retailers can boost customer retention by creating a seamless shopping experience. 

Creating meaningful touchpoints—at as many steps in the customer shopping experience as possible—is critical in executing a sound omnichannel experience. According to McKinsey, consumers are increasingly choosing retailers based on the “ease and richness of end-to-end experiences.” 

Below, we walk through what omnichannel loyalty is, as well as its benefits, examples, and how you can go about setting up your own strategy. 

What is omnichannel loyalty?

Omnichannel loyalty rewards customers regardless of where they shop. Members can engage with brands or make a purchase through a retail store, ecommerce website, mobile app, or social media storefront while their reward status is consistently tracked throughout all of their devices.

How omnichannel loyalty programs work

An omnichannel loyalty program focuses more on customer engagement instead of simply creating point systems that encourage customers to buy more. 

Here’s how they differ from traditional loyalty programs:

• Omnichannel programs are more interactive. They can gamify the customer rewards experience in a way that encourages buyers to interact with the brand even if they aren’t showing purchase intent. They can receive loyalty points through specific customer interactions like taking surveys, referring new customers, or rating products.
• Omnichannel initiatives are more convenient. They focus on developing relationships with returning customers and making them feel valued.
• Omnichannel loyalty strategy allow for greater personalization. Thanks to the ability to collect customer data across sales channels, retailers can deliver a personalized experience with more touchpoints through mobile apps or in-store purchases. 

Benefits of omnichannel loyalty

Let’s look at some of the benefits of omnichannel customer loyalty.

Better match customer experience

An omnichannel loyalty program isn’t only about handing out rewards in hopes of increasing sales. It’s first and foremost about providing a great digital experience that closely matches the wants and needs of a customer. To do so, retailers can use customer data for key indicators that provide each customer with personalized content based on their preferences. 

Capture more relevant customer data

Omnichannel loyalty programs give an overall look at customer activity. They analyze valuable data like:

• Customer purchasing habits
• Buying frequency
• Preferred shopping channels
• Point usage rates
• Demographics
• Customer behaviors and attitudes
• Location

💡 Tip: Sending digital receipts via email is a great way to organically collect customer contact information at checkout and build an email list to fuel retention marketing. Just make sure they’ve opted in to hearing from you before sending them anything.

Competitive advantage

Executing an omnichannel customer buying experience comes with plenty of upsides. With it, retailers can stay top of mind. But it doesn’t stop there. An omnichannel loyalty program also offers greater purchasing flexibility—which customers are demanding now more than ever. 

The added touchpoints offer more retail analytics for store owners to work with, which they can then leverage to create better connections with both new and repeat customers. Add to that an integrated experience across locations and devices, and retailers stand a better chance of capturing and retaining customer attention with an omnichannel loyalty program. 

How to create an omnichannel loyalty program

Today, retailers can set up an omnichannel loyalty program with solutions like in-store events, social media channels, apps, or websites. Here’s a rundown of some of the key steps involved in the process.

1. Choose a unified commerce platform

The traditional approach to omnichannel loyalty was fraught with technical complexities. Store associates worked from a standalone POS system that patched ecommerce with temperamental middleware. As a result, customers couldn’t see their rewards updated in real-time, and cashiers struggled to identify which rewards they were eligible to redeem in-store. 

Unified commerce solves this challenge by bringing all of your backend systems together in one solution. 

Shopify is the only platform to build POS and ecommerce on the same platform natively, giving you a smooth customer loyalty program setup—both from the operational side and front-facing customer experience. A leading independent research firm found Shopify POS retailers reduce total cost of ownership by up to 22%, while also lowering annual third-party support costs by 89% on average.

But it’s not just POS loyalty programs that unified commerce supports. An integrated POS system that offers a frictionless experience ensures you can execute omnichannel retail strategies like: 

• Displaying real-time inventory levels at a nearby store on ecommerce product pages.
• Making it easy to bring online customers in-store and upsell at pickup.
• Easily accepting in-store returns and exchanges, whether an item was purchased online or at other locations.

💡Tip: Shopify automatically creates unified customer profiles that merge first-party data you collect on shoppers across every integrated channel. You get one source of truth for each individual customer, which you can use to create audience segments and offer the personalized experiences your shoppers expect.

2. Pick a loyalty app partner

Choose from hundreds of loyalty apps in the Shopify App Store and start rewarding shoppers for purchases they make both online and in-store. Popular options include:

• Smile.io
• Marsello
• Yotpo
• Rivo
• Inveterate

These Shopify loyalty apps offer customizable loyalty dashboards and integrate with email marketing tools like Shopify Email and Klayvio. You can add dynamic content blocks to marketing emails to display exactly how many points each customer has accumulated.

3. Define loyalty tiers and rewards

Some brands incentivize purchases by allowing customers to collect points, whereas others reward cross-channel engagement—such as following the brand on social media, subscribing to an email list, or referring friends—to grow their retail business outside of direct purchases from existing customers.

Think about what loyalty looks like for your business, and how you’ll incentivize it. Points that can be converted into cash are a good starting point because they’re easy to calculate. If $1 equals one point and each point gives them $0.10 credit, shoppers can easily tot up how many points they need to get a discount on their next purchase.

That said, dollar-based points can eat into profit margins—especially if you’re leaning into other discounting strategies to sell products. Alternative ways to reward high-value customers include:

• Birthday gifts
• Free shipping incentives
• Early access to new product drops
• Discounted product bundles 
• Free months on their subscription

Tiered omnichannel loyalty programs can also increase customer lifetime value as they need to spend more to unlock the next tier. For example, customers might unlock a free birthday gift when they reach 50 points, a $10 gift card when they reach 200 points, and free shipping for a year when they reach 500 points.

4. Promote the omnichannel loyalty program

Do a test run to check that your omnichannel loyalty program is working as intended. For example, if you made a purchase online, do the rewards you’ve earned appear in your POS system? Troubleshoot any issues before you invite customers to join.

Once you’re happy with the setup, promote your omnichannel loyalty program and encourage repeat customers to enroll. You could:

• Use retail signage to promote your customer loyalty program. 
• Add a QR code to join the loyalty program on retail receipts.
• Send digital receipts with a link to the registration page.
• Use post-purchase feedback survey tools like LoudHippo or Grapevine to gather feedback, then automate an email that invites happy customers to join the program.
• Make it routine for cashiers to invite shoppers to the loyalty program when serving customers in-store. 

💡Tip: Use Shopify Flow to deploy trigger-based automations that invite your most loyal customers to join the program after they meet specific criteria—such as making 3+ purchases, initiating their first purchase in a physical store, or being subscribed to the email list for over a month. 

 

5. Use customer data to personalize outreach for loyal customers

After gathering the following customer data from various channels, study it and use it to make personalized omnichannel offers:

• Customer interests
• Their pain points
• Order history
• Customer preferences 
• Frequency of brand touchpoints

Customers who only place buy online, pickup in-store orders (BOPIS), for example, clearly like the convenience of placing orders through your ecommerce website. You could offer free local delivery when they reach 150 points, which caters to this online-buying preference while making their collection more convenient. 

You could also use Shopify’s segmentation tools to deploy targeted marketing strategies. Loyal customers who’ve bought your moisturizer at least three times, for instance, might receive an email upsell for your moisturizer subscription service with dynamic content blocks that show the subscription price after their loyalty points have been applied. 

Examples of omnichannel loyalty programs

To help you inform your own omnichannel loyalty strategy, let's look at a few real-world examples.

Mizzen+Main

About half the customers who visit Mizzen+Main’s retail store are new customers. This presents a huge opportunity for the retail team to not only turn browsers into paying customers, but also invite them to the omnichannel loyalty program and incentivize repeat purchases once they’re happy with their first purchase.

The menswear retailer relies on Shopify POS to maintain unified customer profiles that give associates a real-time view of their shoppers. This data syncs with the Yotpo app for Shopify, which Mizzen+Main uses to operate its omnichannel loyalty program.

“Our retail employees can go into a customer's account created online and see how many loyalty points they have and then apply their credits to their account," says Natalie Shaddick, the brand’s VP of ecommerce. “That would be very difficult to achieve if we didn’t have Shopify for both ecommerce and POS.”

Lola’s Cupcakes

Lola’s Cupcakes sells baked goods both online and in-store, but previously relied on two separate systems to operate its business. Custom-built tools and third-party applications contributed tons of technical complexities which slowed the business down—particularly when it came to operating its loyalty program.

Lola’s Love Club offers loyal customers a free cupcake in-store on their birthday, as well as points that they can convert into discounts for online or offline purchases. In an attempt to simplify the process for both customers and its team, Lola’s Cupcakes migrated to Shopify POS and unified its rewards program with the Smile.io integration.

Over 10,000 new customers have joined Lola’s Cupcakes' new omnichannel loyalty program while helping the retailer reduce the total cost of ownership of its ecommerce website by over 50%.

BYLT Basics

Fashion retailer BYLT Basics leans into omnichannel commerce with a customer loyalty program that rewards buyers regardless of where they shop—be that its online store, brick-and-mortar locations, or the Shop App (the latter of which accounts for around 10% of all conversions). 

The program itself is powered by the Inveterate app for Shopify—something it credits as being a huge growth engine for the omnichannel brand. “The ability of our loyalty members to redeem their rewards from anywhere is so important,” Ryan says. 

“By using Shopify Checkout, we have our bases covered on the website and mobile app. And now, thanks to the integration between Inveterate and Shopify, our retail teams can help customers redeem and earn their loyalty points with the simple click of a button on the POS tile, creating a frictionless checkout experience.”

Build an effective omnichannel loyalty program for your business

Creating your own retail omnichannel loyalty program opens up plenty of opportunities for retailers to increase customer loyalty, grow brand awareness, and boost sales while personalizing the entire retail customer journey.

Where many retailers tend to struggle, however, is with the infrastructure required to operate a large-scale customer loyalty program that spans multiple sales channels.

Shopify’s unified commerce solution has everything you need to reward customers, regardless of where (and how) they prefer to shop. Choose a loyalty app partner to operate the program, then use data from Shopify’s unified customer profiles to segment your VIP customers and offer personalized rewards that encourage conversions.