Your new loyalty program is live, tiers ready, rewards shiny, yet member signup is patchy at best? You’re definitely not alone! Even though 43.2% of consumers are more likely to join a loyalty program than they were last year, many rewards programs are struggling with flat sign-up rates.
Why? Because most programs are invisible! The sign-up link lives in a footer, product pages never mention what customers could earn, and checkout carts are abandoned before anyone’s asked to join.
If you’re wondering how to get customers to join your loyalty program, start with these 6 structural fixes!
And if you’re curious about the latest loyalty trends regarding your own industry, check out our Global Customer Loyalty Report!
Why Fixing Loyalty Member Enrollment Pays Off More Than Ever
Customer acquisition costs have risen 222% over the past eight years, with an 18.4% jump in 2025 alone, making retention, and obviously loyalty enrollment, a top priority for many companies.
According to our extensive research for our Global Customer Loyalty Report 2026:
- Marketers now allocate 51.5% of total marketing budget to loyalty and CRM,
- It’s paying off: Average loyalty program ROI hit 5.3x in 2026,
- With 93% of loyalty program owners who measure ROI reporting a positive return, and
- 89.4% are confident that loyalty is driving value that they wouldn’t get otherwise.
But that ROI becomes reality only with members in the system; a program nobody joins can’t generate it. This is exactly why brands need to prioritize fixing enrollment itself.
6 Best Practices To Increase Loyalty Member Acquisition
In order to get more customers to sign up to your loyalty program, there’s no need for a major overhaul. These 6 strategic steps will help bring your loyalty program into the spotlight and boost new member acquisition.
Whether your program is digital-only or fully omnichannel, we have the right strategy for you. Practical and easy to implement, even on a tight budget!
1. Prompt Sign-up When Customers Are The Most Likely To Convert
If customers can’t find your loyalty program, they can’t join it. Sounds obvious, yet a lot of programs still fail this test. The trigger to click through has to live where customers already are: browsing, comparing, and about to pay.
The fix is placement, not persuasion:
- The program name in the top menu bar,
- A reward-value callout on product pages,
- A visible mention at checkout, where customers are most engaged and most likely to convert.
- A dedicated landing page matters too, but we’ll get into that later.
Your Next Step: Audit your site the way a first-time visitor would: Can you spot your loyalty program within five seconds on the homepage, a product page, and at checkout?
If not, add a persistent visual cue (a badge showing potential points earned) rather than a static banner. Static banners get ignored fast; contextual value cues get clicked.
2. Cut Sign-Up Friction to Almost Nothing
Attila Kecsmar, Antavo’s CEO, put it plainly: “Friction is the enemy of loyalty.” Every extra form field is a chance for a customer to abandon enrollment mid-click.
How to avoid this? Ask for the bare minimum: An email or phone number, nothing else, and let customers complete their profile later in exchange for bonus points. Social or account sign-on removes the form altogether.
A clunky sign-up just adds insult to that frustration before the relationship even starts. If enrollment feels like filling out a mortgage application, you’ve already lost the sign-up you were trying to win.
Your Next Step: Simplify your sign-up process and time your profile-completion ask for after the first purchase, not before it.
Offer a small points bonus for adding a birthday or preferences once someone’s already a member. You’ll get richer data with none of the pre-signup drop-off, and the follow-up request feels like a perk instead of a gate.
3. Create A Dedicated Landing Page To Show the Loyalty Program Value
Customers can take two roads to digital signup: Either immediately join by clicking a “Become a member” CTA at checkout or on the product page, or by clicking on “Learn more”, taking them to the loyalty program landing page.
Which is why it’s imperative to make it as practical and easy-to-understand as possible!
A dedicated landing page is where you lay out the full mechanics: how tiers work, how points are earned and redeemed, and what member-only perks actually look like. Easy, fast, driving home the point of value!
Transparency does real work here: 73% of consumers say transparent online experiences are key to driving trust, and 74% say a reliable website or app matters just as much.
Your Next Step: Structure your landing page in two layers: a plain-language overview above the fold (tiers, earning, redeeming) accompanied by visual cues and infographics, plus an FAQ section, plus a T&C link below it.
4. Utilize the Post-purchase Email Flows
Post-purchase emails to first-time customers are essential: the customer just had a positive experience and is primed to want more of it.
Trying to enroll someone during idle browsing, before they’ve shown intent, is asking for a commitment they haven’t earned a reason to make yet. Sequence the ask around commitment, not convenience for your team.
Your Next Step: Add a one-line enrollment prompt to your order-confirmation and first-purchase emails, not a separate campaign, the transactional email itself.
Open rates on transactional emails are far higher than marketing sends, and the customer is still in a buying mindset.
5. Bring the Program Into Your Physical Stores, Too
Online-only visibility leaves a real gap: EY found 78% of retailers now offer enrollment at the point of sale alongside online sign-up, recognizing that plenty of customers still discover and join in-store.
Checkout signage, a QR code on the receipt, or a simple prompt from the cashier all work, but only if staff can explain the program in one sentence. This is where digital and physical loyalty converge: a customer signing up at the till expects the same instant, low-friction experience they’d get online.
If your in-store enrollment still means a paper form and a follow-up email days later, you’re not omnichannel; you’re just inconsistent.
Your Next Step: Replace any paper sign-up form still in use with a QR code that opens a mobile-optimized, two-field enrollment page.
Instant digital enrollment in-store means the customer leaves as a member, not as a lead you’ll follow up with later, and follow-up is where most in-store sign-ups quietly die.
6. Turn Existing Loyalty Members Into Your Best Recruiters
Your current members are a channel most programs leave on the table. Consumers trust recommendations from people they know far more than they trust a brand’s own marketing: 82% of Gen-Z customers rely on friends and family’s advice for product recommendations.
A member who refers a friend isn’t just handing you a lead; referred customers’ CLV is 16% higher than non-referred customers.
The mechanic is simple: reward both sides. A double-sided referral, where the existing member and the new sign-up both get something, turns advocacy into a two-way transaction instead of a favor. It also reframes referrals as a loyalty feature, not a separate program bolted onto the side.
Your Next Step: Give referral prompts the same visibility rule as sign-up prompts: Surface them inside the member’s account dashboard and post-redemption confirmation screen, when satisfaction is highest.
Reward the referrer immediately on their friend’s first purchase, not weeks later; a delayed reward feels like a broken promise, not a perk.
Why Making Your Loyalty Program As Visible As Possible Works For Member Acquisition
Every fix above solves the same root problem: enrollment isn’t a marketing message; it’s a series of moments where friction either wins or loses.
Visibility gets the program seen; low friction gets it joined; timing gets it noticed when it matters most; staff and social proof get it trusted.
None of these require a bigger discount: Antavo’s data shows 43.2% of consumers already want to join more programs than they did last year. The demand is there. What’s missing is usually a checkout prompt, a shorter form, or a staff member who knows what to say.
So here’s the benchmark question: if a new customer bought from you today, how many separate moments would give them a reason to join?
Frequently Asked Questions About How to Get Customers to Join Your Loyalty Program
What’s the single biggest reason loyalty program enrollment stalls?
Visibility, not incentive value. Oftentimes, programs are technically well-designed but poorly surfaced, buried in a footer link or a single homepage banner that gets ignored after the first visit.
How much friction is too much friction at sign-up?
Any field beyond email or phone number starts costing you conversions. A slow sign-up generates member frustration that starts before they’ve even joined. The best-performing enrollment flows ask for one piece of contact information, confirm instantly, and defer profile-building to a later, incentivized step. Treat sign-up like a funnel, not a form.
What loyalty program enrollment strategies work best for mobile-first brands?
Prioritize one-tap enrollment over anything else: social or account sign-on, digital wallet cards, and push notification opt-in captured in the same flow as account creation. Mobile users convert less patiently than desktop visitors, so every extra screen between “join” and “joined” costs you sign-ups.
How do you measure whether your efforts to increase loyalty program sign-ups are actually working?
Track enrollment rate as a percentage of transacting customers, not just raw sign-up totals: Totals hide whether you’re converting your real customer base or just harvesting existing fans. Break it down by channel too: checkout, post-purchase email, in-store, and landing page should each have their own conversion rate, so you know which fix from this list is actually moving the needle. Time-to-first-redemption is a useful leading indicator: Members who redeem quickly tend to stay more engaged, so a rising sign-up count paired with a slowing redemption rate signals quantity without quality.
Quick Summary And Final Advice
Loyalty programs don’t struggle to attract customers because the mechanics are wrong; they struggle because enrollment is treated as a footnote instead of a funnel.
The programs that grow fastest put the invitation in front of customers at checkout, cut sign-up down to one field, show reward value before asking for commitment, and train staff to make the pitch in one sentence.
The real takeaway for loyalty marketers: enrollment growth comes from removing friction at existing touchpoints, not adding new ones.
Antavo’s AI-powered loyalty platform is built on the principle of turning loyalty into an operating system for customer engagement.
- The Planner helps teams translate engagement ideas into loyalty program structures.
- The Engine runs loyalty mechanics in real time.
- The Optimizer uses AI to interpret performance data and reveal what actually drives behavior.
Together, they allow loyalty teams to run programs that evolve continuously instead of repeating the same campaigns.
And that’s when loyalty stops generating activity and starts generating growth. If you are interested in what Antavo has to offer, be sure to book a call!
Zsuzsanna Ban Zsuzsanna Ban LinkedIn profile
Zsuzsanna is a Loyalty Specialist and Certified Loyalty Expert™ with years of experience in digital marketing and e-commerce. Zsuzsanna is known for having an analytic approach and high-level communication skills, helping her deliver engaging content. In her free time, she enjoys watching Formula 1 and listening to endless Taylor Swift playlists.
