7 Best Customer Loyalty Program Software for 2023

LoyaltyLion is our top choice for customer loyalty software due to its breadth of features and customization options. It is best suited for ecommerce companies that want to design their own unique loyalty program and are ready to invest in their customer retention.

To make your business memorable and boost customer engagement (and spending), LoyaltyLion offers rewards, points, and tiered membership options. It also allows you to customize every interface and piece of text in your customer loyalty program so your website is seamless and cohesive.

This is our top-scoring customer loyalty software, with a 4.56 out of 5, because of its comprehensive features and customization. LoyaltyLion also got top marks for its overall quality and popularity, as well as customer satisfaction. A lack of POS integrations and mixed customer reviews, however, brought its score down. For better customer marks, check out Yotpo and Zinrelo.

LoyaltyLion lets you create tiered programs to motivate your customers to continue interacting with your business. (Source: Pinterest)

---

LoyaltyLion offers rich reporting capabilities to help you understand your customers and loyalty program.
(Source: LoyaltyLion)

---

LoyaltyLion lets you send custom-branded emails to your customers with rewards offerings. (Source: LoyaltyLion)

---

To start, LoyaltyLion lets you design your program and customize your loyalty rewards so that they effectively incentivize return visits among your unique customer base. The software walks you through the whole process step by step to make it easy. From there, you get to add visual customizations. Another great option with an even more custom experience is Annex Cloud, which we will explore below.

LoyaltyLion can integrate with most major ecommerce platforms and has also partnered with Vend for mobile app integration.

• Points and Rewards System: Offer customer points for purchases, referrals, reviews, or any other on-site activity. The customers can exchange those points for gift cards, vouchers, or rewards like free shipping or an exclusive discount.
• Tiered Memberships: Reward customers for engaging with and spending money at your business. Offer platinum, gold, silver, and bronze membership levels, and give better rewards as people climb the ladder.
• Referral Rewards: Reward customers for sharing on social media, via email, or over text through custom referral links or use the LoyaltyLion referrals widget.
• Outreach: Reach out to your customers via email or text to remind them of their points, offer discounts, promote sales, and keep customers interacting with your loyalty program. LoyaltyLion offers different email templates and designs for you to choose from, so your emails can be custom to your message. (LoyaltyLion offers limited email program integrations, but you can use an API to connect to any email software.)
• Reporting: Access real-time statistics and referral and rewards information through your dashboard so you can better understand and target your customer base.
• Integrations: It integrates seamlessly with most ecommerce software, including Shopify and Magento. LoyaltyLion also offers custom integrations through its dev team via API for both ecommerce and POS integrations.
• CSS Theme Editor: It includes a built-in editing tool that allows you to customize how your loyalty program appears on your website.

LoyaltyLion is best suited for ecommerce due to its limited point-of-sale (POS) integration options. For brick-and-mortar stores, a better customer loyalty option is TapMango. Additionally, LoyaltyLion’s user interface can be difficult to understand and master, unlike Yotpo, and its customer support can be difficult to reach. Not only that, but TapMango’s customer service is highly reviewed and personalized.

Yotpo scored an impressive 4.54 out of 5 in our evaluation, and stood out to us as the best option for businesses looking to use reviews and other UGC to bolster their customer retention. Yotpo uses AI to help generate reviews and has social media integrations where you and customers can add social pictures directly to your website.

Yotpo did not just earn a top score from its review feature. It also offers an extensive list of other programs (detailed below) that can help you boost customer loyalty. In addition, Yotpo is an extremely popular option, and the majority of users agree that it is user-friendly, high-quality, and intuitive to set up. It did, however, lose some points due to limited POS integrations and dissatisfaction surrounding its customer support.

Yotpo makes it easy to view reviews from all of your sales and social platforms in one place. (Source: Yotpo)

---

It’s easy to add Yotpo to your site with its user-friendly interface.

---

Understand how your loyalty program is performing with Yotpo’s in-depth reporting platform.
(Source: Yotpo Support)

---

Yotpo offers several different programs that you can use alone or in conjunction with each other. Each program uses a different strategy to promote customer engagement and allows you to engage with customers along multiple channels to boost impact. Yotpo’s programs include:

Depending on the program and tier that you choose, Yotpo offers an extensive list of features:

• AI-Driven Reviews Generation: Use AI to collect more reviews, photos, and Q&A through an automated requests system that ensures you ask for feedback in the right way, at the right time.
• On-Site Widgets: Incorporate customizable on-site widgets to your ecommerce site to display reviews, photos, and customer social images.
• SMS Marketing: Send promotions to your customers via text to help boost engagement and promote events. If you prefer to reach your customer via email, try LoyaltyLion for email-focused outreach marketing.
• Email Marketing: Integrate Yotpo with your email marketing platform and send cart abandonment emails that populate with reviews and ratings based on individual shopper browsing behavior, newsletters that showcase community feedback, new product release emails, welcome emails, and order confirmation emails—reaffirm purchase decisions through social proof that demonstrates the value of your products.
• Visual Marketing Suite: Upload photos to your website from your social media or product pages through social media integrations, and let customers upload their own images to your site.
• Consumer Insights: Access reporting on your reviews and customer feedback to help you understand how customers really feel about your business.
• Customer Q&A: Create custom questions and display customer feedback on your site.
• Marketing Integrations: Integrate Yotpo with your current email or other marketing channels to advertise and boost your loyalty program among your customers.
• Reporting: Access reporting to help you understand the success of your loyalty program and where you can still maximize your bottom line.
• Success Manager: Yotpo gives you a dedicated success manager who can provide best practices and industry insights.

Yotpo lacks a wide variety of POS integrations, and only works seamlessly with Vend and Shopify. The program does, however, provide an extensive list of ecommerce platform integrations. If you are in the market for in-store loyalty programs, TapMango is a great option.

Yotpo also runs into customer complaints when it comes to pricing. The price tends to increase rapidly and drastically when your program grows and your needs expand. Smile.io offers a more affordable option for businesses looking to save some money. Additionally, unlike LoyaltyLion, Yotpo only lets you contact customers via text and does not have email capabilities.

Other than its pricing and outreach options, Yotpo’s customer support could use some bolstering so merchants can get their problems solved in a timely manner. If you are interested in working one-on-one with a developer to guide you, consider Annex Cloud or TapMango for top-tier customer support.

TapMango earned an impressive 4.51 out of 5, landing it just under Yotpo in our evaluation. The software offers the best reporting tools among our options, providing insights into customer behaviors and program performance. The TapMango reporting hub also gives you access to tons of information and analysis about your customers, allowing you to better understand and target their needs and wants. TapMango is perfect for any brick-and-mortar business trying to better understand its customers or those looking to start data-driven loyalty initiatives.

Along with its reporting tools, TapMango also offers a slew of different types of rewards structures that you can choose from and allows you to customize the appearance of all your correspondences so you maintain a cohesive brand image. Additionally, TapMango has a highly regarded and personalized customer support system that is available at all times to help you along the way.

The software lost points, however, for its ecommerce integration limitations. If you are looking for an option that will be better suited to an online business, try Annex Cloud, Yotpo, Smile.io, or Zinrelo.

TapMango offers tons of tools including a customer app, a loyalty card, a tablet, and desktop management dashboard. (Source: TapMango)

---

TapMango offers in-depth reports to help you understand your customers and make better, more informed decisions in your loyalty program. (Source: TapMango Support)

---

TapMango lets you send branded emails and texts to your customers with special offers and reminders.
(Source: TapMango)

---

TapMango lets you customize your in-store tablet so that it matches your brand. (Source: TapMango)

---

TapMango allows you to connect to your customers through a branded loyalty app where you can give rewards to customers for spending and interacting with your business. What you reward is completely up to you, whether that be reviews, referrals, or frequent purchases—it’s totally flexible.

When customers visit your store, they can sign in to their loyalty account through the in-store tablet either manually or by scanning their loyalty card, giving them access to all their rewards history and adding more as they make purchases. They can also access their loyalty info through the TapMango app, and see their membership status and points history there.

• In-Store Tablet app: Run your loyalty program on a tablet with TapMango’s customer-facing tablet app. Not only that, you can customize the tablet interface to match your brand.
• Enrollment: Customers can enroll in your loyalty program via the customer facing tablet, your mobile app, online, or SMS.
• SMS, Push Notification, and Email Outreach Marketing: Connect with your customers with automated or manual emails, texts, or app notifications. All emails are fully customizable to your brand.
• In-store Sharing: Customers can take photos to share on their social media directly through the sign-in table. You can then use this user-generated content (UGC) in ads for your business.
• Keytags: Branded keychain style tag that customers can carry around and use to scan into your tablet and access their rewards. These tags can also function as gift cards.
• Referral Program: Automatically provides referral codes to all customers to share with their friends.
• Surveys: Send out surveys through TapMango’s loyalty platform that will bolster your Google reviews.
• Online Ordering: Customers can order ahead through their loyalty profile online or in the app and ask for pickup, shipping, or curbside delivery.
• Reporting: The TapMango reporting feature lets you see how your program is performing and determine where you can improve.
• Expert Assistance: TapMango pairs you with a rep that can help you understand your reporting, customize your program, use your software, and answer any questions.
• Branding Customizations: Customize the appearance of your sign-in tablet, loyalty app, emails, and texts so that they reflect your brand.

TapMango is designed to work primarily with brick-and-mortar businesses, so it lacks many ecommerce integrations that you find with Annex Cloud or LoyaltyLion. Additionally, TapMango does not offer a free trial for you to experiment with the program before purchasing. You can consider LoyaltyLion and Yotpo if you want an option for a free trial.

Annex Cloud is a great loyalty program for businesses looking to create something completely custom from the ground up. Annex Cloud takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a loyalty program. From integrations to your analysis, you work with a developer to make everything appear and operate just how you want and need it to. This also ensures that your loyalty program integrates seamlessly into your current platforms and software, and your unique marketing needs can be met.

This in-depth customization process is a major reason why Annex Cloud scored so well in our evaluation, landing at a 4.16 out of 5. The breadth of what you can do with Annex Cloud is fantastic, and little is left wanting when it comes to features. Additionally, because of its custom structure, your Annex Cloud loyalty program will be able to fit seamlessly into your website or brick-and-mortar operations. The software lost points for its operational structure, length of its contract, and quality concerns.

Annex Cloud lets you customize every step of the journey and build a completely custom program from the ground up. (Source: Salesforce App Exchange)

---

Once up and running, Annex Cloud lets you manage your program and take actions to increase loyalty.
(Source: Salesforce App Exchange)

---

AnnexCloud has great reporting capabilities to help you better understand your customers and the success of your loyalty program. (Source: Annex Cloud Support)

---

This highly customizable customer loyalty program enables you to monitor your customers at every step in their experience, so you can target them with ads and rewards that are best suited for keeping them engaged and boosting their loyalty to your brand.

When you work with your developer, they will take you through a series of steps to get your customer program off the ground:

1. Integration: Annex Cloud builds a program custom to the needs of your business’s current POS system, website engine, apps, and other programs so your customer loyalty program can fit seamlessly into your existing operations.
2. Create a program: Design a program that makes sense for your business—reward specific loyalty actions with custom rewards.
3. Recruitment: Annex Cloud will help you devise a marketing scheme to get your loyalty program off the ground and recruit new members.
4. Registration: Create channels for customers to easily and conveniently register to your program.
5. Redemption: Choose how your customers can redeem their rewards—whether that be in-store, online, or anywhere else.
6. Marketing: Create a marketing plan that is effective at keeping your customer base coming back over and over again.
7. Analyze: Annex Cloud’s reporting system allows you to look deeply into every step in your customer’s journey and act on them to prevent churn and boost engagement accordingly.

Annex Cloud offers an extensive list of features that you can choose from when creating your custom program.

• Customizable Loyalty Actions: You can reward customers for actions of your choosing, including leaving a review, making online purchases, sharing a referral, or engaging with your social media.
• Reward Options: Choose rewards that are best suited to your customer base and business model, including discounts, free samples, flash sales, or sneak peek access.
• PWA Model: The progressive web app model allows users to access many of the loyalty features in offline mode, including product browsing, cart pages, and rewards statuses.
• Social Media Integrations: Customers can connect their social media to their rewards account for more rewards points. This allows you to reward shoppers for social shares and referrals through social media channels and gives you access to more data about your customer base.
• Native Receipt Scanning: Customers can scan their receipts from anywhere and get rewards for their purchases.
• Gamification: Create tiers, badges, or levels to make your rewards program like a game and promote buying.
• Integrated Online Checkout: Rewards are integrated into the checkout process so customers can easily redeem their points and offers.
• Promotion Engine: Advanced customer tracking ensures that the right ads and promotions are being sent to the right customer—whether that be one of your regulars or a shopper who hasn’t visited in a while.
• Recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) data: Use RFM data to segment customers and better understand your customer base.
• Custom Email Triggers: Decide what actions you want to trigger promotional emails.
• A/B Testing: Annex Cloud uses A/B testing to ensure that the best CTAs are in use across customer segments.
• Customer Segmentation: Segment your shoppers into groups so that you can target different segments and meet their unique needs and buying potential.

With Annex Cloud you have limited control through your merchant portal, so any time you want to make a change to your program, you have to work with Annex Cloud developers. This is unique to Annex Cloud—all the other programs in our list offer control and adjustment options through their merchant portal.

Additionally, Annex Cloud is an investment, and unlike other services that offer free trials and monthly subscriptions, Annex Cloud works under year-long contracts. If you do want the flexibility of trying the program free before you purchase, check out LoyaltyLion and Yotpo.

Zinrelo offers a customer loyalty program that uses data insights to segment customers based on their journeys and sends shoppers targeted reward opportunities that make sense for their positions. Through its Data Science practice, Zinrelo offers custom program insights, deep data analytics, and machine learning. Zinrelo is a great option for any business that wants to focus on data to improve the efficacy of its customer loyalty program.

A data-focused approach is not the only thing that earned this customer loyalty software a 4.06 out of 5 score. It also offers a variety of loyalty program structures, an easy-to-use merchant interface, and omnichannel capabilities. The software, however, did lose points for its high price points, limited POS integrations, customer support hours, and customization options.

Add Zinrelo to your website so that customers can log in to their account and view their rewards at any time. (Source: Zinrelo)

---

Customize your loyalty program straight from your dashboard and select the rewards activities you want to include and the points associated with an action. (Source: Zinrelo)

---

Use Zinrelo’s reporting dashboard to see how your loyalty program is performing. (Source: Zinrelo)

---

Use Zinrelo’s reporting dashboard to see how your loyalty program is performing. (Source: Zinrelo)

---

Zinrelo’s customer loyalty program can reward a variety of different loyalty actions and uses data-driven insights to help you create the best customer retention strategy for your unique customers. Its program options include:

• Discount Program

Let customers exchange their points for discounts, gift cards, or store credit that they can use in-store via your POS or online on your website.

• Status Program

Customers can move up in loyalty tiers as they interact with your business, giving them access to better rewards and benefits.

• Paid Program

Customers can pay an annual subscription to be in your VIP program and get access to discounts and benefits.

• Low-Margin Program

Customers earn points for every purchase they make that passes a set minimum amount. This program structure is designed to reward large-volume purchases.

Once you select the program option(s) that make sense for your business, customers can begin earning both in-store and online and can interact with their rewards profile through your website.

Zinrelo also offers a slew of advanced management and loyalty features, including:

• Data Sciences: Zinrelo provides extensive reports and insights on your customers, segmenting them into groups, analyzing their behaviors, and helping you figure out how best to target different customers at their unique shopping stages.
• Professional Support: For an additional cost, Zinrelo has expert support to help streamline integrations, make aesthetic changes, perform premium reporting, or even manage your loyalty program for you.
• Loyalty Action Options: Reward customers for referrals, reviews, purchases, social media activity, brand engagement, and custom behaviors. You get to choose what your program looks like, and what actions get rewarded.
• Messaging Service: It offers a built-in messaging service to boost customer engagement. Zinrelo lets them know about their rewards opportunities while they are shopping on your site.
• Loyalty Promotions: Run exclusive promotions for your loyal customers so your sales are building retention.
• Outreach Marketing: Send your loyal customers emails, texts, or app notifications to remind them of their rewards and keep them engaged with your brand.
• Tiered Program: You can make your program tiered with Zinrelo, rewarding more loyalty with a higher tier and better rewards.
• Customer Profile: Customers can access their points history, see their purchase log, add points, and upgrade tiers through their loyalty profile.

Zinrelo has little to no brand customization options and few integration capabilities—for a completely custom experience, consider Annex Cloud. Zinrelo also has limited customer support access and an extremely high starting price that you pay annually, rather than monthly. Consider Smile.io, LoyaltyLion, or Fivestars for more affordable options that are paid on a monthly basis.

Due to its automated functionality, Smile.io is extremely low maintenance and requires little oversight. Through a web-based application, you can create a place on your website where customers can sign up for your loyalty program as well as check and redeem their rewards over time. Then, as they perform loyalty actions, they will automatically receive rewards—you don’t have to do a thing. This makes the Smile.io software a great option for a solo operation or business running with a very small staff.

With an overall score of 3.88 out of 5, Smile.io is a cost-effective option with good value for your dollar. It lost some points due to its limited ability to work for in-store applications and its customization restrictions.

Smile.io is integrated with several ecommerce platforms, making it easy to add loyalty profiles to your website. (Source: Smile.io)

---

Give customers options for how they can earn points directly on your website. (Source: Smile.io)

---

Add branding elements to your Smile.io widget so it is in line with your business’s image. (Source: Smile.io)

---

Smile.io lets you use rewards, referrals, and VIP loyalty programs to keep customers interacting with your business.

To enhance its loyalty programs and make them effective, Smile.io also offers an array of different features.

• Loyalty Action Options: You can choose what actions you want to reward based on what you think will incentivize and engage your unique customer base the most. Your loyalty actions can be anything from account creation to spending $100—there are no limitations.
• Reward Options: Offer dollar discounts, percentage discounts, free products, or free shipping as your loyalty rewards.
• Customization: You can customize your Smile.io widget and name your rewards points yourself so that your loyalty pages maintain your brand experience.
• Tiered Program: Create a VIP program where customers sign up for exclusive discounts or rewards, and move through your membership tiers to unlock better prizes.
• Referral Program: Within their rewards profile, customers will have access to a referral link that they can share to earn rewards.
• Reports and Administration: Control your loyalty program and check in on its performance through your administration page.
• Emails and Nudges: Reach out to your customers and keep them engaging with your brand with custom-designed emails and remind them of their rewards with on-site nudges.
• International Use: Smail.io is available in a variety of languages so you can operate it around the world.

Smile.io does not have many POS integrations and is difficult to implement for in-store applications. Additionally, there are limited messaging customization options for your emails and texts, and Smile.io lacks a reviews program.

If you are interested in more customization, Annex Cloud and LoyaltyLion are great options. And, as we covered previously, Yotpo is the best software for boosting your reviews.

Fivestars is an in-store customer loyalty program with its own payment processing and POS terminal. While you can integrate Fivestars with your existing POS system, Fivestar offers a credit card terminal with integrated payment processing through Fivestars Payments so you can process transactions and manage rewards all from one place. This is ideal for businesses that don’t have a POS or payment processing or those that want to streamline their software.

Overall, Fivestars earned a 3.41 out of 5 in our review, earning points for its outreach marketing features, unique payments offering, and its free plan option. The software lost points, however, because there are no ecommerce integrations, and the types of loyalty program you can create is limited. For more program options and ecommerce capabilities, check out LoyaltyLion or Smile.io.

Use the customer touch screen to let members check in, redeem rewards, and make purchases. (Source: Fivestars)

---

As part of their customer acquisition program, your loyalty program and offers will be advertised at neighboring, non-competitor businesses. (Source: Fivestars)

---

Customers can discover nearby businesses and view offers with the Fivestar app map. (Source: Fivestars)

---

With Fivestars, the process of creating and implementing your program is simple. Simply fill out the sign-up survey and you will be paired with a sales representative to help equip you with the tools you need and to design your program. Unlike other options on this list, Fivestars only has a visits/purchase-to-rewards points loyalty program structure. However, you can also set up automated campaigns to welcome new customers, celebrate their birthdays, and bring back those who haven’t visited recently.

Then, you can integrate your Fivestars program to your POS and start using the Fivestars credit card terminal to sign people up and manage their rewards.

From there, Fivestars offers a host of great features that you can use to operate your loyalty program.

• Automated campaigns (AutoPilot): You can create automated marketing campaigns so that customers receive messages automatically based on your cues. Messages can be sent via text, email, or push notification.
• Customer acquisition: Connect with customers and get them to join your program as your business is promoted in the Fivestars app and on non-competitor customer touchscreens (Network Matching). Plus, if you add 20+ new loyalty members in a week, Fivestars will start sending your offers to active local shoppers and diners in the Fivestars community who are well-matched with your business.
• Fivestars Pay: With the Fivestars credit card terminal, you will have built-in payment processing via Fivestars Pay, so that as customers checkout, they can sign up for your program or redeem points during the purchase.
• Customer touch screen: This credit card terminal not only supports payment processing, it also lets customers sign-up for your program, sign-in if they are already registered, redeem points, as well as process transactions and leave tips.
• Fivestars app: Customers can manage their rewards and see the Fivestars marketplace via the Fivestars loyalty app.
• Manager App: Manage your loyalty program, view reports, and see your customers from the manager dashboard on the manager app (or you can access your account online via a web browser).
• Love Local: On the Fivestars app, customers will get alerts about nearby Fivestars businesses in real time plus info on introductory offers. The app also has a directory specifically for local businesses to help you attract new, local shoppers.

While Fivestars has a lot to offer, it lacks any ecommerce capabilities and is restricted to in-store use. Additionally, the types of programs you can create are limited to only spending/visits rewards. You cannot reward other types of actions, like referrals or reviews. For options that are ecommerce friendly and offer additional program structures, checkout Annex Cloud, Loyalty Lion, or Zinrelo.