LINE Marketing Playbook: Three Essentials for Early-Stage LINE Membership Programs That Build Loyal Fans
Membership programs have become a hot battleground for brands again over the past year or two. As customer behavior grows fragmented and omnichannel, brands are looking to unify their conversation channels with members and turn one-way, one-off interactions like point cards and mileage into deep two-way relationships.
Howard HuangMarketing Specialist
Membership programs have become a hot battleground for brands again over the past year or two. As customer behavior grows fragmented and omnichannel, brands are looking to unify their conversation channels with members and turn one-way, one-off interactions like point cards and mileage into deep two-way relationships.
What's driving brands to invest in membership programs?
Research shows that acquiring a new customer costs five times as much as retaining an existing one. On top of that, digital marketing keeps running into strategy shifts from the ad giants and new privacy policies, making it harder and harder for brands to track users with third-party cookies and target ads to prospects. Managing existing customers as members has become the new battleground.
A sizable member base not only gives a brand stable annual revenue; members can also become brand advocates. Now that KOL and influencer marketing has gone mainstream, KOL exposure, friend recommendations, and product reviews have become the main factors in whether customers complete a purchase, a trend reflected in the growing number of brands partnering with KOLs to expand their customer touchpoints.
Why use LINE for membership programs
LINE is Taiwan's most-used messaging app, with more than 21 million active users. Brands are investing heavily in it, aiming to use direct interaction with friends to capture the next wave of social traffic after Facebook and Instagram. According to data released at LINE's online marketing conference at the end of last year (2021), the number of official accounts opened by brands grew 18%, with the total topping 2 million for the first time.
Free from reach fluctuations
Brands running fan pages on Facebook and other established social platforms inevitably see reach decline, driving ad costs up and campaign results down. Because LINE lets brands interact with friends directly, they are no longer bound by metrics like reach. Instead, they can focus on rich content and on making sure customers with different interests receive the information they want.
Unaffected by third-party cookie restrictions
Google has repeatedly pushed back the final phase-out of third-party cookies, but that still means brands urgently need a new digital marketing strategy for the foreseeable future. By linking to users' LINE accounts, brands can collect first-party data directly once someone becomes a friend of their official account, turning LINE into a Social CRM that handles both friend engagement and customer data management.
Third-Party Cookies Are Going Away. How Should Marketers Respond?As consumer privacy awareness grows, Google has had to announce it will phase out third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years, and Facebook has launched its Conversions API. Google's move will reshape an online advertising industry that has long lived on cookies. Safari introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention back in 2017, Firefox released a version that blocks third-party tracking cookies, and Microsoft's new Edge turns on tracking prevention by default.https://oakmega.com/blog/google-cookie-ban-ads-tracking
Three essentials for early-stage LINE membership programs
Plenty of brands have jumped into LINE, but most are still at the stage of engaging friends through mass messages. Few truly understand membership strategy well enough to collect friend data effectively and build behavioral profiles. The core issue is that a LINE membership program is fundamentally different from a Facebook or Instagram strategy. Rather than URL tracking, LINE is closer to first-party data, using tags for tracking. Here are three essentials for the early stage of a LINE membership program:
1. Member form verification
Add a "Member form" button to your rich menu, and friends who have made a purchase can fill out and submit the form right away. Once verified, a tag rule automatically switches them to a members-only rich menu, clearly separating the member experience from that of regular friends.
Beyond member forms, forms also work for surveys and customer service:
- Choose from more than ten question types, and upload your own banner, images, and a thank-you message shown after submission.
- Friends' basic details (name, email, phone, and so on) prefill survey fields, so no one has to enter the same information twice.
- Form activity becomes CRM data. Opening or completing a form, or picking specific answers, can tag friends automatically, and those tags let you retarget friends who haven't finished.
- Submissions to a "Customer service form" turn into live chat messages in the dashboard so agents can respond immediately.
2. Segmented broadcasts with tailored messages
With tags, brands can see how many members fit each profile and send tailored messages at each stage of the customer lifecycle, for example:
- Send new-member coupons to "Entry-level members."
- Send mileage-based vouchers, thank-you gifts for referring new friends, and dedicated one-on-one customer service messages to "Mid-tier members."
- Offer exclusive birthday gifts and dedicated one-on-one customer service messages to "Top-tier members."
3. Member area
Brands can build a member area in LINE and freely choose what it displays, such as coupons earned and points accumulated from completed campaigns, to make friends more engaged with the brand's official account.
How friends use the member area, such as collecting points and redeeming rewards, can also be exported to CSV in real time for in-depth analysis to pinpoint your most active, loyal members.
Is LINE a Good Fit for Member Management?LINE is probably the messaging app people in Taiwan know best. Beyond chatting, some see it as an advertising tool, but is LINE really suited to member management? A LINE OA connects a brand with its customers and lets it talk to them on LINE, but many brands hit a wall here: LINE is only for messaging, often only for broadcasting to everyone, with no way to know each user's preferences or what they click.https://oakmega.com/blog/line-crm-solution
Boost member loyalty and build loyal fans
As more and more brands invest in LINE, they need to recognize that LINE isn't just for acquiring new customers. Its direct interaction with friends lets brands deliver post-purchase member perks and one-on-one customer service in real time, turning customers into loyal fans who may even refer new customers, so acquisition happens at the same time and creates a virtuous cycle.
