Technically, Loyalty programs are subsets of marketing activities, and yet many companies treat them as a different segment of operations.
When creating a loyalty program, businesses must integrate it well with other marketing efforts to get the best response from customers and generate maximum value for the business in terms of increased sales over time.
Therefore, when choosing a loyalty program software, we must choose one that can support the overall goals of marketing, and have room to promote marketing messages and activities.
Here are a few ways in which loyalty program softwares can support marketing activities.
Offer and Promotion Announcements
A loyalty software that helps send notifications, SMS or emails to customers on offers and promotions can save a lot of marketing cost.
Businesses and stores can market their current and upcoming offers and promotions to relevant customers in the loyalty network. All one needs to do is tap the database created by the software.
These messages can be targeted to a relevant segment and hence can generate a great response in terms of sales.
Type of Rewards and Discounts
A loyalty program should enable marketers to recognize what kinds of rewards and discounts will work with their customers, and create marketing campaigns around the results obtained from the data.
With the help of a good loyalty software, businesses can easily notify relevant customers about stock clearance sales, seasonal discounts, on-going offers and customized promotions.
Basket Size and Lifetime Value Enhancement
Marketers always experiment with different things like attractive visual merchandising, one-plus-one offers and sales to increase the basket size of their customers.
Loyalty program softwares help shoppers see all relevant merchandise they can buy to avail discounts and rewards, hence motivates them to increase their basket size.
With tier-based loyalty programs, marketers can also encourage customers to purchase repeatedly from you, and hence increase the lifetime value of customers.
Referral Bonus
Referrals are a great source to get new customers. This reduces your marketing cost and increases your chances of sales.
Referrals are more like to buy your merchandize than a new customer who came to your store organically or through other marketing channels. The challenge is to motivate your customers to act to refer more people.
Loyalty softwares can be used to offer referral bonus to customers. This motivates customers to voluntarily give referrals.
Advocacy
Satisfied customers speak well about your business and products, but they often do not have the right channels to advocate you in front of the right kind of people.
Loyalty program softwares allow satisfied customers to share their experience on social media and other channels, so that you get better online and offline visibility and reputation enhancement. This is a great way to attract new customers, especially when an influencer advocates your business or products.
Feedback and Data
A good marketing plan is based on good user data. Loyalty software are a great source of data about what customers purchase from time to time, what offers encourage them to buy more, and what products do they buy together.
Such data is extremely valuable for marketers to plan their inventory, visual merchandizing, products, promotions, etc. to reach the marketing goals of the company.
Your loyalty program software can be a valuable resource if chosen correctly. A loyalty software should be wholesome and benefit both businesses and customers, so that both have incentives to use it sincerely.
Even the participation of your employees and managers in the loyalty and marketing efforts should be trackable. A good software enables you to that, so that active employees can be rewarded for their efforts.
Loyera is a loyalty software that streamlines your POS, Loyalty, E-commerce and Rostering requirements. It ensures that the loyalty network of customers you create can be tapped for various marketing and sales activities to get the maximum value for your business. It enables you to carry out various marketing activities like sending offer notifications to loyal customers and tracking branch and staff participation in loyalty and related marketing efforts of the company.
Your business can reach it potential only when you have a strong base of loyal customers, and then you build upon that with the help of referral and new customers, which are attracted through other marketing activities.
Choosing a good loyalty program can go a long way to enhance marketing results, save marketing cost and increase your customer base.