Customer retention is an important task for every marketing department. It is not only cheaper to retain customers but old customers also tend to purchase more.
Therefore, businesses need to continuously work towards creation and management of a loyalty program that generates value for them and their customers.
A loyalty program becomes addictive due to various elements that benefit both customers and businesses. You can use a loyalty software for business to run a good loyalty program efficiently.
Here are some elements of an addictive loyalty program that keeps bringing customers back:
Attractive sign up incentive
One important element for a loyalty program is getting people to sign up for it. You can engage your sales staff in informing people about your loyalty program and its benefits, send messages to customers with the details of your loyalty programs, and also place banners in your stores to inform people about the program. Your sign up message should be clear and value-driven.
However, all of this will work only when customers see real benefit in signing up for your loyalty program. Therefore, create a sign up incentive, so that more and more customers find value in subscribing to your loyalty program.
Easy sign up
Make your loyalty program sign up process simple. Some stores tend to take a lot of time in getting loyalty program forms filled and issuing loyalty cards to users. This may put off customers and discourage them from signing up to the program. Create a simple digital process where you collect minimal information from your customers. Develop and use an efficient system for the same.
These days, many businesses sign up customers for their loyalty program at point of sale by just collecting their email IDs and phone numbers. Customer loyalty program software like Loyera helps sign up users in a few seconds.
Transactional messages with status updates
A good loyalty program keeps customers informed. When patrons receive regular updates or notifications about their loyalty reward status, they tend to stay more engaged and interested in the program. Transactional messages help build customer trust, too, as they feel confident about the efficiency of your systems. This can be achieved through a good Loyalty software.
Loyalty reward status updates can be given to users through SMSs, emails, app notifications, and billing receipts. You can use various features of Loyera Loyalty software to convey such messages to users on every transaction they make.
Marketing messages with new offers
You can also send marketing messages with new offers and discounts to your loyal customers. The customer data that you collect through your POS or loyalty software comes in handy for this. You can use Loyera POS add-on to study customer purchase behaviour to create marketing campaigns that appeal to your loyal customers. Customer data plays an important role in planning.
Messages to promote such attractive campaigns can be send to your loyal customers to bring them back to your store. This is important to keep customers engaged and to deliver value to loyal customers.
Transactional messages with status updates
Every successful and addictive loyalty program offers exclusive offers to their loyal customers. Businesses give incentives to loyal customers to keep them engaged and to make them feel appreciated. Every business needs to understand the motivations of their customers to be able to create effective exclusive offers. Such offers help distinguish incentives given to your regular customers from those given to loyal ones.
These offers and their benefits need to be communicated well to customers, so that they feel appreciated, see value in using the loyalty program, and stay connected with your business. This is one of the biggest hooks in any loyalty program.
Actual savings on preferred items
This element usually makes or breaks a loyalty program. When you offer loyalty rewards and incentives to customers, you need to calculate actual savings for your customers from the program. Customer savings from your loyalty program should be large enough to keep customers interested. Businesses need to deliver actual value to customers on the items shoppers prefer to buy regularly.
Many loyalty programs make the mistake of creating superficial or negligible savings for customers through loyalty programs. This leads to failure of campaigns that utilise a large sum of marketing budget. Businesses should work towards avoiding this.
Products should be bought regularly
Offer incentives and saving opportunities to loyal customers on the products they buy regularly. Products or product categories that are purchased every day, week, month, season or year can be a good base for an effective loyalty program. A loyalty program for a business whose products are not purchased by customers from time to time might have less effect on customer loyalty.
Therefore, ensure that your stores or business sells a good range of products that customers purchase regularly, as that will contribute highly to the motivation to subscribe to a loyalty program that may generate savings in the future for customers.
Continuous value generation
One important thing to remember to retain customers and to keep them hooked to your loyalty program is to deliver a continuous stream of value. If you do not deliver regular value to your loyal customers, then they will not be motivated enough to stay connected with your business and might start looking for alternatives. Therefore, this aspect needs to be considered with seriousness.
It takes a lot of effort and money in gaining customers; therefore, it should be a business’ responsibility to work diligently towards generating continuous value for customers to retain them, as that will contribute to business’ revenue generation in long term.
The above eight elements form the crux of an effective and addictive loyalty program. A good loyalty program helps bring customers back and to increase customer’s purchase basket size. This is essential for every business, as it helps build a strong foundation of customers.
Businesses can focus on growth activities once they have secured the loyalty of their existing customers. Gaining and managing customer loyalty is an ongoing task, and to run an addictive or engaging loyalty program, businesses requires to put themselves in the shoes of customers and create incentives that are appealing and valuable.
Loyera is a loyalty software for business that helps manage a loyalty program in an efficient and effective manner. It helps implement all the above points with success. It not only helps collect customer data, communicate with customers, and carry out loyalty point rewarding and redemption, but it also empowers customers.
Loyera app for shoppers enables them to keep track of their loyalty rewards, get updates about offers at your stores and to monitor the log of their purchases and payments. This customer loyalty program software helps leverage technology to create value for both businesses and shoppers.
Conclusively, to retain customers, businesses need to ensure two things—create an effective loyalty program and use an efficient loyalty and POS software to carry out loyalty activities in a successful manner.