Come spring and the businesses will start promoting season-end sales to their customers. But in order to make the most of these periods of increased customer activity, businesses need to use modern digital tools and services effectively. While the usage of digital loyalty software tools ramps up during the holidays, it is essential to maintain this momentum until the season-end sales for best results. Let’s take a look at how you can make the most of a customer loyalty management software system during the season-end sales:
Variable discounts
Offering your most valuable customers and rolling out an attractive and exclusive discount for them is one of the simplest ways to ensure that both, you and your customers, benefit from year-end sales. For points-based loyalty programs, an additional discount can be offered to the top 1% most valuable customers. For multi-tiered Customer Loyalty Rewards Programs, the amount of discount can be progressively increased for every tier going up. Similarly, on crossing a minimum-purchase threshold, you can promote your customers to a higher tier.
Stock clearance
The end-of-season sale won’t be serving its purpose if you aren’t able to sell your existing stock. Offering a high discount to your most valuable customers is a relatively fool-proof strategy because they are more likely to respond to these offers. Furthermore, since they get to save more and even get to jump a loyalty tier, the incentive for them to spend more than usual is higher as well. With the right offer and the right promotions, you can make sure that you are able to enter the new season with a fresh stock and new inventory.
Personalised rewards
Getting your customers excited about the season-end sale and then offering them rewards and discounts on products that they have no interest in, can do more harm than you may imagine. Not only will your sales be lacklustre, but even your brand reputation might take a hit. Customers have access to plenty of information online and they will switch to a competitor the moment they find an offer on a product of their choice. In order to ensure that that doesn’t happen, you need to personalise the rewards according to the customer’s purchase history, product preference, and spending capacity.
Cross-selling and up-selling
In addition to helping you understand your customers better, personalising rewards and offers can help you cross-sell and up-sell your products more effectively. You can also introduce new products and even influence customer purchasing decisions by offering the right discount on the right product. The objective is to help your customers feel valued. At the end of the day, a successful rewards strategy is all about benefiting customers and businesses alike, and personalisation of rewards is the best way to ensure the same. Intelligent loyalty software systems can help you in designing effective personalised rewards strategy for your customers.
Exclusive & early access to members
An effective way to generate a positive word-of-mouth publicity is to open the sale season with your loyalty members and give them access to special deals. The idea is to make your existing customers feel valued, and encourage other existing and new customers to join this ‘elite’ club. You could organise a premium event of sorts, and invite your most loyalty customers to foster several powerful brand ambassadors and influencers naturally.
Effective marketing and promotion
If done right, providing early access of your products to select customer can generate a positive publicity regarding your brand and increase the anticipation of the sale. Since most of this ‘buzz’ will be circulated through word-of-mouth channels, you will be able to tap into the networks of your existing customers effortlessly. What’s more, potential and new customers who want to get their hands on these deals might actually end up joining your loyalty program.
Gathering reviews and feedback
Season-end sales provide a regular stream of interested and engaged shoppers. In addition to providing them a positive shopping experience, you can also use this opportunity to make them feel more valued by gathering their insights and feedback. Providing a review, feedback, or a rating can be made a pre-cursor to be eligible for certain deals and offers, like an extra discount or a free product. Depending upon the objective, you can either collect responses to a customised questionnaire or ask your customers to leave their reviews and ratings on third-party platforms.
Positive publicity and customer insight
Using this strategy can help you kill two birds with a single stone. One, you get genuine feedback from your most loyalty customers and gain valuable insights regarding your business. This will naturally help make your business more agile and innovative. Two, by asking your most ardent fans to leave their reviews and ratings on third-party platforms and social media, you gain positive publicity. Businesses of all sizes greatly struggle with both these challenges and are usually unable to find effective solutions to the same, but not anymore.
Customer referrals
Another module of your program that can benefit from season-end sale is the referral activity. You can ask your customers to refer N number of friends (say five or ten) in order to be eligible for even more discounts or exclusive perks. However, make sure that the referral process is as simple as possible. Designing a cumbersome and multi-step process that tests the patience level of customers might actually backfire. With the help of a leading customer loyalty solution, Loyera, Customer Loyalty Rewards Programs can simplify the customer referral process tremendously.
Expanding the loyalty network
While engaging existing loyalty customers should naturally be one of your top-priorities during the season-end sale, you can also enrol more customers in your loyalty program. Season-end sales provide an easy opportunity to collect customer data and information, and making referrals a part of the same will benefit your business enormously. In addition to expanding your loyalty network by giving you a reliable and accurate database of new potential customers, seeking referrals also helps you integrate a customer’s social media identity with their customer profile, which can be further used to design personalised rewards.
While these loyalty strategies may look simple, they can deceptively tough to implement. It takes a lot of experience and analytics-based insights to design the best rewards strategies for customers. That is why most cloud-based Customer Loyalty Software solutions, like Loyera, offer intelligent reporting tools to help understand customers better. With critical add-ons like POS and E-Commerce, Loyera can help you consolidate your business operations efficiently, and help you gain data-backed strategic insights regarding your customers. To know more about how you can benefit from Loyera, get in touch with us today.