Use the detailed history of your customers’ activity to design a personalized approach.
Everyone wants to be recognized as an individual. A whopping 80% of customers want a personalized experience when connecting with a shop, restaurant or eCommerce site and are more likely to do business with an organisation that offers this. Look at the data that you collect in your Loyalty program and see how you can use that data to create a personalized experience for your customers new and old!
Use the live feedback from your customers to know which incentives work best
We all desire and live for positive feedback. It strokes our ego and warms our soul. We all want to know that we are doing well, I know I do. At the same time, I know that to receive negative or critical feedback can be overwhelmingly upsetting, especially when we are business owners invested emotionally in our company. When I look back at critical feedback that I have received, perhaps a subject for a separate post ? with distance I see that I have grown most when I have been able to listen and act on negative feedback- Seek out feedback of all kinds and be open to hearing it and acting on it.
Identify top performing patterns to drive your decisions.
Once you have launched your Loyalty Program remember to look for patterns of behavior like.
Then after you have spotted a pattern or several patterns you can incorporate the insight into your marketing strategy and try new things. and measure the impact of them. Once you have launched your Loyalty Program remember to look for patterns of behavior like.
- What time do most people make use of the Loyalty Program?
- When are most people joining the programe?
- What are the most attractive offers?
- If we change the star offer what happens to the redemption rate?
Once you have spotted a pattern or several patterns you can incorporate the insight into your marketing strategy and try new things. and measure the impact of them
Build your membership base quickly and gather critical customer information
So, you have decided on creating a Points based Loyalty Program. Amongst the first things you need to do, in parallel with developing attractive rewards and benefits, is to drive members to join the program. To really succeed you need to adopt an Omni Channel approach that is use as many different means as you can afford and are at your disposal.
- Ask customer to join in store.
- Post using all relevant social media.
- Create a page on your website with description and joining instructions.
- Put up material in store.
- Produce ‘old fashioned’ flyers to hand out.
Have I missed anything? Feel free to add other methods of getting members to join a program.
Award points in exchange for important information
Customer Data is where it’s at right? To run your Loyalty Scheme, you need customer data. I remember the days when you would be handed a three-page application form to join a Loyalty Program and you had to complete it in the store and hand it to the Cashier! Those days are gone. Most people are moving towards handing over less information and expecting to receive more for it. You will need to incentivise your customer to give you information and you can do that by awarding points to collect that will go towards rewards, offers and benefits in exchange for giving entering your personal details. Remember though, that not everyone wants to give your personal data so be prepared to have some Anonymous members, you will still gain valuable transnational information and perhaps in time they will also update their profiles
Customize the joining form to collect additional data according to your needs
Data is the internal currency of your Loyalty Program. Naturally, we want lots of it. The more the merrier right? Well to a point. If you are a Small to Medium sized business, there is a limit to the resources you can pump into Marketing in general and Loyalty in particular. So, choose carefully what data you want to collect and how and when you collect it. Err on the side of caution when adding data collection fields to your sing up forms, you can always ask for more later.
Have your customers earn points to unlock rewards and continue coming back for more.
Running a Loyalty Program is a long-term game. Whilst there are short term tactics that you will use from time to time to drive new members or to push certain products the overall benefit of the Loyalty Program will be seen over time. This is where longer term planning around the collection and use of points and membership tiers comes into play- Remember that you want your customer to collect points and redeem them for a reward and then collect points again for the same reward or for a different one. Keep it simple. Keep it fresh with new offers and rewards and your customers will keep earning points and redeeming rewards.
Reward your best customers by giving them more points.
Keep your customer feeling special and valued to cement the relationship that he or she is building up with your brand. Once you identify customers who are frequenting your business more often or making larger than average purchases or making more purchases per week or month than others you can further cement that relationship by selecting those customers as special customers and giving them that little bit extra by giving them more points on each visit that they make
Generate more revenue per customer.
There are several ways to increase the profits of your company.
- Get more customers to buy from you.
- Get your existing customers to spend more with you.
You already know that It is an expensive business to constantly find new customers- Try to use your Loyalty Points to incentivise your existing customer to spend more with you each time they visit. We see customers who are LoyaltyDog members spend up to 50% more on average then customers who are not part of a Loyalty Program.
In Conclusion.
Of course this is not an exhaustive list of all the actions that you can take to make your Loyalty program work more efficiently for you. There are many other areas to improve too. Keep looking our for our posts as we will bring you more information and of course if there are ares that you want us to cover please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]