How To Set Up A Loyalty Program
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
In today’s tough economic times, companies are always trying to find ways to keep customers loyal. Regardless of how strong your branding is or how broad based the corporate reach is. There are times when keeping a customer loyal is a difficult thing to do. That’s why developing an effective loyalty program is essential to maintain the customer base required to maintain the business. There are lots of ways to build a strong program and here’s a few:
1. Offer discounts for repeat customers. Having cards with punch outs that don’t take a dozen punches to complete is effective. If you have a card with a 3 to 5 punch for a significant discount is always good to keep customers close. An example of this would be those coffee cards where you buy 3 coffees and get the next one free.
2. Have rewards programs good for other products they can build towards. Think airline miles for hotel room stays, etc.
3. Doing a game or contest that offers prizes that involves both company products or even large scale “grand prizes” can be highly effective. Can anyone say McDonalds Monopoly?
4. Scratch off cards for discounts and free products. There are several stores doing this kind of promotion.
5. Offer support for worthy causes or schools based on participation. Many grocery stores who have the little key tags will give support to local schools as incentives.
There are lots of other ways to use incentives like these to drive customer loyalty programs. The really great part is the fact that it makes driving marketing campaigns really easy because there are always ways to pique customer interest. Even when the customer is being loyal to another program or institution such as breast cancer research, the loyalty program still pulls the customer into the store.
While some programs are more effective than others, using one or better yet, a combination of programs can multiply the repeat customer base exponentially. Great prices can bring customers in once. A great loyalty program will bring them back again and again.
Business Cards and Postcard seen above