Acquiring new customers isn’t always as easy as we’d like it to be. It drains your energy and leaves you with little time for all the other tasks piling up on your desk. While getting new business is important, there are other ways to grow your business revenue that requires fewer resources and time. And one of those ways is by setting up a Customer Loyalty Program that rewards loyal customers for repeat businesses.
What is a Customer Loyalty Program?
A customer loyalty program is a rewards program offered by a business to customers who frequently make purchases. A loyalty program may give a customer advanced access to new products, special sales coupons or free merchandise. Customers typically register their personal information with the company and are given a unique identifier, such as a numerical ID or membership card, and use that identifier when making a purchase.
Customer loyalty reflects a customer’s willingness to buy from or work with a business or a brand again and again, and it’s the result of a positive customer experience, customer satisfaction, and the value of the products or services the customer gets from the transaction. Customer loyalty programs are structured marketing strategies designed by businesses to encourage customers to continue to shop at or use the services of businesses associated with each program.
Benefits of a Customer Loyalty Program.
- Increases sales and boost growth: Setting up a customer loyalty is one of the cheapest ways that a small business can increase sales. It’s more affordable to turn a customer into a loyal customer than to keep finding new customers. You’ll be able to lower your ad spend while increasing your profits by remarketing to customers who are already familiar with your brand.
- Build a loyal brand reputation: Creating a customer loyalty program can help your customers build their loyalty to your brand. According to Facebook, millennials and baby boomers are often considered brand loyalists. If your business targets millennials, present them the right offer in the right way and you could build a relationship with a lifelong customer.
- Attracts and acquires new customers: How much have you spent on attracting new customers? Loyalty programs can be one of your most beneficial marketing tactics and will not only help increase sales but also help develop a brand image for yourself that will feel more like a community and less like a corporation who is only after money.
- Learn more about your customer: Customer loyalty programs can help you better understand how to market to your customers. You can test promotions and special offers on your biggest fans to better market to the casual customer. Once you understand what makes certain customers loyal to your brand you can use those findings to build brand loyalty with your store browsers.
- It makes customers happy: By implementing a loyalty rewards program, you are sending a message to your current and future client base that you are interested in not only making money off of purchases but also in a relationship with customers that is mutually beneficial. You sell goods and services, although you attach benefits solely for the benefit of the customer. This act of goodwill will improve the overall outlook of your customers, which will ultimately have a positive impact on your business.
Also Read: How can a small business deliver more values to customers?
How to Set-Up a Customer Loyalty Program?
A loyalty and retention program has two goals. The first which is to convert new customers to repeat customers and secondly to keep your repeat customers for as long as possible. There are two approaches to setting up a customers loyalty program that is easy and affordable.
- Do-It-Yourself (DIY) customer loyalty program: this is the cheapest and most affordable means of setting up a loyalty program. This requires that you manually track and reward customers based on certain metrics. A great way to achieve this is the use of loyalty cards.
- Using a customer loyalty program software: customer loyalty software are designed to help businesses ease the process of rewarding loyal customers by tracking customers transaction history and rewarding such customers based on set-out factors and guidelines. This is considered best fit for businesses with an online presence such as e-commerce websites.
Conclusion
The first sale to a customer matters, but if you really want to make your business a success, you need to focus on getting the customer to make the 2nd, 3rd and the 4th transaction with your business. A customer loyalty program for a small business can be as simple as a Buy 2 get 1 Free offer for repeat customers of giving a percentage discount when a customer transact business more than once.
Do you have any advice or ideas about customer loyalty programs that have worked well for your business? Share them in the comments section below!