When you look at your average customer today you will find that they are more informed and demanding in regards to quality of goods and services. In addition to this, today’s customer wants to be recognized and appreciated for their patronage.
So as a business how can you respond?
The response lies in the need to design and implement a loyalty program that recognizes and rewards your customers. Rewards programs today are highly accepted by customers with 80 – 90% of individuals in some kind of loyalty or rewards program.
A well designed and applied loyalty program can play a significant role in:
Acquiring New Customers
Growing your business means finding new ways to reach out to potential customers in a way that distinguishes your business from others. A loyalty program can help you attract and also recognize a new customer, and apply the right strategies to make them return time and time again.
Customer recognition
One of the biggest benefits of a loyalty program is that at the point of sale your staff are able to identify the customer by scanning their card. This enables them to address the customer by name and also view the customer profile in terms of sales history and other details. This then provides further information to staff which will assist them to provide a personalized service to the customer including opportunities to up sell and cross sell related products.
Keeping Your Competition at bay
A rewards program including exclusive member only sales, rewards points, discounted products or services may provide you with the edge you have been needing to distinguish your business from the competition.
Improving Your Profitability
Most people know or have heard about the 80 20 rule. This rules states that for many businesses 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers. What a loyalty and rewards program provides is the ability to identify and then reward these customers to ensure they stay as your customers and that they purchase more goods and services.
Any business that is able to store data on customers address, email, phone and then track their contribution to the business and spending behaviors is going to be positioned to boost sales. This customer profile provides your business with the power to create low cost targeted marketing campaigns directed towards loyal customers.
So how do you implement a loyalty program?
The most important aspect of loyalty program implementation is the ability to have the program fully integrated into your point of sale solution. Many loyalty programs work separate to the point of sale process which creates an administration night mare.
What you need in your point of sale system (POS) is the ability to:
Store customer profiles information: The customer profile including contact details, email, phone and also notes and customer attributes is very important to assist targeted marketing campaigns.
Produce a customer loyalty card that includes a bar code: This enables your staff to quickly scan the card which will bring up the customer information your staff can then use to personalize the service.
Set the point earned and point required for each product: Each products has different margin levels so it is important that for each product you can set the number of points a customer earns on purchasing a certain product and how much they require to purchase that product. This ensure that you maintain your margins and profitability. Without this feature a loyalty program can become very expensive. This approach also allows empowers you to encourage your customer loyalty and rewards members to purchase products with high margins.
Complete a purchase with multiple payment options including the rewards program points: To implement a loyalty program it needs to be simple and easy for customers as part of the check out to pay for goods via loyalty points.
Getting back to Customer Loyalty
If is all about collecting information on your customer needs and then using this information to provide customer with what they need. The better you do this the more your business will grow.
- Post Time: 12-30-15 - By: http://www.rfidang.com