As you run a small business, your number one priority is to attract new customers and retain your current ones. The more customers you have in your company, the more you can increase your profits and draw more attention to your business as people see you have plenty of happy and satisfied clients. With that, keeping your customer list full should be helpful for your sales and your marketing strategy.
Building a loyalty program is one of the best ways to keep customers coming back. By providing the best experience and offering incentives, businesses can encourage customer loyalty.
There are various ways to build a loyalty program, but some key steps include understanding your customer base, designing attractive rewards, and making it easy for customers to sign up and participate. Below are some tried and tested steps of building a POS loyalty program.
Table of Contents
Here’s How to Create a Loyalty Program
1. Prepare Your Program
Before you can start building your loyalty program, you first need to prepare and hash out the details for it. You need to ensure that your program will run smoothly and attract the customers you have in mind. There are a lot of ways to make sure that your program will be a hit and make customers enroll.
Here are some of the things that you need to consider before you start rolling out your program:
- Set Goals
The most essential thing to do is set your goals for your loyalty program. Make sure you have a clear view of what you want to achieve. If you want to maintain your customers, get new customers, or it can be profit-based. You should define your goals first so you can plan your program appropriately and effectively.
- Set A Budget
You need to set a budget before going into battle. You can select a budget for all the things you’re planning for your customers when they apply to this program, such as rewards, perks, and even discounts. This gives your business enough room to move around and grow.
- Define Your Target
Defining your target helps you properly determine which customers to cater to for your loyalty program. You or your trusted employees can hand out surveys or ask quick questions to your customers, depending on your needs and objectives. This allows you to have an overview of your customers based on the criteria you’ll be setting.
Here’s some great examples of loyalty programs to get you inspired.
Here’s an example of a popular and of one of the best loyalty programs in Canada.
2. Get Creative With The Name
One of the things that you may want to focus on after planning your program is to come up with a perfect name for your loyalty program. This will surely help attract customers to enroll in your program as they’d be curious about what you’re offering. That name can even be that one crucial factor to help them decide.
Also, getting creative with your program’s name allows it to stand out from all other loyalty programs your customers may already be a part of. You can allow your loyalty program to be fun, traditional, or classy. It all depends on your branding and what rewards you’re trying to offer.
3. Establish A Deeper Meaning
Although loyalty programs tend to make customers spend more for businesses, you should make sure to create a deeper meaning behind why you started your loyalty program. Yes, companies need to make their customers spend more to gain more profit, but it’s best to explain your program as much as possible to make it more compelling.
You could tell your story of how your company started, how grateful you are for your business’s progress, and how you’d like to give back. Being personal and heartfelt would surely help to make deeper connections with your customers.
4. Choose Reward Options
When it comes to making a reward program, you need to decide what kind of reward you’d like to provide to your loyal customers. This is where the budget comes in, as you still need to ensure that you’re making enough profits even with all the perks you’re giving out.
There are plenty of rewards that you could try providing to your customers, such as a discount for their next purchase, a gift for every ten orders, free shipping, or even a birthday gift to your loyal members. The more you try to be generous, the more you can attract more customers to sign up for your loyalty program.
5. Make It Engaging
Customers love it when things get more exciting. So, sometimes, a little competition doesn’t hurt. Everyone has a winning spirit, so come up with games in which they can participate, allowing them to have fun and accumulate points every once in a while.
You can do trivia quizzes and have leaderboards for your customers to help you determine which customers spend the most on a specific product or category. You can then provide discounts or points to the winners.
6. Include Valuable Points
Having points in a loyalty program should be one of your priorities. These points are what make loyalty programs great. Just make sure that the points your customers will be earning are valuable and will help them enjoy discounts or other perks on their next purchase.
Customers love it when they spend on a business and earn points while doing so. They tend to spend more on an item to earn more points.
7. Consider Partnerships
Exploring partnerships that complement your business can be a fun way to introduce more offers to them.
For example, one single loyalty card allows them to earn points and discounts from you and your business partners. This can be more enticing for your customers as they get to save by purchasing items from more establishments, motivating them to sign up for your loyalty program.
All you have to do is look for a business or two willing to work with you and, ideally, have the same target market as yours to allow for better exposure.
Takeaway
Building a loyalty program for your small business would surely provide plenty of benefits for you and your customers. While you allow them to save on their next purchases, you can allow your business to have more returning customers, thereby increasing your profits over time. Moreover, it could also help you attract more customers into your business as you can provide them with plenty of perks, making them the true winners of your company.
