Your business is now getting traction and slowly eating up the available market, what any entrepreneur would want is to sustain the momentum by simply getting more clients and sustain your existing customers’ return visits. A loyalty program may sound a bit early at this point, but in reality, the program itself should already be a part of your sales strategy.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Why should it be part of your sales strategy? When you start selling products or services, you are already in the second phase of your customer lifecycle or journey. At this point, it is already expected for your business or organization to have an understanding of your potential customers, how you can make the sale, and how you target to sustain your business with your customers in the long run.
So how should you start your loyalty program? There area different loyalty program strategies out there, it is basically choosing what is the best fit for your business in terms of customer adaptability and organizational readiness. Here are a few loyalty program ideas to jump-start your business.
1. Stickers, Stickers, and Stickers
Well, who won’t love earning a sticker for each visit? This is the most common implementation of a loyalty strategy for coffee shops, restaurants, etc. Customer earns a free sticker for each visit and once a number of stickers are earned, they get something for FREE. This option is pretty much customizable to make it more personalized or more aligned to your business goals or brand promise.
2. Happy Hour/Exclusive Sale
This is a common strategy for restaurants and retail establishments. The intent of this strategy is to maximize sales potential during off-peak hours (or days) by giving discounted offers during the period. This strategy though requires a good analysis of your sales pattern to get optimal time to schedule your campaign, at worst, you might be cannibalizing your own sale and will surely hit your bottom-line.
This strategy may sound a bit of a sales strategy more than a loyalty one, but spinning this idea to an Exclusive sale for your existing customers, and giving them the first dibs will surely make them go back and buy an extra product from you, which leads to increasing the average revenue per customer.
3. Exclusive Member Discounts
A great way to show appreciation to your loyal customers is to provide them with exclusive discounts on their succeeding visits. This strategy is not limited to actual product discounting but can also be used to provide a free product. (Just ensure to check your mark-up and the free product’s value)
Your free product can either be something that is slow-moving or a new product that is being tried for your market.
There are a lot of ways to implement a loyalty program, choosing the right one for you to start is the hardest part. If you scan the current market, you will probably think of jumping into the digital bandwagon, but is it the right strategy? Well, that depends on your risk profile. Going digital is inevitable, but knowing the readiness of your business and organization should also be considered. Also, regardless of your loyalty strategy, a high-quality product and service will surely make a difference and should be the heart and soul of your strategy.
Loyalty Programs augment and further improve the customer experience you are providing, it is not the only way to provide great customer experience.