Best practice tips for retail loyalty programmes
When people think of retail loyalty programmes, they often recall outdated stamp cards buried in their wallets. Thankfully, those days are (mostly) behind us.
Loyalty programmes have evolved from inefficient and hard to track to becoming powerful marketing tools that enable retailers to transform customer data into personalised, interactive campaigns that boost repeat purchases and strengthen brand loyalty.
To launch a successful retail loyalty programme, it’s essential to clearly define your goals and understand how your programme fits into the overall customer journey. Here are our top tips to elevate your loyalty programme to the next level.
Make it simple for customers to sign up
Customer loyalty programmes should be frictionless. Both to sign up, and to use. Fail at this first hurdle? You’ll turn customers away before they’ve even redeemed their first reward.
Reduce the time it takes you to use your loyalty programme by not having to switch between your ePOS app and your loyalty programme manager. The less time it takes to sign up, and use points, the greater chance you have of people sticking with your loyalty scheme.
Using a loyalty programme integrated with your iPad ePOS app solves these problems. The checkout screen will show you how many points your customer has earned and what rewards are available to them. You’ll also be able to easily enrol shoppers however you’d like whether it’s through their phone email address, or customer profile.
Send email and text messages
Did you know that 45% of consumers stay loyal to their favourite brands due to discounts, regular rewards, and regular incentives? And, 93.1% of companies that offer a rewards program and measure return on investment have a positive ROI? The difficulty, however, is getting customers to see these offers.
Successful customer loyalty programmes use text messages and emails to send offers to their customers. Email open rates, within the retail industry at least, average 10.81% and clickthrough rates average 8.19%. While these might seem quite low, email marketing has a high ROI for most businesses.
Text messages have similar rates of high performance with 91% of survey respondents interested in signing up for text messages from brands. Studies also show that people check their phones upwards of 80 times per day and SMS messages have an 82% open rate.
Leverage your customer data
Personalisation is king. It does not matter how well-written your marketing campaigns are, if they’re not relevant to your customers, you’re not going to get much traction. Deals, promotions, offers, and discounts should be used in your loyalty programme but only when they’re laser focused and specific within regards to your customers.
Start by using your customer data (like their purchase history) to understand what products or services they like. Once you know this, you can start rewarding them based on those preferences. You can do this with an electronic point-of-sale system, too.
For example, an electronic point-of-sale system like Lightspeed Retail can allow you to create customer groups based on shared demographic information, location, purchase history, method of payment and special days (like birthdays). Once you have your groups set up and ready, choose an email template, add your text, photos, subject line, and select the groups you want to send the email to.
All you need to do, then, is to send the emails and analyse your results to see how you can improve your next batch of emails. You can send text messages to your customer groups, too.
Grow your business with a loyalty programme
Existing customers can be worth up to ten times more than their original purchase. That’s why customer loyalty programmes are so important, and why having one connected directly to your electronic point-of-sale really shines.
Leverage your customer data, maximise how existing customers spend, and incentivise them to recommend you to their friends and family – rather than just hoping for return customers. Lightspeed Loyalty, as part of Lightspeed Retail, allows you to reach out to customers through email, text messages, and more.
If you’re interested in getting set up with Loyalty, you can find out more here.
