Why a customer loyalty program is a must for your business

Customer Loyalty Programs 101

Sometimes a Customer Loyalty Program may seem like an insignificant slice of business pie.
After all, you are focussed on pushing sales and growth, right? And that means you have to concentrate solely on outreach, new advertising angles, and increasing your profit margin, doesn’t it?
Well, yes…and no.

Customer loyalty is key

Providing a great customer experience is a sure fire way to unlock customer loyalty and take your business down the yellow-brick-brand-loyal-road.
In order to keep driving growth and sales to ensure your business’s success, you need to knuckle down and invest in your existing customer base. And by invest, we don’t mean handing them discount vouchers when they set foot in your store or sending them personalised “Happy Holidays” emails.
By investing, we mean by taking a long hard look at your customer experience strategy and taking action to transform passive customers into upbeat and interactive loyal customers. And the best way to do this? Through a customised Customer Loyalty Program.

What does a Customer Loyalty Program actually do?

The short answer is that a Customer Loyalty Program will do just about everything.
Aside from providing a channel through which you can reward frequent or repeat shoppers for their engagement and support, a Customer Loyalty Program will help you unlock the secrets to your customers’ key demographics and buying habits. This will enable you to understand your target audience inside out and pave the way for exponential growth.
To explain further, we’ve broken things down into four main fields. These are the reasons how and why Customer Loyalty Programs are essential for Australian businesses in 2017.
Let’s take a look at them below:

1. Access to real-time, relevant analytics

In a Customer Loyalty Program, data about your customers’ purchases is automatically collected and analytically filtered. This means you won’t just get a list of the items they frequently purchase, you’ll have access to data that provides you with a sneak peek into their innermost buying habits (even the ones they’re not aware of).
With these relevant analytics, you’ll be able to see where they shop and when they shop, letting you combine this with other data to form detailed profiles of your ideal customers, down to their age and number of children. This enables you to target your ideal audience more effectively in both new and retargeting customer loyalty campaigns

2. Define your customer experience and your customer life cycle

Ever wonder how long it takes a customer to make a decision? What their main objections are? Or what points they consider before completing a purchase in your store?
You can’t glean this kind of valuable information from receipts alone. With a Customer Loyalty Program, this data is gathered via consumer surveys and analyses of shoppers’ engagement.
If you have access to vital facts such as these, you will be able to clearly grasp the length of your ideal customer’s life cycle and identify where the leaks are in your sales funnel. By doing so, you’ll be able to take swift action to modify certain parts of your sales process in order to prevent future customers from abandoning sales while they’re in the middle of the funnel.

3. Learn how customers prefer to engage

Gauging customers’ interactions with your business can be tricky. Customer buying habits aren’t always dictated by social cues, but rather by personal ones. These can range from external cues, such as life circumstances like, how much they have in the bank right now, or internal ones such as being stressed, or feeling tired at the end of a long day. Both interact and influence one another. But that’s okay because a Customer Loyalty Program give your business the power to assist customers with these everyday hassles.
A Customer Loyalty Program sidesteps that by setting up specific rules of engagement to gather information about customer interactions without needing them to be in-store, or in the process of a purchase.
For example, customers may collect points towards redeeming rewards by completing a survey, visiting a partner website, or offering feedback on a new advertisement. You’ll be able to see when a customer completes, or fails to complete these tasks. Then, you will be able to filter out and understand how your customers like to engage with your business, without the pressure of a purchase sitting on their shoulder.

4. Refine your communication channels

With so much rich data, it’s now time to put it to work. Use the information you collect through your Customer Loyalty Program while coming up with new, relevant creative and marketing campaigns.
You can use this data to host multiple customer loyalty campaigns through your program and continue to learn what your customers respond best to.
Refine your methods of communication and your brand’s messaging to encourage higher response rates to new loyalty campaigns. You will also be able to pinpoint which channels your customers interact with the most and create relevant, personalised advertisements that more easily catch the attention of, and engage, potential customers.

Take aways

It’s clear that if you wish for your business to succeed in the coming months and years, investing in a Customer Loyalty Program is perhaps the smartest decision you’ll ever make.
Talk to us today about getting a customised Customer Loyalty Program set up for your business.