How To Incentivise Customer Loyalty

Loyalty is an essential component of any customer-centric business, but it’s one that so many companies overlook. They spend so much time focusing on customer acquisitions and short-term gains and they fail to see the bigger picture, which is that a loyal and dedicated customer is often worth more than a dozen new ones.

Creating a quality loyalty program requires significant, human and financial, resources, and with all this, there is no guarantee that they will achieve their goal of attracting new and retaining old customers. Investing in loyalty programs we can justify it by creating a database that allows easy access to information needed for segmentation, research, and eventual conquest markets. Also through databases, the retailer can conclude in which direction should expand its range, whether to change the concept of the store, facilitate category management and even accurately predict changes to the market.

If you’re struggling to get a grip on customer loyalty, take a look at these top tips.

1. Reward Regular Spending

The online casino industry often nails the loyalty side of things, and some of the best loyalty schemes can be found on bingo sites, casinos, and poker rooms, you can find a great many deals such as free spins and deposit related offers on this page.

Typically, they invite all players to join a loyalty scheme and give them points every time they wager. Once they have earned a certain number of points, they can unlock prizes or swap them for bonus credits.

The credits can then be used on the site’s games.

In the grand scheme of things, the site is giving away a very small amount, but it’s enough to encourage the players to spend more, which means the site earns more.

2. Encourage Them to Meet a Goal

Coffee shops and fast-food restaurants often encourage customers to buy more food and beverages by offering them a free meal or a free cup of coffee when they purchase half a dozen similar items. The idea is that the customer is encouraged to buy more so they can meet that goal, but it’s a pretty half-hearted offer.

The only people collecting those tokens and trying for that goal are the ones who were going to buy it anyway.

Customers should be encouraged to spend more so they can achieve a certain goal, but it needs to be a more rewarding and aspirational prize, even if it means moving the finishing line and turning a sprint into a marathon.

After all, would you rather get a free coffee after you’ve bought a few coffees or get a personalized flask after buying 100? The former is forgettable, the latter is aspirational.

3. Meet customers expectations with product quality

Not only the number of customers you have had so far speaks of a successful business, but the number of regular customers speaks even more about it. In other words, people come back to your store or webshop because they recognized the quality, which leads us to the next tip.

4. Give the customer a reason to come back again

The job is not done when you attract a customer. On the contrary, you now have a more difficult task – to keep it.

For the first purchase, give the customer a discount coupon for the next purchase or just contact him later to thank him for the purchase and say that you are at his disposal for any questions.

Take care of the packaging in which you send the product, and make up for the lack of physical contact from the store with a handwritten thank you message.

These little signs of attention can do a lot in keeping the customer loyal, and at the same time prevent customers from feeling guilty because they spent money on your product.

5. Show Your Appreciation

A little appreciation goes a long way.

When a customer returns time and time again to make a purchase, send them a message to show your appreciation and reward them for their efforts.

The best rewards are the ones that have an actual value and were completely unprompted and unexpected. “Buy five of these and we’ll give you one free” doesn’t hit as hard as “here’s an unexpected gift to thank you for your continued support”.

The more value it has, the more appreciated it will be, but the thought counts for a lot, as well. A birthday card, a personalized email, a discount code—it’s about connecting with the customer and showing that you care.

Summary: Focus on the Bigger Picture

Many companies argue that loyalty schemes are just a waste of money, but that’s not the case.

Not only do these schemes encourage more customers to stick around for the long haul, but they generate much more than they spend.

Think about all of the money that you spend to acquire new customers, only to lose them after a purchase or two. If you invest a little more in keeping them, you can greatly increase lifetime value, and that’s ultimately the end goal.

Customer loyalty is a complex concept that cannot be categorically stated quantify because loyalty is also related to the subjective experience of customers. The only way to measure loyalty would be to calculate the extra “effort” that is a customer willing to invest to shop in a particular store.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy focused on customers and building a long-term relationship with them by providing them with added value. Strategic CRM is a business philosophy and customer-oriented strategy at the entire level of organizations to establish competitive advantages, and its main components are customer orientation, integration, and harmonization of business processes, information gathering, and technology harmonization.

Business organizations can use a variety of promotional tools to achieve the appropriate marketing goals, and loyalty programs are among the most popular marketing strategies in retail. The purpose and goal of implementing a loyalty program in business are to create a long-term and profitable relationship between retailer and buyer and increase earnings by repeated sales to existing customers or by attracting new customers. Creation Consumer loyalty should be the primary goal of any business organization that wants to maintain its own business success because only loyal consumers are the ones who repeat and increase the volume of their purchases, make the best promotion by recommending to others, and stay loyal to the retailer despite the efforts of the competition.