Top Tips for Starting Customer Reward Programs

Developing strong customer retention strategies will help you succeed in any business, whatever it may be. You want your customers to keep coming back to you rather than going to your competitors, and better yet, you want them to advocate your business to their friends and family. Thus, fostering loyalty is imperative. One of the easiest and most efficient ways of doing this is through customer reward programs, such as the ones we offer at RewardCo. Here are our top tips for developing and implementing your own program:

• • Is it necessary?

    Decide whether you truly need a loyalty scheme. Reward programs will effectively aid customer retention in grocery stores and cafes but may not work so efficiently for businesses that don’t involve regular repeat customers, such as repair shops or mechanics. For the latter business type, frequent buyer type loyalty schemes will do little since customers return on a sporadic basis. In such instances it might be worth considering referral schemes in which both the referrer and the potential new client get a discount or reward of some sort. This will engender advocacy and encourage new custom.

• • What rewards will you offer?

    Consider what type of reward you want to offer, ensuring that it is suitable for your business type. Discounts are popular, as our “buy nine, get the tenth free” style loyalty cards. There are alternative types of customer reward programs though. Consider offering paid memberships that give customers a discount every time they make a purchase. Alternatively, implement a points per dollars spent style program having customers build points at each visit and allowing them to cash them in for products or services.

• • Communication

    Once you’ve decided on how your reward plan will work, you need to communicate your intentions. Customer reward programs have no chance to be successful if your customers don’t know what you are offering, so talk to them and advertise your scheme.

• • Keep up-to-date

    Keeping up with the latest technology trends and being flexible to new ideas will aid customer retention. Promote your reward program through social media and build a website to allow customers access information about the scheme online.

• • Analyse the results

    Customer retention strategies are useless if they aren’t actually helping you to retain customers and build profits. That’s why it is imperative that you analyse the results of the scheme, look at the data to see where your business could improve, and if the scheme is not working, change it.