Four tips for loyalty program best practices

When people think of retail loyalty programs, they often think of old stamp cards lying somewhere at the bottom of their wallet. Thankfully, that’s in the past (for the most part).

To launch a successful retail loyalty program, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how your loyalty program fits into your customer journey.

As for the retail, gift and loyalty cards that are required for your retail loyalty program, Cards Plus is a local PVC card manufacturer which offers various flexible printing options for retail, gift and loyalty cards.

Cards Plus is able to offer several additional features of a plastic card including: Hot foiling, which is the ‘bling to your card’ with a range of foil colours. UV Print – unique florescent ink, which is only visible under UV lights. Magnetic stripe & Encoding – available in HiCo or LoCo and has up to three tracks to encode your data, as well as many other features.

1. Make it easy to use

If you want people to see your loyalty program as something that is of a benefit to them and something that will make their life better, you need to ensure it is easy to use and simple to understand.

Your customers should be able to earn loyalty points both online and in-store. Your marketing campaigns, should be thought out and carefully put together to ensure you are targeting the right consumer through the right channel in order to get as many customers as possible making use of your loyalty programme.

2. Make redeeming points at checkout easy for your customers

Your customers do not want anything that is too complicated or takes long for them to achieve what they want. Ensure that the sign up process is hassle-free and can be completed within a minute or two. You do not want your customers to have to insert their whole bio of information – keep it short and to the point.

3. Use email and SMS messages to engage with your customers

The key to engaging with your customers is to ensure your communication is timely and responsive. There is no point spending money on getting retail, gift and loyalty cards manufactured if you are not going to correctly manage your loyalty program and continue to engage with your customers. The real challenge, however, is getting customers to actually see these offers.

The most successful retail loyalty programs use both emails and SMS messages to send offers to customers, which maximizes the probability that the offer is seen. With your messages more likely to be seen, you can feel more confident the offer results in a sale. While it’s a

necessary element to any loyalty campaign, you shouldn’t rely exclusively on emails to send relevant offers to customers.

4. Personalize your promotions

To build long-lasting relationships with customers (and increase their lifetime value), you have to consistently show them that your business has what they need.

Rather than offering generic rewards, use your customer data and offer personalized promotions that matter to the customer.

If a customer typically purchases new items at full-price, consider adding them to a customer group that will be targeted with emails promoting products that are new in-store. Those customers probably value being the first to buy a new item rather than older items.

Grow your business with a loyalty programme

Investing in your customers is not just great for your brand image, but also your bottom line.

Your existing customers can be worth up to ten times more than their original purchase, and that’s where a loyalty program really shines.

Contact Cards Plus for more information on Retail Gift and Loyalty Cards.