THe importance of loyalty rewards
Marketing ties into so many other aspects of your business including sales and branding. Ultimately, marketing should convert to sales while keeping your brand top of mind for your customers. Building that community of loyal customers is no easy feat and takes time. Loyalty rewards, especially after a tumultuous time, can help tremendously. What are loyalty rewards? A program or campaign designed to show appreciation to your most loyal customers through discounts and special offers. Something especially important to implement post-covid shutdowns.
COVID’S IMPACT
When the world shut down, businesses quickly realized who their most loyal customers were. Those customers, even if they couldn’t purchase to support, became their favorite businesses’ biggest advocates and promoted them as much as they could. Hopefully, you took note for the future as to who those customers were. Rewarding them now that things are returning to a more normal state of operations will pay you back tenfold.
Covid shutdowns also brought a new surge of customers who found businesses online. With everyone: a) online and b) searching for new things to keep them happy and busy, businesses saw new customers with eyes on them. Now is a great time to make these customers stickier by offering them incentives to stay around.
STICKINESS
Offering a loyalty program helps to ensure your customers are coming back to purchase over and over again. The goal is to build customers for life. It takes more time, energy, and money to go after new clients than to fish in your own pond of customers who already found your brand and love it. Rewarding customers for their loyalty builds community around your brand. With community comes connection, which makes it harder for customers to jump ship to a competitor or alternative.
FREE MARKETING
That’s right. Loyal customers are your own personal influencers that cost you nothing. Creating a sense of community and loyalty means customers will be your biggest promoters. Reward your promoters and you will see the impacts through free marketing from them and potentially sales conversions and new customers.
Speaking of new customers, there is a difference between getting a new customer from an ad you ran through Google or social media and a new customer through a referral. Referrals are stickier because people trust their friends more than an ad. New customers through referrals are the type of new customers you should be aiming for. Unfortunately, referrals don’t come easily. This is where a loyalty program can help immensely.
Have more questions about how to build a loyalty program that is unique to your business? Feel free to contact me and I’m happy to answer your questions. Want to audit your current program to see how to make it even better? Book a complimentary consultation with me and we can discuss partnering for the project.