Customer loyalty is essential in increasing profits, improvement of sales, and ensuring sustainable growth. The success of your business is not just highlighted by the new customers you attract, but also by the existing customers you can keep. To ensure customer loyalty, you must build an effective customer reward program. These programs are beneficial in retaining current customers, get new customers onboard, minimize turnover and improve your profit.
Recently, there was research in the UK that stated that 60% of adults encourage the offers of custom rewards programs. Furthermore, 60% of internet users consider ‘earning rewards’ as one of the most important attributes of a retail shopping experience.
Usually, a repeated customer spends 67% more in the months 31-36 than they do in months 0-6. Around 95% of the organizations claim that their loyal members invest more annually than their non-members. Also, almost half of the people admit that this is true about themselves.
Why are Customer Loyalty Programs Important?
The best loyalty programs always provide relief to their customers. They are a tremendous asset to the customers during their shopping experience and are something that they look forward to integrating further into their lives.
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Unfortunately, only 18% of online businesses prioritize customer retention. Most of the customers want the companies to identify innovative ways to promote customer reward initiatives for them. More importantly, customer loyalty is not the only thing they should pay attention to. We will share five reasons for that:
1. Builds an Emotional Connection
A healthy customer reward program improves business sales and increases customer lifetime value. If we look at the most basic level, it is derived via incentives. However, there are much deeper things associated with these reward programs, as the emotional connection provided by loyalty programs can hold great benefits.
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A loyalty program will build an emotional connection via repeat behavior. However, you can improve on it by having a creative approach to your loyalty offers. Being a caretaker of third-party promotions (going to the restaurants, hotels, theaters) will enable you to create a community and an exciting perception. This positive perception will emotionally incline your customers to your brand. If you can have a customization panel at your disposal, the impact will be even bigger.
As an example, Strikingly provides Membership features that enable customers to look into the birthday rewards, latest products, event invitations, and content surrounding the reward programs. Our panel provides successful tips and tricks for you to embrace the reward programs and make them part of your website experience. If you want to learn more about the reward programs or the features associated with them, check out our website.
2. Repetitive Customers Have a High ROI
On average, it takes five times the investment to get a customer than to keep one. The current customers are 50% more likely to look for a new product and invest 31% more money on buying as compared to the new customers. Even though marketing demands you to gain new customers for the growth of your business, retaining customers is vital to the long-term value of your business.
If you cannot keep customers, you will just continuously replace them for your business startups. Encouraging customer loyalty via a customer reward program will enable you to ignore high churn rates and look forward to high-value customers. It is also a cost-effective strategy for improving business sales.
If you look into the best loyalty programs, they grant lesser resources to the traditional advertising efforts and invest more time in creating long-term relationships with the current customers. It is all about managing both sides of things. It may also enable you to get new customers, which brings us to the next point.
3. Makes You Get New Customers
Satisfied customers are one of the most important assets of your business. In the period of online eCommerce websites, positive and professional language and tone are essential to attract new customers. Moreover, 83% of the customers believe more in personal recommendations than in any other marketing form.
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With an exciting customer reward program, you can encourage referrals and customer rewards for your new shoppers. There is huge evidence that suggests that referred customers are more loyal, keener to invest, and have minimal churn rates regarding your brand as compared to non-referred customers.
Even though the customer purchase has usually been costly, the best custom rewards programs and advocacy systems will enable you to expand your customer base. You can follow this strategy at a very cheap rate.
Your customer reward program can also be a formidable selling point, especially in a saturated marketplace. If you cannot move your price or other crucial factors, you can gain an exquisite advantage with your loyalty offerings. You must keep in mind that people invest to use credit cards.
4. Loyalty Programs Bring Customer Insights
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A customer reward program is established to bring maximum customer rewards and benefits to your brand. If you digitize your loyalty initiative, it means that you can look into the current data about how different customers interact with your program and brand. Visualizing all these details will enable you to develop effective productivity strategies for improving your reward program and your brand.
Rewards programs become double as a form of an adequate marketing study. Digital functions enable you to study many incentives, highlight the customer rewards that appeal to certain sections of the customers, and look into those rewards that are not as engaging. Rewards programs also enable you to visualize the customer buying habits appropriately.
You can associate a specific sale to a certain type of customer section, which will help you create helpful customer profiles and understand the variations within the target market that might otherwise go under the radar. Afterward, you can integrate this information into your customer reward program and formidable brand decisions to have a better chance of interacting with the customers on an individual level.
5. Never Easy to Build a Good Customer Program
If your objective is to build a loyalty points system by accessing more than just the physical loyalty cards, you may find it difficult when you start the process. Even though 70% of the custom rewards programs still provide physical cards, 70% of the members check the customer rewards via an app. If you want the prioritization of new shoppers, and look into the numerous benefits it is associated with, a technologically enabled smart retail solution could be the way to go forward.
Luckily, the lack of experience will not stop you from achieving your goals for a customer reward program. The increasing popularity of the loyalty programs is corresponding with the increase in loyalty marketing specialists. These agencies provide considerable solutions, create customized loyalty programs and applications, optimize backend analytics, and enable you to get to the right strategic decisions.
Loyalty marketing specialists may bring you rewards even beyond your brand. They ensure these benefits by developing a loyalty program that ensures a strong ROI. At the end of the day, fulfilling the customer’s needs comes from having an effective partnership.
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The best loyalty market partnerships will not just make it easier for you to integrate an operating system, you will be able to visualize the innovative technological advancements and deliver creative solutions. For example, three customers out of four are more likely to purchase from brands that are creating more recommendations depending on purchase history or interacting with customers by name.
Geological targeting is another innovative marketing tool that a solid technical foundation for your reward program will allow you to deliver. According to the reports, 72% of the users look into an exciting Call to Action (CTA) when they go past the physical storefront. By managing geofencing and internet proximity, your device application will call upon a vast range of third-party partners to offer push notifications to the members. This strategy will enable your customers to have an exciting and valued experience.
It could be that having the correct partner for your customer reward program will help you choose from the best promotional partners. Moreover, that partner will help you in developing a certain portfolio of loyalty offerings to please your customers and create an emotional connection with them.
Conclusion
An excellent customer reward program can be an effective strategy for improving your customer engagement strategy. Customers can profit from heavy discounts and offerings that suit their demands. Moreover, your brand takes advantage of lower churn rates, more organic purchases, and a better source of income.
Strikingly is an excellent operating platform that provides exquisite sales techniques for its customers. We are fully aware of the difference in investment in attracting new customers and keeping the existing ones. Therefore, we create effective content for them. The precision and accuracy of our content enable us to convert our current customers into repetitive buyers. Make sure that you look into our membership feature and Simple Store coupons, which will enable you to open your campaign for driving customers back to your online shop.
