Building member loyalty isn’t something that happens overnight. Even the brands you trust today were once nothing but small startups. Loyalty schemes require special attention and care to ensure that they will continue loving your products and services.
A satisfied customer is willing to pay a greater price. They would rather spend a higher price to ensure that they get the same level of quality and service. But, regardless of pricing or accessibility, how do well-known brands gain customer loyalty and keep them coming back?
To help answer that question, we’ll list some of the best member rewards that businesses can offer their customers. You can gain ideas for your own loyalty scheme by looking at these suggestions.
Discounts
You can get customers’ email addresses or phone numbers to send them the latest discount offers that may catch their eye. Offering discounts is one of the most popular customer loyalty programs out there.
This loyalty program will not only help you keep the old customers but also attract new consumers. This is an excellent approach to offering new product lines to your regular consumers and making it more convenient for them to try them out. Discounts are a good approach to convince people who haven’t bought from you in a while to reconsider visiting your shop.
Benefits of Offering Discounts
Here are some benefits of offering discount rewards to members:
1. Brings in New Customers
Discounts, as previously said, are incredibly appealing to customers and can bring in both new and returning customers. Discounting goods and services, especially those that are in high demand, is a good approach to attract attention. Word-of-mouth traffic can enormously boost returns on advertising, especially in the era of social media. Increasing traffic online or in-store is likely to result in increased sales for your company.
2. Creates a Good Rep
There are a variety of situations in which a company can offer a discount to improve its image. Customized discounts (such as seasonal or location-based discounts) can tremendously help a company’s reputation. For example, if a company offers discounts to seniors, military veterans, or cancer survivors, it exhibits sympathy and identifies itself with specific groups.
Points-Based Rewards
The most popular sort of rewards system is a point-based system. Customers can earn points that can be used for free purchases, rebates, and other benefits.
Purchases aren’t the only way for customers to earn points. They can also accumulate points for posting on social media, writing reviews, celebrating their birthday with your establishment, or participating in gamification.
Benefits of Point-Based Rewards
Points-based rewards are great for members because they are:
1. Easy to Maintain
First of all, it’s low-maintenance. It is run on a digital platform; everything is in one place, it’s easy on your end to manage the system.
2. Flexible
Second, it’s flexible. A business’s needs, goals, and strategies can change from time to time. Points-based systems give you the freedom to reward your customers as you see fit and encourage them to engage more than ever with your organization.
3. Helpful for Understanding Shopping Behavior
Because it’s a digital system and every point reward is carefully recorded, you can learn a lot about your customers, their historical patterns, and their shopping habits. It’s easily quantifiable. That will give you a clear picture of what customers want and by providing that, you will be able to drive their loyalty more than ever before.
Cashback
You can link your customers with retailers offering cashback so they can earn money back on their purchases. Simply put, instead of receiving a percentage discount on products and services, your users would get cashback as a fraction of their purchase from a number of businesses. They will pay the total amount as usual when they shop and receive a fraction of the money back.
Benefits of Offering Cashback
1. It’s Convenient & Clear
One of the downsides to using points-based reward systems is the lack of clarity. Both customers and employees sometimes complain that it’s somewhat complicated to figure out how the system works and how to earn rewards.
Also, when earning points, there is a possibility that the effort may not match the reward. For example, it may take you two months to reach 1000 points, only to find that those points are worth a $50 coupon to a retailer. Two months for a $50 reward is obviously not worth the effort.
2. It Shows Customers You Care
You’ll rarely come across a customer who can claim that the pandemic didn’t upset their lives, especially in financial terms. That’s why state and non-state institutions have been coming up with different packages and solutions to help people recover from these two years.
You can play a vital role here by offering cashback yourself and helping customers gain access to many retailers that offer cashback. It may not turn their life around, but it will show customers that you want to help them as much as you can. That is a sure-fire, honest way to boost customer loyalty.
In these tough times, nothing can help people like cutting down their expenses and opening up an additional revenue stream/saving channel.
3. It’s Cold, Hard Cash
If you go on Google and type “rewards to offer members” or “loyalty programs”, you will come across a list of +20 alternatives. There’s no doubt that all of them have merit, some tangible and some intangible. You could pick a customer of the month, form a loyalty club, and put them as a leading contender for a grand prize.
Again, all are great. But, the reality is that in today’s world, nothing catches people’s eyes more than cold, hard cash. By offering a cashback program, businesses can help members earn money back on every small or big purchase, giving them extra money to use on a rainy day. That will undoubtedly register shopping at that place/website as a positive experience in people’s minds, which will significantly improve their loyalty to the brand.
Optimal Solution
To offer cashback to your customers, you need to connect them with other businesses that provide such benefits. You will need to develop or acquire an API solution to do this. How? You have two options:
- Some businesses may opt for an in-house solution to save money. However, the reality is that they need to spend a significant portion of their budget on developing the infrastructure, training employees, and optimizing the solution. Plus, they have to spend a lot of time finding and connecting with other businesses that provide cashback offers.
- The alternative is to use a third-party “cashback engine”, an accredited API provider like Loyalize, to gain access to thousands of retailers. Here, you can integrate Loyalize’s API engine into your own user interface to show your customers a long list of other businesses and their respective cashback offers in a variety of categories.
In addition, the cashback API provider can continuously monitor, attribute and report on customer shopping behavior. Plus, companies no longer need to spend resources on building connections with retailers.
DO Get in Touch!
In an era where businesses are under immense pressure from other players in their industries, maximizing customer loyalty is vital to their survival and growth. That’s why we’ve seen such a spike in the quantity and types of customer loyalty programs.
Whether you’re offering discounts, cashback, or setting up a point-based system to keep your members coming back, you need to first know what they need and come up with a program that will hit the right spot. But, as you already know, people respond to few things as eagerly as to straight-up cash.
If you need help setting up your own cashback-powered loyalty program, we at Loyalize provide one of the best cashback API engines to connect you to more than 6,500 U.S. retailers. Just contact us for an exploratory meeting and we’ll show you what we’ve got.
