Loyalty programs, in a nutshell, reward customers for their continued patronage. They are essentially a way to incentivize customers to continue shopping with your brand in particular. However, with the right loyalty program marketing, you can also boost customer engagement, creating an all-around better experience for your customers.
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So, whether you are looking for a way to boost sales this summer when business is traditionally slow or you simply want to improve the customer experience year-round, boosting your loyalty program with the right marketing tools can help you out. And we’ve got the tips on how to do so below.
Loyalty Program Marketing Can Improve the Customer Experience
No matter what kind of business you run, your customers should always be one of your number one priorities. Without loyal, returning customers, you wouldn’t really have a successful business, so it’s important to show your customers how much you appreciate them.
Yes, your business might be the one giving customers what they need, but in return, they are also giving your business what it needs to continue growing — sales. As such, creating the best customer experience possible to ensure your customers know how much they mean to you is a must.
Generally, this is done by delivering superior customer service, which starts with understanding your customers, mapping their journey, and ensuring your employees are also happy so they can best address your customer’s needs. However, beyond customer service, incentive programs, like loyalty programs, are also essential.
Loyalty program marketing not only rewards your customers, but it rewards your business as well. It can save you money because marketing for retention is generally more affordable than marketing to bring in new customers. Loyal customers will also gladly spread the word about your business, which is like free marketing. Loyal customers tend to spend more money. And incentive programs can get more customers to sign up for your subscriber lists, which helps you stay in communication with them better.
How to Successfully Market Your Loyalty Program to Customers
Creating the best loyalty program is all about customer communication. Customers cannot experience the benefits of a great loyalty program if they are not aware of the incentives in the first place. Thus, it’s essential to use the right marketing tools to market, or communicate, your loyalty program to your customers.
Email Marketing
Email campaigns remain a very powerful tool for marketing today. It’s a great way to educate your customers on the value of your brand while also keeping them engaged between sales. And email marketing is particularly useful for keeping your customers in the know about sales, discounts, and, of course, loyalty rewards.
However, as email has been around for some time now, it’s important that you stay up to date with the latest email marketing trends. As most brands use email today, you want to make sure you are using the latest and most effective marketing tactics in your emails to keep your customers’ attention.
If you’re not sure how to do this, an online email marketing course can help. This will teach you and your employees the latest tips and trends to ensure your email and loyalty marketing programs are as effective as possible.
SMS Marketing
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a cell phone these days, and as such, SMS marketing is another ideal way to promote your loyalty program. SMS marketing, or text marketing, is simply a strategy that uses text messages to easily ping customers about things like offers, discounts, and rewards.
SMS marketing is also a great way to provide customer service to enhance the customer experience overall, such as by sending reminders and notifications about orders and shipping. There is so much you can do with text messaging as a form of marketing today, and keeping your customers in the know about your loyalty program is just one of them.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are a common form of marketing that works for just about any service, product, or offer. You can use push notifications to send transactional and promotional messages, such as sending a notification about order statuses or letting the customer know about promotions or loyalty rewards and how to sign up for them.
This form of marketing is achieved by sending pop-up messages to users’ devices, either through an app or a web browser. And the best part is that the app or website doesn’t have to currently be in use for the notification to appear, meaning push notifications are a quick way to easily get your customers’ attention. Users can then click on the pop-up, and it opens an app or browser, which takes them to the suggested action.
Conclusion
If you want to boost your loyalty program marketing, you must make the most of as many communication channels as possible. The more you communicate the program to your customers, the more they will know about it and the more they will use it. It’s all about using the right tools and boosting engagement with your customers as much as possible.
Blog Contribution: Amanda Winstead
