3 Knock ‘em Dead, Sure-Fire Ways To K-O Your Customer Loyalty Program!
You want your customer loyalty program to be the talk of the industry, right? You want every blogger discussing what you did. After all, you want your 15 minutes of fame, and it’s a lot easier to get it when you’re piloting the Hindenburg than when you’re at the helm of a smoothly running business.
Follow these three tips, and you’ll create a customer loyalty program that gets everyone’s attention (just not in a positive fashion.):
1. Make sure it’s all smoke and mirrors. In today’s business climate everyone has to have a loyalty program, but that’s really as far as it goes. As long as your cashiers can ask, “Are you a member of our loyalty program” and you can put a “click here to join our loyalty program” icon on your website, you’ve got it covered.
The “run-of-the-mill” so-called successful loyalty program delivers value, but the real value is just in being able to say you have a loyalty program, right? Who can be bothered giving away all that free stuff. Let your competitors do that!
Save your money. It will come in handy if, for some reason, your customer base begins to shrink.
2. Take a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Hey, if it’s good enough for “Hat Day” at the ball park, it’s certainly good enough for your business. A guy just told me that this month the loyalty program at Panera was giving him a month of free coffee – one a day, all month long. Where do they get off?
It’s almost like they noticed that this guy habitually buys a cup of coffee virtually every time he dines at a Panera. The way I see it, the guy’s in a rut. Choose what you want to get rid of and make that your “reward.” That way your customers will get something they seldom buy and you’ll be helping your inventory situation at the same time.
It’s the classic “win-win.”
And if we want to get a little more technical here – And isn’t that what marketing guroos always want to do? – ignore your demographics and never bother to segment out your buyers. You have better things to do.
3. Make customers jump through hoops. Make it difficult to earn rewards and make it difficult to find the status of their rewards on your website. That way, if and when they do receive a reward, they will appreciate it that much more! This will show your customers that you’re always thinking about them! You know: give a man a fish…and all of that.
I know you can immediately recognize the wisdom in these three tips and once you have implemented all of them, they dramatically reduce the cost of your loyalty program, which, in our experience, partially offsets the loss of revenue!
How can you beat that?
Image: Public Domain CC0.