Create A Customer Loyalty Program

Is a Loyalty Program Right for Your Business?

Let's say a good customer at a B2B company buys much worth of products in a year.

At the same time, you spend more a year in marketing and business development activities that yield, on average, 10 new customers a year. Therefore, your average customer acquisition cost may be more than you spend.

If you have several existing customers who don't want to spend with you in a year, why invest more to finding a new customer? With a good customer loyalty program, you will most likely boost your sales to existing customers at a much lower cost.

A customer loyalty program is a rewards program offered by a company to customers who frequently make purchases. A loyalty program may give a customer free merchandise, rewards, coupons, or even advance released products.

Increase Loyalty Program Membership

1. Offer new customers an incentive at enrollment as a reward for joining up.
2. Don't ask for too much personal information. Only gather information you plan to use.
3. Omni-channel advertising is important. Spread the word about your loyalty program any way that you can.
4. Reward existing loyalty customers for sharing the word and interacting with your brand.

Study your current customers

A customer loyalty program is a structured and long-term marketing effort which provides incentives to repeat customers who demonstrate loyal buying behavior. Successful programs are designed to motivate customers in a business's target market to return often, make frequent purchases, and shun competitors..Here are some questions to ask about each customer:

1. How much does this customer buy in a year?
2. How long have they been a customer?
3. How long have they been a customer?
4. Can we sell them other products?
5. Do they use other suppliers, and, if so, who are they?
6. How much profit do we earn on their purchases?
7. How fast do they pay?
8. How satisfied are they with our company?
9. How could we improve our business relationship?

Prepare Your Customer Loyalty Program

Before launching a loyalty program, you need to assess your customers' current level of satisfaction through such techniques as surveys, interviews and monitoring customer comments.

Then, identify employees who are good at dealing with customers and who will be available to participate in the program. You will need to target customers who purchase frequently from you but could become more profitable, according to your analysis. If the purchase cycle is long (more than three years), this type of program is generally not recommended.

A customer loyalty program is a rewards program offered by a company to customers who frequently make purchases. A loyalty program may give a customer free merchandise, rewards, coupons, or even advance released products.

Set Goals, And Measure Them With a CRM

Set your goals for the program from the beginning. For example, if your customers purchase on average three times per year, set a goal of 3.3 times a year. This will increase your sales by 10% with few additional expenses. Use CRM software to manage this program. If you are looking for a low‑cost or free CRM solution, you may want to consider our list.

1. Goal. This gives you the actual figures, whether it is revenue or number of tickets sold.
2. Goal metric. This tells you how your goal figure is being measured (number versus dollar amount). There are some out of the box goal metrics for Revenue, No. of Product Units, and No. of Cases, but goal metrics can be created for anything you wish to measure.
3. Rollup field. The goal metric has rollup fields which are the definitions of how we want to calculate actual and estimated values of the goal being measured—in our case, estimated versus actual revenue and estimated versus the actual number of tickets sold.