Friday, March 29

7 Tactics to Increase Sales with a B2C Loyalty Program

Every business survives off a strong customer base. In the way that a customer needs your products to achieve their goals, likewise, you need them just as much to grow in your business. Building customer relations is a crucial part of any business. Providing good service in a personalised manner helps build a relationship with your client. Maintaining good relations with your clients will help you in the long run. A business can get its customer’s loyalty and trust by giving them useful incentives and giving due recognition to their efforts.

A loyalty program strategy is useful when you are trying to gain the customer’s loyalty towards your company. It is basically like a plan where you give your clients some sort of incentive or rewards for purchasing your products and services on a regular basis. This kind of program makes your clients want to come back to you and in turn generate more business for you. Loyalty programs will help you not only to win over the loyalty of your customers but also help build a solid relationship with them.

If your company is suddenly seeing a downfall in sales or has been struggling to increase the level of sales for some time now, you could make good use of a loyalty program strategy to attract those potential customers your way. If you want to increase your sales volume in the current period, you should choose the B2C channel, because the sales cycle is shorter and it has more scope for higher sales. In B2C sales, the customer is not thinking about the purchase as seriously or has not planned a big purchase, so they may end buying on impulse when given certain rewards for it, thereby increasing your sales.

Here are 7 tactics you can use to increase sales using a B2C loyalty program:

  • Create A Basic System.

A good loyalty program is one that the customer can understand and use easily. Something as basic as a points system will make it easy for the customer to feel motivated to buy things when they see the points collected in their account. Create a system where ‘x’ points are collected when ‘y’ amount is spent and can be redeemed on items worth ‘z’ points. Having an expiry date on the points will encourage customers to buy things and use those points so that they don’t lapse. This will result in higher sales.

  • Charge membership fees.

 A loyalty program where the customer can pay a nominal fee to enjoy some added benefits can turn out to be used in retaining the customer. Services like amazon prime or Sephora beauty insider programs charge their customers a nominal annual fee and provide services like early access to sales, free delivery, access to streaming services, etc. This builds a sense of belonging in the customer, thereby gaining their loyalty. Once they are your loyal customers you can expect a more or less steady cash inflow from them.

  • Collaborate with other brands.

Working with another brand having a goodwill in the market is a great tactic to expand your customer base and gain their trust. Once they use your services and are satisfied with it, you can gain their loyalty and expect more sales. For example, an e-commerce company can work in collaboration with a credit card company to offer a loyalty program that directly links the points collected to their credit card, making the points easily usable anywhere else as well. This way, the e-commerce website gets more customers through the collaboration and may see a spike in sales due to this.

  • Design a progressive loyalty program

Having a program where the customer can be placed in tiers based on their spending will help curate a personalised program that will cater to the customer’s requirements. A higher tier suggests a greater spending habit, so the company can target these customers to increase their sales. Each tier may have different benefits which can stimulate customers to shop more to progress to the next tier to get those benefits, thereby increasing sales.

  • Make your program interesting

You can experiment with the way you want your loyalty program to be like and make it really interesting for your customers. You can lay out your loyalty program benefits in such a way that the customer is intrigued and wants to play chase to get the benefits offered, just like a board game. If the benefits are laid out like a game, it is fun for the customer to play so they’ll end up spending their money on your products, thereby generating regular sales for your company.

  • Allow customers to try it out for free.

Just like streaming services allow a free trial for a month before you have to start paying for the service, in the same way, you can allow your, customers, to try out your loyalty program for some time and enjoy the benefits for free. Once they have experienced the benefits without having to pay anything, they will be more willing to buy from you the next time. This gives the customer a sense of being cared for, making it more likely for them to shop from you, thereby generating sales for your company.

  • Keep a long term relationship in mind.

The purpose of a loyalty program is to retain the customer for a long time. When framing a loyalty program, design it bearing in mind that to build loyalty you need to retain the customer for the long run. To do so, you should offer incentives to your customers for not just buying your products but for other actions as well, like referring your products and services and sharing your products with their network. This will encourage customers to participate in activities that may eventually lead to making a sale. Showing that you care about the customer will help gain their trust and loyalty and you will be able to retain them in your business for a long time.

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