A good loyalty program consists of much more than simply rewarding your customers’ repeat business. In many ways, the repeat business generated by customer rewards is only scratching the surface of the loyalty and retention benefits available with such a program. A recent article published by ITC Infotech details how businesses can include customer-centric processes in implementing their customer loyalty programs to improve their tactical marketing efforts and the overall customer experience:
Collect & Organize Data
Adopt a customer loyalty solution that allows not just the collection of data but its organization into smaller and usable modules which will help in the accurate assessment of actual ‘market’ and locate existing and emerging trends. Organized data can be extrapolated not only with information on prevailing economic scenario but also to competitive landscape to fine tune a loyalty program that is future-proof. It goes without saying that the more detailed loyalty data repositories are, resultant reports generated would be more pointed making loyalty offers more attractive to its members.
Profiling Customer Segments
Psycho-social profiling of customer segments is integral to the analysis of the health of a loyalty program. Besides demographic segmentation, your solution should allow you to pull up data that displays attitude, behavior, spending and customer satisfaction. This helps in ongoing fine-tuning of the loyalty strategy.
Integrating Loyalty with Organizational Goals
Once insights are obtained, it is important to align them to organizational goals thereby drawing out a winning, fit-for-purpose marketing loyalty program. By identifying target groups and actionable touch points, it is far easier for organizations to get higher returns on loyalty programs. Research shows that when it comes to loyalty programs, one size does not fit all as customers are promiscuous by nature and thus heterogeneous in their preferences.
Adopt Tailored Tactics
While generic marketing is about broadcasting, loyalty marketing is the practice of narrowcasting thus its tactics have to be tailored to the needs of specific customer segments. These tactics may be based on regions, gender, spend, membership to specific social class etc. Specific customer insights go a long way in sharpening visual merchandizing, planning campaigns & promotions and ensure that spend on any media returns more bang for the buck!
By using properly segmented data collected through your loyalty program, you can ensure your marketing efforts are targeting the right people with the right message at the right time. Your customers are more likely to respond to offers that were intended specifically for them, rather than offers broadcasted to every individual in your database. And when your customers are responding to your marketing efforts at higher rates, organizational goals – and overall success – will be more easily achieved.
What other customer-centric processes have you found to improve your tactical marketing effort?
What methods have you tried for tracking the overall efficacy of your marketing efforts? What didn’t work? What worked best?