Many big online and offline retailers use customer rewards to increase sales for their business. They are known as customer loyalty programs or customer reward point programs. These effective tools can be used in any marketing campaign. The main purpose of having this kind of program is to reward customers for making repeat purchases, it promotes loyal buying behavior.
The way that customer incentives work is a visitor to your online store makes a purchase and as a result earns reward points for either the total sum, the number of products or specific type of products purchased. Reward points will then be accumulated and used towards future purchases. You, the e-commerce business owner, can choose how the customer reward program works. You can set a threshold for amount of points necessary in order for customers to redeem their rewards. You can also designate what type of reward to provide, it can be discount for future purchases, free gifts or gift certificates.
Simply having a customer reward program is not enough, you must make sure that it is both simple to find and easy to use for your customers. It is important to display text or image links throughout your ecommerce website so customers are able to get the information they are looking for. Ideally, these links should be located in areas such as headers, footers and sidebars. This way no matter which page a visitor lands on, they will be able to get to the customer incentives page. The information you give your customers is critical as well, be clear and concise when giving them directions on how to redeem their reward. The worst thing for a customer is not having any idea on how to redeem their reward or getting unknown errors when completing an order. Go over all the little details and think in terms of a new customer, then make the necessary changes to your website.
An ecommerce solution that has customer reward capabilities should have the ability to do the following:
* Built-in reward points systems in the store admin
* be able to select what type of reward to give
* be able to convert points into gift certificates or gift cards
* be able to create you own rules for calculating reward points
* be able to set predefined criteria for redeeming rewards
There are many advantages for offering customer incentives on your ecommerce website. It is a powerful tool that not only helps acquire new customers but does an even better job retaining current customers. Recent studies indicate that it's a lot easier to market to current customers than it is to acquire new ones. In fact, it is 7 to 10 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to get an existing customer to buy from you again. On average repeat customers will spend 33% more than new customers and if they belong to a customer loyalty program, they spend 4 times as much money. There is plenty of reason to create your own customer reward program.
Since you are primarily targeting current customers, you need to first announce this new program to them. Be sure to include image and text links all over your site and if you have a mailing list, send an email out to everyone on that list. Remember to add details of the program in the checkout area. You can also use it as a promotional tool to acquire new customers. Useful tactics include rewarding existing customers for introducing their friends, starting contests where participants can earn rewards and giving away points to customers with good feedback that will help improve your site. Customer reward programs have the ability to become viral, especially if you use contests to entice people to join. Announce it to well known bloggers, post to related forums or encourage more people to follow you through your social media campaign. All of these tactics are used to promote your business, the customer incentives are used to get them to come back for more.
Now that you know why it is so important to have
customer retention programs, it's time to select a reliable e-commerce solution that has a built-in reward points program within your ecommerce website. It needs to be really easy to set up and very simple to manage. Most importantly, customers must be able to use it without any difficulties.
