In order to build strong customer loyalty, you need to develop a loyalty program toolkit. The toolkit comprises of the following highly useful and effective enablers:
Customer Appreciation and Loyalty Building: Implement customer loyalty programs that inspire loyalty and praise from existing and prospective customers. Emphasize your valued clients by providing recognition rewards for their recommended referrals and good reviews. Inform employees about the importance of recommending good customer service to clients. These activities instill a sense of pride among employees who participate in these activities. Your loyalty program toolkit should have a dedicated call center that provides ongoing support and assistance to employees with newly implemented customer loyalty programs.
Branding: Brand loyalty program are an important part of most customer loyalty projects. You can build up a brand image by creating and sustaining a consistent and visible presence on the web and online social media networks. Use a number of high-quality and relevant content and videos to reinforce your brand. These strategies are particularly useful for medium to small businesses that lack the resources or manpower to create their own corporate identity. Your loyalty program toolkit should include branding techniques that are consistent throughout all communication channels.
Activity Cost Estimates: Conducting a customer loyalty program requires detailed planning and analysis. Your activity cost estimates will depend on the size of your target audience, frequency of use, and various competitive factors such as the provider’s pricing and reach. Your activity cost estimates should take into account any special arrangements that may be required for event-based campaigns. These include audience reach and seating areas.
Research and Development Labels: Your loyalty programs should provide a mechanism for measuring customer engagement. This includes a company website tracking tool and the delivery of customer engagement surveys. These tools will help you measure employee engagement, participation rates in reward programs, and engagement levels with third party vendors. Your loyalty program toolkit should also include information about third party engagement opportunities.
Marketing Strategy: Conducting customer loyalty programs requires comprehensive marketing strategy planning. The strength and impact of your program will be dependent upon the marketing strategy adopted. Your toolkit should include a marketing strategy that is realistic and effective. One strategy that is increasingly popular is embedding customer loyalty cards in email campaigns. This allows you to build up engagement levels more rapidly. Customer loyalty program tools can also integrate with social media marketing campaigns.
Step 2: Conducting a self-assessment: Before undertaking a loyalty program, it is important to conduct a self-assessment on your own business. This will help identify strengths and weaknesses, and determine whether the benefits offered by implementing the program would be worth the effort. For example, do you have the necessary staff, resources, and finances to support a program? Do you have the best methods for measuring customer engagement? Your self-assessment will serve as a guide to guide you through the entire loyalty project management process.
Step 3: Using the results of your self-assessment, talk to the CFO about your self-assessment results. Get detailed information about the customer service and retention levels, cost savings, and other aspects of your program. When using your self-assessment as a basis for building a proposal, remember to take into consideration any suggestions and comments made by your CFO. It is important to make the program as streamlined and profitable for your organization as possible.
Step 4: Creating a proposal: Now that you have assessed your needs, you need to create a proposal for the program. Your proposal should include the benefits, the time frame for which you intend to offer the loyalty discounts, and the pricing structure of the program. Include a statement about how you will keep these benefits and how you will obtain future lifetime updates. Your proposal should also include a list of the specific products and services that are covered in the loyalty discount. If you plan to use an IT service to manage your email campaigns, be sure to include that fact in your proposal as well.
Step 5: Review the proposal: When you receive feedback from your CFO, your next step is to review the proposal. Review the strengths of the proposal and the areas where you think there are weaknesses. Your loyalty program can benefit from some changes such as a more efficient email delivery method. The time frame for which you plan to offer discounts and the pricing structure should be adjusted to better fit with your revenue stream. If you find a significant weakness in the proposal, you should discuss it with your CFO.
Step 6: Negotiate and finalize: You can negotiate your pricing structure and other terms with your CFO over the phone or through other channels. You should develop a special price and guarantee program management plan (CPM). Developing a special loyalty strategy may also be a good option. The toolkit provides you with the technical and creative tools you need to leverage the power of loyalty programs. These program management tools will help you to automate your customer relationship management (CRM) process, thereby saving you valuable time and money.
