: customer loyalty programs

It's very important to your bottom line to keep valuable customers. Loyalty programs can be a valuable and inexpensive means of making customers feel special, increase their purchases and recommend your company to friends and associates.

For many firms, 20% of their customers provide 80% of their profits. (In community banks, it is not unusual for 80% of the deposits to come from 7-½% of their customers.)   So, losing a customer can have very negative effects on the bottom line and upon survival.

Customer loyalty programs allow companies to collect data about their customers. This data can be used to better understand, target, market to, and communicate with customers or to customize future interactions with customers.  

Loyalty Programs 101

Sometimes a loyalty program is as simple as the "frequent customer card."  You stamp the card each time the customer buys a service. That works fine - provided the customer doesn't lose the card.

Most often, a loyalty program needs to be more complex.   It needs to consider that there are different kinds of customers who have different ways they want to be rewarded. The loyalty program needs a simple and accurate way to keep track of "loyal" behavior.

Finally, the customer needs a convenient way to trigger the award process: a swipe card on his key ring, for example.   Even better: the customer's reward qualification points are tracked automatically, like frequent flyer miles.

What Apple can do to make your program a success

(1) We'll provide basic customer research to help you create a program that is highly desirable to key customers.   (2) We'll help you prepare a simple tracking system, delivered on the Internet where your customers can track it -- of course, you may prefer to have a more simple spread-sheet tracking system and that's fine with us. (3) Design a great ad program, aimed at your customer - and prospect - base to generate high levels of involvement in your program.

 

How we helped one international non-profit organization not only to keep its existing customers, but also to grow its customer base.