To call customer loyalty important would be an understatement. Your customers keep you going. No customers, no business. And getting new customers is harder and more expensive than developing your existing customer base. So it makes a lot of sense to build customer loyalty by creating a customer loyalty program within your organization.

A loyalty program is your way of saying ‘Thank You” to your customers. Of course, it’s about revenue, but it’s also about gratitude. You’re grateful to your customers for their patronage. So let’s talk about some of the best customer loyalty program ideas we’ve seen in the retail industry.

Customer Loyalty Idea #1 – Use Personalized Emails

Have you ever sent your customers a ‘Happy Birthday’ email? You should – it’s a great way to tell your customers you care about them, far beyond just being a source of revenue. You could offer them a birthday discount in that month as well, or perhaps even customize pregnancy planning emails for new moms in their first year of motherhood.

Show your customers you care about them. There are a variety of email platforms that can help you customize birthday, pregnancy and special occasion email campaigns.

Customer Loyalty Idea #2 – Customer Loyalty Cards and Rewards Programs

Here’s one of the more obvious ways to create a customer loyalty program. We’ve all seen rewards cards from the supermarket and various coffee chains. You could create a customer rewards program of your own. You could do it with plastic cards if that’s within your budget; but you could also do it with punch cards, which are far cheaper to make and easy to set up.

You know the type. It’s the kind at your favourite local pizza shop, where you buy 10 slices of pizza and the eleventh one is free.

Experiment with loyalty cards and programs. They don’t have to be hard or expensive. It’s little things like this that can keep your customers coming back.

Customer Loyalty Idea #3 -Make Loyalty Easier For Your Customer

Is there anything more annoying than when you call a company and you’re asked to press 30 different buttons, only to be placed on hold for the next 15 minutes? What about going into a store that requires you to have your loyalty card present in order to get your loyalty discount?

Don’t be that business. Make it easy for your customers to get their rewards. For example, MyPOS Connect allows you to easily look up loyal customers by using a phone number or a name or any part of their address. Type anything into the POS system screen and MyPOS Connect’s multi-word search capability will find your customer quickly.

Customer Loyalty Idea #4 – Excel At Something

Every business has a story. It’s important for you to know yours, and to get it out there. For example, some companies are renowned for their lifetime guarantees – even if the current owner of the product or service was not the original buyer. For others, it’s their passion. And for others, it’s being at the edge of pop culture.

So what’s your story, and what do you excel at? With us, it’s our award-winning technical support. For you, it may be something else.

Here’s our point: find your strength and promote it. You know you’ve arrived when customers return to your business for that very reason.

Customer Loyalty Idea #5 – Ask For Customer Feedback

You should never, ever, ignore customer feedback. It’s not a coincidence that businesses with a large number of Google reviews tend to show up earlier in local business search results. Good reviews start with good service. If you’re proud of the service your business provides (and if you’re not, that needs to change), ask your customers to review your business! You can incentivize them with discounts if you like. But you could also simply ask your customers to review your business in your email campaigns after making a certain amount of purchases.

Pay attention to what your reviewers are saying, too. If they’re complimentary, keep up the great work! If they’re not, listen to them.

Feedback is exactly that – it’s feedback. It’s an effective way to learn what you’re doing right and where to improve.

Reach Out to Tri-City Retail To Help Grow Your Business

Customer loyalty is an ongoing target. It’s something you build into your business, starting with your main ‘customer touch points’: whether that’s you or your staff at the Point of Sale, or anywhere else in your store that your customers engage with your team.

We’ve seen a lot of success with customer loyalty programs through integration with our point of sale system in the past 25 years, and we’ve seen a few failures too. So do it right and start today. Make customer loyalty a priority for your company, and remember, you can always reach out to us here at Tri-City Retail for convenient and effective ways to grow your business.

25 years ago, we started Tri-City Retail Systems by selling and installing cash register systems in our own local area.

After two and a half decades, we’ve deployed Point of Sale system solutions for over 1,000 retail companies across North America.

So we’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you! Thank you, to our amazing team of POS technology experts who have relentlessly worked to help our customers succeed. Thank you, to our suppliers and our many technology partners who have enabled us to continually evolve in an ever-evolving industry. But most of all, we’d like to say thank you to our loyal customers, both large and small, without whom we would not exist. You have pushed us to be better.

Your suggestions and feedback over the years have helped us to develop what the retail industry views as one of the best retail point of sale product and service offerings available. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts; and here’s to another 25 years of success for us all!

Tri-City Retail Systems is proud to announce that we have been named in the FrontRunners 2020 edition of the Software Advice Buyers Guide.

Industry-leading business software advocate and research platform, Software Advice, has just named MyPOS Connect as a leading Retail POS System in their 2020 buyer’s guide report. MyPOS Connect showed up in the #1 position for Customer Satisfaction and we are especially proud of that designation.

In the chart below, the ideal positions are toward the upper right quadrant, which highlights the industry leaders in Customer Satisfaction and Software Usability.

In order to be included for consideration in the above chart, there are a series of requirements that each software product must meet. Each axis is based on a cumulative score, as outlined below:

• Customer Satisfaction is based on end-user ratings and feedback provided to Software Advice
  • 25% – Value for Money
  • 25% – Likelihood to Recommend
  • 50% – Customer Support
• Usability is based on user feedback from a 24-month analysis period.
  • 50% – Functionality
  • 50% – Ease-of-Use

Software Advice is the leading online service for businesses navigating the software selection process. Advisors provide free, personalized software recommendations, helping companies of all sizes find products that meet their business needs. Software Advice also features objective research by industry experts and reviews from validated users, saving buyers time and resources.

Software Advice is a division of the Gartner Group, a giant in the enterprise customer experience management software research market. Gartner also provides software selection and consulting advice for all types of business systems.

Read the complete report here: https://www.softwareadvice.com/retail/#buyers-guide

Learn more about Software Advice here: https://www.softwareadvice.com/

FrontRunners constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Software Advice or its affiliates.

 

 

Our recent article on maximizing your email campaigns provided some tips and tricks for creating email lists. Once you’ve built a top-notch list of email addresses, you’re ready to start creating email campaigns. To help give you a few ideas, we’ve compiled a list of tips for creating successful email campaigns.

1. Use responsive design

Campaign Monitor notes that 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices. This means that if your emails don’t look good on a mobile device, you’re starting at a disadvantage. Responsive design is the best way to ensure that your emails adjust to the device’s screen size on which it is opened. If you’re looking for a simple way to create responsive campaigns, email marketing platforms like SendInBlue and Constant Contact offer this functionality right out of the box.

2. Keep your subject lines short

SendGrid’s Study analyzing the engagement rates of email subject lines revealed a definitive answer: keep your subject line short. Three-word subject lines have been shown to be ideal, increasing engagement by 25% when compared to the most common subject line length (seven words). Once you’ve hit fifteen characters, each additional character decreases your engagement rate by an average of 0.03%.

3. Keep your emails concise

Your readers are often checking their emails in the middle of a busy day. If you don’t get your point across quickly, you may lose their attention to another task. Lyfe Marketing helps businesses increase the success of their email marketing by keeping email content to a few sentences. If more information needs to be conveyed, they encourage the use of bullet points.

4. Create a clear Call-To-Action

Determine exactly what you want your customers to do after reading your email, and make it easy for customers to do it. Campaign Monitor suggests using a prominent button for the job. Increased size, a unique colour (different from the background and other text colours), and whitespace around the button all lead to increased click-through. Also consider personalizing your Call-To-Action, as it is linked with dramatically increased click-through rates. In a study of 330,000 Calls to Action, Jerry Vocell of Hubspot found that personalized Calls To Action got more than double the click-through rate of CTAs that were generalized.

5. Personalize your Emails

Remember how we talked about segmenting your email list in part 1 of this series? Now you can start to reap the benefits of that extra effort by enjoying higher read and click-through rates for your email campaigns.

Rather than sending the same email to every customer, personalize your email content by promoting information to specific categories of customers. For example, if you sell men’s and lady’s wear, you might send an email about a new dress line to your female customers; whereas an email campaign introducing a new line of men’s jeans will have more impact if they are sent only to your male customers.

In a world saturated with email marketing, personalized emails will help your business capture your reader’s attention. Experian, a global provider of consumer insights and targeting data, found that personalized promotional emails have a 29 percent higher open rate and 41 percent higher click-through rate.  It may seem like more work to segment your contact list, but there’s a lot of proof that it’s worth the effort.

Another note on personalizing emails: most email marketing platforms charge based on the total number of emails sent during a period of time (usually a month). If you have a large list of email addresses, then it makes good financial sense to personalize emails. Why pay for emails being sent to people who will never read them?

6. Stay out of the spam filter

There’s nothing worse than investing your resources into building a contact list and creating stunning email campaigns only to have them sent straight to the junk folder. Ensure that you are sending emails from a recognizable email address, emailing only people who have given you their permission, and you stay away from spam trigger words. If you’re still unsure whether or not your emails seem spammy, try out an email testing tool to test campaigns for spam triggers before you hit send.

 

Creating impactful email campaigns is not an exact science. But if you keep working at it, after a while, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully, some of these tips will help you come up with powerful email campaigns, and Calls to Action, that engage your customers and keep them coming back again and again.