How to Start a Loyalty Program

Did you know that starting a loyalty rewards program is one of the easiest ways to grow your sales?

Loyalty programs are an effective way to engage your customers, increase visits, increase ticket amounts, and create brand advocates.

From our previous blogs, we’ve already covered why small businesses should consider loyalty programs and when loyalty is right for you. Now that you’re excited about building stronger relationships with your customers and boosting your revenue, you’re probably wondering how to start a rewards program.

How to Start a Loyalty Program:

1. Get your business started with a loyalty program

Starting a loyalty program can be quick and simple. With Paystone, you can launch your own program for $50 per month and have everything you need to start signing up members within 10 business days. You’ll have customized loyalty cards (and digital cards for mobile wallets), and you’ll get access to a dashboard with all your important metrics and customer data.

Before launching your program, there are a few things to consider to ensure that it aligns with your business objectives and that you get the best return on your investment.

For example, if you want customers to spend more, you could consider rewarding loyalty members with exclusive promotions for tiered spends. If you want to grow your reach and create brand advocates, give customers bonus rewards points for actions like sharing, liking, and following your social posts and accounts. If you want to increase the frequency of visits, try enticing members with limited-time offers.

2. Train your team to promote your rewards program

In order for your loyalty program to be successful, you’ll need to make sure your team is trained to promote it and effectively communicate its value to customers. Your team should be familiar with the registration process and able to tell customers what kind of perks they can expect.

For example:

“Would you like to provide an email and phone number to sign up for our loyalty program? Loyalty members receive 10% off, exclusive offers, and birthday perks.”

A phrase like this communicates that the sign-up process is quick, what information the customer needs to provide, and most importantly the value of signing up.

Aside from promoting your loyalty program during check-out, make sure your team asks customers to scan their loyalty cards during their subsequent visits. If your staff aren't scanning loyalty cards, your customers miss out on offers and points and you won't be able to gain insights on their buying behaviour and purchase data.

3. Learn to use your dashboard

Once you have a healthy loyalty member base, you’ll want to ensure that you’re using the insights provided by your loyalty program and optimizing for the best return on investment.

Start by exploring your loyalty program dashboard and understanding basic metrics. In your dashboard, you should be able to find data including:

• Number of loyalty members
• Average purchase amount for loyalty members
• Data by location
• Time between point accumulations
• Total point balances
• Member spending by segment
• Total number of visits
• Last member activity

4. Re-engage your customers and watch your revenue grow

Once you’ve looked at your customer data, you’ll be able to see which promotions are most effective and optimize around the ones that work.

For example, if a loyalty member hasn’t visited for 3 weeks, you can automatically send them an offer to entice them to return to your store or engage with you on social media. If you automate your promotions and encourage your customers to return and spend more, you’ll grow the customer lifetime value for your loyalty members, which can greatly increase your cash flow and revenue.

Loyalty members are more likely to recommend a business to friends and family, so creating and cultivating a loyalty program will also help you to bring new customers, making it a worthy investment for any business.

Learn more about the benefit of loyalty programs.