The world is digital - here is why your loyalty program should be too

“The true purpose of a business is to create and keep customers." - Peter Drucker

It sounds simple, but how can businesses ensure that customers return? It is clear that you need to offer a fantastic service, however, with switching costs lower than ever and competitors vying for your profit margin, your customers want to feel rewarded for their repeat custom.

However, with tech-savvy and environmentally conscious customers demanding more, it’s no longer acceptable to have a paper loyalty program in 2021 - especially with the advent of affordable and easy-to-setup digital loyalty programs.

Still not sold? Keep reading…

1. Know your customer

Most retailers can only see the behaviour of their customers in-store. These in-store observations offer limited insight into how your consumers think and behave and their overall decision-making process. As a business owner, you want to acquire information on how they want their shopping experience to be enhanced or different. With your back-office dashboard, you can avail of valuable customer insights, including:

- Your top customers

- Customer demographics and visit frequency

- Customer feedback

This allows you to tailor your product or service to your actual customers (not just those who like your Facebook page) which can help boost sales.

2. Increased membership and reduced costs

How many times have you or your staff heard customers ask, “I have lost my loyalty card, can I have a replacement?”

Modern loyalty programs help businesses identify their most valuable customers and enhance the efficiency of marketing communications.

Yet, many businesses are still using the outdated method of paper loyalty cards, which are bulky and take up space. Often, customers forget to use their physical loyalty cards, or cannot spare room in their overflowing wallets or purses as there are so many. Even more frustrating, physical cards cannot be used when shopping online. This results in missed opportunities to create and keep loyal customers.

Our app is built for convenience for you and your customers. One app encompasses multiple loyalty cards, and no physical card is needed to reward customers - in fact, all your customer needs is to pay with their bank card and we automatically reward them for spending with you. This offers the ultimate convenience for your customers and saves your employees time as well (time is money!). As a result, your customers are delighted and your staff can spend more time focusing on other, profit-generating tasks besides stamping and replacing paper cards - it’s a win-win.

3. Environmental benefits

The environmental impact of your business cannot be overlooked, and taking steps to reduce this can begin today… Abandon your paper loyalty card and become digital!

Research shows that SMEs underestimate their contribution to the environmental agenda, even though they are responsible for 70% of pollution worldwide. This can affect your brand’s reputation, as sustainability and transparency have a strong influence on customer loyalty, especially among consumers within the Millennial and Generation Z category.

Brands must consider, alongside their loyalty program, ethical or environmentally-friendly efforts as part of their ethos to attract and retain customers. 60% of consumers who have loyalty to a brand, state that social responsibility is a key reason for their continued loyalty.

At loyalBe, our mission is to rid the world of physical, paper loyalty cards for good. Our technology is a vast improvement over traditional paper loyalty cards. Not only does our app allow you to get rid of your paper cards for good just as some of our customers have done, but it can also encourage increased membership of your loyalty program and allows you to understand and engage with customers like never before.

So, in a world that is digital, why isn’t your loyalty program?

It used to be painful and very expensive to create and implement a digital loyalty program for your business. With loyalBe, we offer a drastically improved way to have your very own digital loyalty program that benefits you and your customers, all at a very affordable price. We’ll save the nitty-gritty details on how we achieve this for another post, but it’s only now possible thanks to a brand new technology called Open Banking. Our app uses Open Banking technology to make the loyalty rewarding process seamless, instant, and direct between business to consumer.

Contact Us today and find out how loyalBe can help you create and retain more loyal customers. You can be up and running in less than one hour of your time!