How connected is your business? Have you gone so far as to implement the latest technology into your point of sale, marketing efforts, or customer loyalty programs? If not, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Small businesses–establishments with 500 workers or less–comprise 99.9% of the economy, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. That averages 33,185,550 companies employing about 61.7 million Americans in total. Astoundingly, while small-to-medium businesses make up most of our professional sector, only 38% use specialized technology–like enhancing customer loyalty programs to rival bigger brands.
Fueling your business’s digital transformation could help you adapt certain tools, like automation and cloud computing, to streamline your operation. Why not let technology help you learn about your customer activity and trends while improving the shopping experience?
Making Customer Loyalty Programs Bigger and Better
While technology can help every part of your business, digital loyalty programs are an easy place to start to see big dividends. Here are a few ideas for automating your small business loyalty program:
Personalizing Customer Interactions = Better Experiences
Think of shopping as research for your potential customers. They scroll through your site to see if you offer anything interesting. If they find something, they might click on it, save it, or even add it to the cart.
If you aren’t recording how your customers’ research into your products or services is going, you can’t analyze them or make improvements to the shopping experience. That’s where the right technology comes in. With automated customer loyalty technology, you can:
- Note browsing habits to better recommend similar products or styles.
- Pick up abandoned carts by retargeting ads, reducing prices, or offering someone an incentive to complete their purchase with you.
- Streamline personalization to strengthen each customer’s emotional connection to your brand.
Flaunting Incentives = Better Engagement
How does your current system increase customer engagement? Have you considered gamification? This approach allows your customers to use mobile technology to earn points for shopping or other activities or top leaderboards to make things competitive or fun.
Whether that’s an app or promotions on social media platforms, you can ramp up the engagement and reach more people with digital stamp cards, prizes, and more. Software management tools make tracking these rewards and referral programs simple. Technology does the work for you.
Gaining Customer Insight = Better ROI for Bigger Company Growth
The thing with digital stamps or punch cards is not only that they entice customers–they also help your business gain better insight into the overall customer experience on offer. Unlike with traditional paper punch cards or stickers, online programs give you an accurate and updated card count for customer loyalty measurement. You’ll even see how many rewards you currently owe so that you can budget resources efficiently.
Why not use advanced data analytics to show weaknesses in your program, remove any demotivating features, or make other parts of your strategy excel? With technology, you can create, distribute, and track wholly unique marketing campaigns across a much larger audience for great ROI. Who says small business customer loyalty programs have to stay small?
