A customer loyalty system is a marketing tool used more and more in today’s competitive retail world.Not only do reward cards and loyalty systems offer incentive to customers to return to your store, they can provide valuable information to the retailer about customer buying habits.
Once upon a time managing a loyalty system would have been a nightmare, but with modern technology and the latest in point of sale software, this is no longer the case.
A good rewards system, with the right pos software behind it allows the retailer to increase customer loyalty and repeat purchases, communicate with the customer in a number of ways and gather customer intelligence for marketing purposes.
Scanning a customer’s loyalty card into a retail point of sale system gives the retailer the opportunity to collect information on the customer’s brand preferences, purchasing habits and demographic information as well as calculating accumulated spend. This information can then be used for a number of marketing purposes.
The parameters are set within the POS software to suit your business and reward scheme. This could be ‘dollars spent to points accrued’ ratio, or automatic customer discount thresholds, or redemption of points as tender at the point of sale. Higher or lower points can be allocated against certain product purchases, during promotional campaigns. Very successful reward/loyalty schemes have been running in Australia and in countries around the world for many years, and are a great favourite with the consumer.
Data stored within the software allows for direct communication from retailer to customer. Drawing on specific data, the software will enable you to email customers with newsletters, or information about specific products. Extracted information from the data base can be imported into various other software to allow for mail merging and traditional mail outs via snail mail. Or using other data collected by the software, direct marketing via SMS message is possible.
Using the point of sale software, retail marketing departments will be able to access information from customer loyalty card transactions and create advertising and marketing campaigns to be directly targeted to the audience considered the most receptive.
The type of valuable information that may be collected is:
- purchases between certain dates
- no purchases between certain dates
- spent more or less than a particular dollar value
- accrued more or less than a certain number of points
- have purchased particular products
- have marketing profiles such as: have a birthday during a particular month, live in a certain geographical area, is a member of a particular group.
Just think how specifically you would be able to target your marketing .
Gathering and collecting all this information, its management and secure storage is no longer the nightmare it used to be. Retail point of sale software available today is designed to take the process further than just recording the sale, and taking the money at the check out.
Many of the systems available are point of sale software, stock inventory management software, and CRM software rolled into one and if you are thinking of starting a loyalty system now may well be the time to update your retail POS system.
Looking to fast track your growth with a smarter POS System? Contact the Retail Express team today on 1300 732 618.
