How To Generate An Effective Loyalty Program For Magento Site

Surveys in customer loyalty have shown that it costs five times as much to gain a new customer as it does to retain an existing one.  And as customers have a variety of choices beside your brand, it’s essential to have such a strong customer loyalty program like customers rewarding program. This is a program that allows your current clients or client-to-be to receive incentives for their behaviors relating to your e-business. By giving them a few points or credits for each behavior such as signing up, hitting subscribe, purchasing and referring friends, etc, the store owner could increase his customer’s loyalty which results in a rising sale.

Here are some stuffs that every store owner should take into consideration when running a customer rewarding program on an online store:

What you should reward your customers for?

There are several reasons for which your clients “deserve” to receive an incentive.

Firstly, it may be for their non-purchasing behaviors such as signing up, subscribing to newsletter, subscribing to social networks …or may be for the customers’ special event such as Birthday.

Secondly and more practically, you can let your customers earn reward points through their purchasing activities. For example, customer will receive a number of points for purchasing some particular products or when their spending exceeds a fixed number etc.

Thirdly, another behavior that has become an important one that every e-commerce business wants to encourage is referral. Whenever there is a new registration or transaction that comes from the invitation from your current customer, both of the current and new customers should be rewarded.

How should you allow your customers to use their rewards?

It’s also necessary that you set up the value of reward points as well as the spending rules to control the cost of the loyalty scheme.

With the development of Magento extensions installed to your e-commerce site, it is becoming easy and simple for any store owner to set up spending rules for a rewarding scheme, to name a few:

- Point/currency exchange rate.
- Maximum points allowed per account.
- Minimum points required to be redeemed per purchase.
- Setting spending rules based on product’s attribute or on shopping cart price.

The reward points spending rules are very flexible and subject to your objective. However it would be counterproductive if you set up a program with too many spending rules which can cause confusion to customers.

Keep in mind some following tips to make sure your customer reward program will run effectively:

- Do not set too many conditions of a spending rule because that can make your customer displeased when they want to redeem points.
- Points exchange rate needs to be simple and easy to calculate. For example 10 points= $1 or 5 points= $1 are good rates while 15points = 4$ is not an optimal one.
- Encourage customers to purchase more by expand the scope of using reward points because they would have stronger demand of earning points.
- Encourage customers to promptly use points by setting points expiration.

It might seem a bit difficult for a store-owner who is not a tech-savvy to build a productive customer reward program directly on his e-business site. However thanks to the Magento extensions like Reward Points Pro with full of features needed, everyone could easily set up and manage the whole program.

How should you promote your customer loyalty program.

Setting up rules and conditions of your loyalty program is not enough. Significantly, your program should be popular to your customers and visitors. Below are some methods to bring your loyalty program to your client- to-be:

- Promote on your official online store by placing a banner at your homepage and creating a specific page describing your reward policy.
- Promote on the social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instargram, Forums etc) , remember to focus on the sources that are popular with your audience.
- Advertising via remarketing with Google adwords, email marketing, rich media ads, etc

To sum up, every promotional campaign especially Points Rewarding program needs a thorough analysis process to be launched effectively. Remember the basic notices above and adjust them to your conditions to achieve your goal.

Generate your loyalty program with MageWorld now!