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Entrepreneurs – Have You Thought About A Loyalty Program?

Written by: Lee Lister

Article Overview: You’ve got your business up and running and sales are coming in and you are even making a profit. Now is the time to step your marketing up a bit. How about a loyalty program to encourage more sales and more customers?

Entrepreneurs – Have You Thought About A Loyalty Program?

So what is a loyalty program then? It’s a group of incentives you put in place to encourage your customers to buy more from you than they originally intended. Here are a few ideas for you.

* Coupons: One of the easiest ways to encourage more sales is to give away coupons that give you a discount on the next purchase. The coupons can be in your ezine, packed with your products or in your adverts. The beauty with this is that you also bring your customers back to your shop or web site.
* BOGOF: The delightful acronym that means buy one get one free. You can offer this to your customers on their next purchase. This actually means that they buy three for the price of two. If you limit the time that this offer is available you can encourage extra purchases at little cost to yourself.
* Specials: You can offer hard to find or desirable items to your regular or existing customers.
* Packages: You can group some of your products into a cost effective package and offer these to loyal customers.
* Loyalty Cards: You can set up cards that can be stamped for each purchase. Many large supermarkets use sophisticated loyalty cards. You can then offer free products, offers or special information for so many stamps.

Just a word of caution – make sure that your offers are “to look forward to: and not perceived as “normal business”.

So why go to all this trouble and expense to reward customers that are with you anyway?
* It brings your customer back to your shop or web site.
* It encourages more sales.
* Word gets around and your customers tell others of the great value that you offer.
* Your business gets perceived as offering great value.
* Mostly – because it works!

Good Luck!

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Article Tags: acronym, adverts, caution, coupons, existing customers, ezine, good luck, incentives, loyal customers, loyalty cards, loyalty program, stamps, supermarkets



Related Forum Posts
Re: From Sales to Marketing - Loyalty, Glad to know a little about you. Yes, this forum holds quite a bit of useful information. We hope you will join into the conversations and get to know us. Welcome!
Re: How to develop sales contacts? - Everyone has the right idea here. Depending on your business, there are different techniques that you could use. For consultants and sales heavy businesses, there are three tactics that I have found especially useful in my business: 1. Attend Networking Events 2. Cold Calling 3. Referral Program 4. Affiliate Program (most successful) The affiliate program was successful for me, as I hooked up with a franchise consultant, and he gave multiple unit businesses that needed my credit card processing services. I highly suggest you hook up with a sales partner, and give him a cut of the monthly revenue.
Hi from OpenAFranchise - Hello everyone, I am a small business owner working in a consulting capacity. Thought I would introduce myself. Nice to be here.
Think like an Association - Hey Sebastian, Maybe you could try thinking like an Association... I would study the structure or formats used by other Associations. What are they doing to add value for their members? The BBB plays a monitoring role for consumers by gathering data about business' that are behaving badly. And they're pretty successful at it too. Maybe you can offer a 'Platinum Program' that franchisors buy into. Accredited members only. Criteria could be strict: 1. Age (stability): 10+ years 2. Satisfied franchisees: 85% + satisfaction 3. Size (stability again): 250 units 4. Strong profits 5. Great management -Maybe a 'Gold Program' for those Franchisors that aren't quite at that level, but can strive to reach it... -Top 100, 500, 1000 Listing for qualified members... maybe a slap at Entrepreneur.com and their biased top 10 lists... -Maybe act as a monitor like BBB? -Maybe team up with FranSurvey OR do something similar for each member (not sure about Fransurvey's rep, but I like the concept) There's so much discontent within the franchising arena that I think if you were part of the solution, then you could create a win/win with your Association. The only downside is that this power can get abused if there aren't good checks and balances within the association.
CEOs and Email - Slaves? - I wonder if the emails they are responding to are filtered thru their assistants first 'cos they seem to spend a lot of their off hours responding to them. True they are successful but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay that price. I'd be interested to know what's the in the typical day planner of Entrepreneurs on the Forum. Entrepreneurs are a different breed than Paid Employees- so it would be interesting to view the contrast.


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