B2B Marketing Promotions

The consumer loyalty promotion is still a way for companies to earn repeat business from customers. Whether it’s a coffee shop giving you your 10th latte for free, or an airline miles program that gives you a free ticket after 25,000 travel miles, consumer loyalty promotions are an effective way to bring customers back time and again.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Green Stamps consumer loyalty promotion in the 60s and 70s and earlier. These consumer loyalty promotions actually started in the 1800s as a way to reward customers who paid with cash. Later, stamps were given to everyone who made a purchase. The stamps could be redeemed for store discounts, or for merchandise. The S&H Green Stamps were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and anyone in their 40s and older can remember their parents’ or even their own collections of the green stamps.

Nowadays, rather than giving stamps, many stores just give discounts, but only if you’re a member of one of their consumer loyalty promotions. You show your little card — usually kept on a keychain — when you check out, and they give you a discount on your groceries. Spend enough money, and the reward is usually a discount on their gasoline, in addition to the initial savings. Most people, about 75%, carry at least one of these consumer loyalty promotions cards.

The upside of a consumer loyalty promotion is that you can amass all kinds of purchasing information about your customers with their permission. Want to know how many people have recently begun buying diapers? Or cat food? Or prefer certain brands of beer? Direct mail marketers love to know this kind of information, and will pay for your consumer loyalty promotions lists just to find out new ways to get your customers to buy their products.

But consumer loyalty promotions are not just about selling mailing lists. They’re marketing tools. They encourage people to come back again and again, to earn the rewards you’re offering after 10 cups of coffee, 25,000 miles, $100 spent at a grocery store. The rewards in consumer loyalty promotions are there for you to continually show why your customers need to keep coming back. They’re not just a trick; they show your customers again and again why you’re their provider of choice.

In fact, that’s the point about a good consumer loyalty promotion: you can keep track of your customers, reward loyalty with prizes and discounts. You can also figure out ways to convert your occasional customers to loyal customers, and your loyal customers to raving fans.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, travel consumer loyalty promotions were all the rage. You got airline miles for flying a certain airlines, miles for staying in allied hotels, and could even double and triple those miles if you paid for the flight and night with your miles-earning credit cards. Some days it seemed like you needed a Ph.D. in customer loyalty management just to keep track of it all, but there were news stories of people who would take unnecessary flights just to reach the 500,000 mile platinum level for the next year.

If you’re thinking about setting up a consumer loyalty promotion of your own, be sure you give your customers something they want. It’s not enough just to give a discount, or a cheap piece of merchandise no one wanted in the first place, like the proverbial toaster for opening a new account. Figure out why your customers are there in the first place, and give them that. Sandwich shops give free sandwiches, airlines give free travel tickets. Give your customers something for free when they spend a certain amount of money or buy a specific number of items.

Referrals are another great form of consumer loyalty promotions. Customers are not just coming back themselves, they’re bringing their friends. If a customer comes to your store once a week and brings a friend who now comes once a week, that customer has actually doubled their value. They’re already fans, and by bringing in their friends, they will actually become more loyal to you and your company.

consumer loyalty promotions are a great way to not only thank your customers, but to market your company at no additional costs other than the rewards you gave out for your efforts.

Finding affordable SEO services can make the difference between success and failure for your online business. That’s because the once-popular pay-per-click model (where you pay for ads to be placed on a search engine, such as the right-hand side of Google search results) is not bringing in the results they once — if ever — did.

So why do you need affordable SEO services? What can they do that a pay-per-click campaign can’t. And why can’t you just create a website and count on people finding you that way?

Let’s test pay-per-click vs. affordable SEO services: the next time you do a Google search, pay attention to where your eyes go on the results page. If you’re like most people, they found the top of the search results, and quickly scanned to the bottom of the screen, not the bottom of the page. They didn’t jump to the right side and the paid ads, and they didn’t look at the sponsored links at the very top of the page. They looked at the actual search results, and skipped the stuff people paid for. You’re not alone. There have been several studies that examine eye tracking and heat mapping, and have found that users tend to skip the ads on a page, and zero in on the results.

In other words, the pay-per-click ads are not receiving the attention the online business owners were counting on, but the affordable SEO services are creating positive results.

And why doesn’t “if you build it, they will come” work either? Because most web designers don’t have the knowledge and skills an affordable SEO services firm has when it comes to optimizing your website for maximum search effectiveness.

That’s why affordable SEO services are very important. Search engine optimization is the idea that you make your website everything the search engines want to see. An affordable SEO services firm can help you with organic SEO consulting — putting your website at the top of the search results without paying for any ads or sponsored links.

An affordable SEO services firm will work with you to find the ideal keywords for your website, and then help you write your web copy, format your web pages, and even choose the best domain name and page titles to achieve those top rankings. A pay-per-click firm will just help you find the lowest price for getting your links on the part of the page people rarely look at.

Organic search results are more trusted and accepted by search users, because they’re real websites created by real people based on things people really want to find. They’re not bought and paid for by a pay-per-click campaign. They’re created by either the user or an affordable SEO services firm that specializes in organic search consulting.

But you can even forgo the affordable SEO services and take the DIY route instead. If you want to take the time to learn the proper formatting and web copy creation, you can create your own search success. It’s not that hard if you have the technical skills and patience to do it, although we should warn you that you’ll need to spend quite a bit of time each week keeping up with any changes to the accepted search techniques, to the algorithms the search engines use, and even to your competitors’ websites. (That’s why an affordable SEO services firm is often a better alternative.)

Investing in affordable SEO services is a great way to propel your website to the top of the search results. And when your online business relies on people finding you quickly and easily, it’s one of the smartest business decisions you can make.

Using traditional promotions to reach Generation Y doesn’t work.

Let’s just get that out of the way. We’re normally not supposed to start articles like this on a down note, but you need to know what doesn’t work before we can really talk about what does.

Generation Y — those born between 1977 and 1994 — don’t respond to regular promotions. They don’t watch TV, they don’t read billboards, they don’t do direct mail. But they’re such an important target to marketers, that most marketers are looking for any kind of promotions to reach Gen Y.

So why Y?

Because they’re a consumer power that actually outnumber the Baby Boomers. There are 82 million Gen Yers, give or take a few, and only 78 million Boomers. Generation Y are 26% of the population, and their spending power is more than $200 billion, plus they influence another $300 – $400 billion. According to some reports, Gen Yers influence over 50% of their family’s car choices.

Tantalizing, huh? But if you can’t reach them with traditional promotions, how do you do it?

That’s where online and digital promotions become important. Generation Y is online. That’s where they grew up, that’s where they get their information. When asked where they get their news, most Gen Yers said “Yahoo.” They watch YouTube videos on their phones. They communicate through texts, and use Facebook.

In short, Generation Y wants you to communicate with them, not market to them. So what are some promotions ideas you can use?

First, you need to go where they are. Before you start any sort of Gen Y promotions campaign, get to know them. Figure out who your target audience is, and where they like to hang out, what they like to do, where they get their entertainment.

Vans Shoes, makers of the famous skateboard shoes, built skateboard parks in California and Florida. They sponsor a skateboard team. When their customers need to buy new skateboard shoes, they buy the ones they see at the skate parks, or on the shirts of the team from the skate competition.

Tampax sponsors a social network for young girls, without blatantly marketing to them. They place their logo discreetly on the network, while young girls connect with each other and discuss whatever young girls discuss. The logo just sits there. Then, when it’s time to go shopping for feminine products with their moms, they choose the product they see on their network.

Brands like Mountain Dew, Nokia, Coca-Cola, and Chrysler are paying video game developers for product placement promotions inside video games. Tony Hawk’s Ride, EA’s NBA “2K10,” and Need for Speed: Shift are just a few of the games that include ads. Whether it’s billboards, vending machines, or traditional sports advertising venues (like sponsor signs inside an arena), video game promotions are an excellent way to reach Gen Yers. Remember, Gen Y influences more than half of their family’s car purchases, so putting car ads in video games makes great promotions sense.

Text clubs are another form of digital promotions. Since most Gen Yers are communicating with each other via text, they’re a great way for local businesses like restaurants and clubs to reach Generation Y. Text clubs are opt-in marketing efforts. A restaurant can use text clubs to advertise hidden specials — “free appetizers with dinner, tonight only” — or a club can send out sneak previews about bands or drink specials.

When you’re creating your B2C marketing campaign, make sure you give digital promotions a good, hard look in order to reach the elusive Generation Y. With their spending power and large population, it’s important to connect with them now, so as they grow older and their spending power increases, you have earned their brand loyalty and top-of-mind awareness.

Congratulations! You’ve started your own online business and now you’re ready for online business promotion. There are a number of schools of thought about online business promotion, they all come down to the same basic techniques: social media, search engine optimization, and offline promotion. If you start this early on, the entire process can be automated and create recurring revenue for you

Online business promotion starts with a blog.

You’ve started your online business, the catalog and shopping cart software are running, and you’re carefully written dozens, if not hundreds, of product descriptions. But you’re not done. Make blogging a part of your online business promotion. Blog posts are great landing pages for your website, with a much longer and keyword-rich description than your catalog entries. Write articles about typical problems your customers will face, and show how your products are the solutions. Post customer testimonials and photos with the products in action. The blog will become the center of your social media campaign, and improve your search engine optimization results.

Use social media for online business promotion.

Social media is another important part of your online business promotion. Create accounts for yourself and/or your company on Twitter, Facebook, and any social networks that fall within your target market. Follow/friend people who fit within that niche, and focus only on them. But rather than spam them with product messages, promote your how-to articles on your blog, answer questions related to your product, and let them see you as a solution, not a pest.

Online business promotion means optimizing for search engines.

It’s crucial that your website is optimized for search engines, otherwise you’ll waste a big part of your online business promotion efforts. Do simple things, like use important keywords in headlines and anchor text, having back links to your website and blog posts. These will lead to higher search engine placement. As you rank higher in the search results, more people will find you, which will lead to more visits, which leads to increased sales.

Offline marketing is important for online business promotion.

Offline marketing is an important tool in the online business promotion toolbox, especially as you focus on a particular niche. If you sell hand degreaser to car mechanics, go to the places where the gearheads gather. Go to car shows, trade shows, and conventions. Visit the garages in your town and the surrounding area. Buy a mailing list of auto repair shops around the country, and send them a sample of your product.

Tell everyone they can only buy the product on your website. Make cards and brochures with your URL on it. While you can certainly sell your product at these events, a lot of people will say “not right now” or “maybe I’ll come back.” Give them a card and tell them to find you online when they’re ready.

By following these online business promotion steps, you can set your business to run on autopilot. What you’ll see is that your blog will be picked up by the search engines and seen by social media friends, they’ll continue to visit your website, buy your products, and this will be an automatic revenue generator for you.

An affordable SEO services firm is tough to find, especially when you are new to online marketing.  When you first get into web commerce and Internet marketing,  you’ll start hearing a flurry of terms, like “organic search engine optimization” and “paid search engine listings.” What do they mean? Are they the same thing? Is this something I should be doing myself, or do I need to find an SEO firm?

Search engine optimization is one of those “so easy a caveman can do it” areas that people often end up neglecting it, or worse, not understanding it completely. That’s when it may be important to call in an SEO firm to pick up that part of the program for you, because, let’s face it, it’s really not that easy. But if you work at it, and spend a lot of time doing it, you can actually do your own search engine optimization. However, it can be rather time consuming to do properly, so if you have a large site or a new campaign, find an affordable SEO services firm to handle the heavy lifting for you.

There are a few major differences between organic search engine optimization and things like Google Adwords – paid search engine listings – which are a different beast altogether. Make sure you find an affordable SEO services firm that knows the difference.

The first place you’ll see the difference between organic SEO and paid ads is on Google’s search results page. Type in a search term, and see what comes up. You’ll see two sets of results, one on the left, the other on the right. The results on the left are based on organic search, while the results on the right are the sponsored links, or paid ads. According to some search marketing experts, organic search results make up almost 90% of total search results; the remainder are the paid search engine listings.

Second, the organic search results are improved by adding backlinks to a website, using keywords in an article and in anchor text, and using other proper SEO techniques. An SEO services firm is going to be able to show you the best way to accomplish either or both of these.

Third, paid search engine listings can let you “own” more keywords than organic SEO. With paid listings, you’re limited only by your budget — you can own thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords. With organic SEO, you’re limited only by your time, which means you will typically only be able to own tens, or possibly a couple hundred, keywords. An affordable SEO services firm will be able to handle either of these for you.

Fourth, while all search is trackable and measurable, paid search engine listings are more measurable than organic. For one thing, you can measure actual conversions and sales with your keywords, rather than just clicks and eyeballs. This will also speed up the research time in finding which are the best keywords to use for your organic search. By seeing which keywords have the most clickthroughs and conversions, you can see what the most important search terms should be for your organic search. Talk to an affordable SEO services firm about how they can help you.

An Affordable SEO Services Firm is tough to find, especially when you are new to online marketing. When you first get into web commerce and Internet marketing, you’ll start hearing a flurry of terms, like “organic search engine optimization” and “paid search engine listings.” What do they mean? Are they the same thing? Is this something I should be doing myself, or do I need to find an affordable SEO services firm?

Search engine optimization is one of those “so easy a caveman can do it” areas that people often end up neglecting it, or worse, not understanding it completely. That’s when it may be important to call in an SEO firm to pick up that part of the program for you, because, let’s face it, it’s really not that easy. But if you work at it, and spend a lot of time doing it, you can actually do your own search engine optimization. However, it can be rather time consuming to do properly, so if you have a large site or a new campaign, find an affordable SEO services firm to handle the heavy lifting for you.

There are a few major differences between organic search engine optimization and things like Google Adwords – paid search engine listings – which are a different beast altogether. So you need to make sure you find an affordable SEO services firm that understands that difference.

The first place you’ll see the difference between organic SEO and paid ads is on Google’s search results page. Type in a search term, and see what comes up. You’ll see two sets of results, one on the left, the other on the right. The results on the left are based on organic search, while the results on the right are the sponsored links, or paid ads. According to some search marketing experts, organic search results make up almost 90% of total search results; the remainder are the paid search engine listings.

Second, the organic search results are improved by adding backlinks to a website, using keywords in an article and in anchor text, and using other proper SEO techniques. On the other hand, paid search engine listings only require some keyword research and a willingness to pay more money than your competitor to have your paid results appear higher. An affordable SEO services firm is going to be able to show you the best way to accomplish either or both of these.

To the purist and the social media expert, the organic search is going to produce more honest, trsutworthy, and therefore, more-likely-to-be-clicked results that will lead to better search engine performance. However, the affordable SEO services firm will recognize that paid search engine listings are also an important of any effective search engine strategy, and will work with you to make it as successful as possible.

Third, paid search engine listings can let you “own” more keywords than organic SEO. With paid listings, you’re limited only by your budget — you can own thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords. With organic SEO, you’re limited only by your time, which means you will typically only be able to own tens, or possibly a couple hundred, keywords. And you’ll spend a lot of time trying to own them all, which means you’ll miss out on a lot of other work you could be doing for your business. Of course, an affordable SEO services firm will be able to take the time issue off your plate, which means you will be able to focus on the other aspects of your business. They’ll also be able to help you find and claim the best keywords for a paid listing campaign.

Fourth, while all search is trackable and measurable, paid search engine listings are more measurable than organic. For one thing, you can measure actual conversions and sales with your keywords, rather than just clicks and eyeballs. This will also speed up the research time in finding which are the best keywords to use for your organic search. By seeing which keywords have the most clickthroughs and conversions, you can see what the most important search terms should be for your organic search. You can do all these things with organic search too, but the paid search engine listings lets you get that laser-like focus, and to do it much more quickly. Talk to an affordable SEO services firm about how they can help you.

When you say promotional marketing, most people just think “marketing,” especially the non-marketing types. As if what we do is nothing but contests, coupons, and giving out free samples. While that is a part of marketing, promotional marketing is only one small fraction of the big umbrella that makes up Marketing (with a capital M).

Promotional marketing is the idea of promoting your product or service by attracting attention to potential customers. You see this quite a bit in places like grocery stores. The next time you’re walking through your grocery store, count how many promotional marketing items you see: coupons to try a new brand of breakfast cereal, or the free samples of a new food item.

Car dealers and timeshare companies are also big fans of promotional marketing. How many “game cards” have you received from a local car dealer where you would win a prize if it showed up under the silver scratch-off discs.

But there’s more to promotional marketing than just coupons and free items. Contests are another popular method of marketing promotions. Whether it’s a bank giving you 30 seconds in a giant box filled with money and a large fan, letting you grab as many of the fluttering bills as you can, or it’s a golf tournament that will give you a free car if you hit a hole in one on the 14th hole, contests are another great way to bring in potential new customers.

The most famous promotional marketing contest is the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, where you could win $1 million or more, as well as subscribe to different magazines. We went nuts for these when we were kids, begging our parents to please please enter, because we could win a million dollars!

The reason people respond to these promotional marketing campaigns is they’re attracted to the large cash and prize giveaways. Sure, in our heads we know that the odds of winning are higher than the odds of being struck by lightning, but in our hearts, we hope we’ll beat the odds just that one time.

Of course, promotional marketing experts are worried about the one person who does beat the odds, so promotional risk coverage is available for those promotional marketing campaigns that offer large prizes and cash to winners.

If you want to create a powerful promotional marketing campaign, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

• Why are you holding the promotional marketing campaign in the first place? Is it to sell more product, collect names for your customer mailing list, or just to increase brand awareness?
• How will you measure success? Through increased sales, a bigger customer list, or based on the number of promotional marketing items you gave away? We don’t recommend measuring this last item, because measuring the amount of money you spent does not always translate well to the amount of money you’ll make from it. Just ask any auto racing promoter who spent $100,000 and didn’t get a single sale as a result.
• Who is the marketing campaign geared toward? Is the promotional marketing item going to appeal to your target audience? If you’re trying to reach young men between 18 – 34, a contest that has tickets to a football game will draw them in, while two free passes to a day spa will not.
• Are you looking for new customers or trying to reach existing ones? The kinds of promotional marketing items you give away will attract one group or another.
• Are you compliant with the state and federal laws? Do you have promotional risk coverage in case someone wins bigger than you thought they would? (Imagine how the car dealer must feel when someone hits that hole-in-one and wins a car he wasn’t expecting to give away.) There are a lot of laws surrounding promotional marketing campaigns, and you could run afoul of laws without knowing it. Consult with a promotional marketing professional to make sure you run a clean campaign that doesn’t get you into trouble down the road.

Digital promotions are a great, low-cost way for marketers to promote their products, and increase brand awareness by offering Freemiums to consumers. These incentive promotions can reward people for buying the product (“buy 9 coffee drinks, get your 10th one for free”), can introduce your product to customers (“download a free track from our new album to see if you like it”), or can even allow you to promote your product to others by giving it away for free (“get free skins for the upcoming Watchmen movie for your iPhone and iPod Touch”).

Digital promotions can take a number of different forms, whether it’s an online gift certificate to your customers’ favorite online or brick-and-mortar retailers, free music downloads from iTunes, or even a real plastic gift card to an online store.

The cost of digital promotions is much lower than the other promotional incentives, because your cost is basically the value of the item you’re giving. If you give $10 online gift cards, your cost is $10 per card. This is a welcome change to promotional incentives professionals who would have normally spent a lot of money on graphic design, production and printing, and mailing and distribution.

Whatever form your digital promotions take, it’s an effective way to increase awareness for your brand, and track sales as well. With digital promotions like an online gift card, you can track who received your card, when they redeemed it, what product they were interested in (useful if you’re giving away several different kinds of music), and even if they purchased the actual product you were selling.

Do you have users who only redeem your digital promotions, but don’t actually buy anything? You can drop them from your incentive promotions campaign, and find a new batch of potential customers. Then start tracking and dropping until you’re only giving your digital incentives to a group of people with a high purchase percentage.

So how can you use digital promotions to gather valuable data about your customers? Not only are you able to track individual customers, but you can ask them for additional information like a working email address (you have to email them the digital promotions cards, right?), what products and brands do they usually buy, and what kinds of products they use.

For example, a music producer has several artists on his record label. He uses a digital promotions campaign to promote each of his artists, and offers a free track from any of his artists. For a user to take advantage of these digital incentives, she has to fill out a survey that tells the producer what kind of music she likes, how much she spends on music, and where she usually purchases it.

The producer can then aggregate the data from these digital promotions and see that most of his customers are between 18 – 24, like R&B, and purchase their music on iTunes. Now, he knows he needs to find more R&B artists, and promote them on iTunes rather than trying to produce and distribute CDs to various music stores around the country. Without using and tracking his digital promotions, he would never have access to this kind of information.

Now let’s take it one step further. Armed with this information, the producer can send out future digital promotions that are individualized to each customer’s tastes and preferences, rather than sending out a bunch of generic information and hoping the customers will take the bait. He can create digital promotions that use variable data to customize the offers, so each customer will see the music that he or she likes, and will receive offers that are more likely to be accepted by them.

Let’s recap: if done correctly, digital promotions can be a great way to market your product for a lower price than regular promotional incentives, to track customer responses, and to customize further digital incentives, to increase response and purchase rates.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail, has turned the idea of free on its head with his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

In it, he talks about how Free is often used as promotional incentives as a way to get people to buy them. Free is often an integral part of marketing promotions, used as a way to get people to try our products, to buy something else, to showcase our products or services, and even to do some work for us.

Here are the four basic iterations of Free Anderson discusses in his book.

1. Direct cross-subsidies - This is a product that gets you to pay for something else. It could be a buy-one-get-one-free item at your favorite clothing store. Or a free “prize” given to you by a car dealership in the hopes of getting you to buy a new car. Or even a cell phone company giving you a free cell phone because you’ll pay for the minutes, the text plan, and the data package.
2. The Three-Party Market - Someone else pays for you to have access so you can use the program, in order for you to be exposed to their product. In other words, your basic television and radio mass media setup. I get to watch NBC’s “The Office” for free. The catch is I have to watch the ads that go with it. Or I can subscribe to a free trade magazine that covers my industry. The catch is I have to make my name and address available to people who want to send me direct mail. The advertisers need us to consume that product, but we need the advertisers to pay for our access.
3. Freemium - One of the models we’re most familiar with: we get a free sample to try a product: the food samples we get at our local supermarket, as a way to entice us to buy the really huge bag of pizza rolls. Or in the digital world, giving us limited access so we’re willing to pay full price for total access. Anderson uses Flickr.com as an example. We can use Flickr for free, but can only include 200 photos in our general timeline. If we want to have all of our photos available, and/or we want some premium features, we need to pay $25 per year.
4. Nonmonetary markets - The idea that people give away things with no expectation of payment. Wikipedia is one example. Hundreds of volunteers have created millions of articles in 10 languages about a variety of topics. Wikipedia doesn’t charge for this access, it’s free. Sure, they’ll take donations, and in fact, this past Spring, they had a donation drive to help cover the costs. But there’s nothing else. No banner ads (three-party market), no limited access (freemiums), and no direct cross-subsidies (“get Wikipedia free if you buy a copy of Photoshop”)

It’s this last version of free that most people are becoming used to, and this latest version of free that Anderson wrote about. Since marketing promotions in the digital world is cheap and easy, there are different ways people can use them to promote their services (i.e. a Freemium).

For example, a consultant posts free articles on their blog as a way to not only showcase their knowledge, but to get a potential client to consider them. Or a book author who offers an audio version of his book on iTunes (also free) and on the Kindle, knowing that if people get the free version, they’re more likely to pay for a real copy too. This last technique is the latest promotional incentive to hit the publishing world, and one that more and more authors are using to boost their own sales.

What kind of promotional incentives are you using to drive customer traffic? How are you getting sales leads? Have you thought of using free items as a way to do this? Leave a comment in the comment section.

Customer loyalty programs work by offering customers incentives and encouraging their continued business so sellers can see huge returns. Sounds easy, right?

Unfortunately, customer loyalty programs aren’t always that simple. They have to be done correctly and there is, like all potentially successful business ventures, some risk involved. Potential cost overruns, incentives which fail to trigger the intended response, and poor audience targeting all threaten to impede the success of any customer loyalty program. But, there’s good news: these risks can be managed. The question is, how? Here’s your answer:

Link the Promotional Incentives to the Product

In any customer loyalty program, the promotional incentive should always be related to the product. In other words, if you’re selling baby bath products, don’t reward your customers with a free oil change. Instead, help your customers make a connection in their mind between the product and the reward. The easiest way to link your incentive to your product is to make the product itself the incentive. You see this all the time at coffee shops who hand out “Buy 10, Get 1 Free” cards to their customers. And guess what? It works.

Inject Perceived Value Into the Customer Loyalty Program

One of the interesting psychological effects of a customer loyalty program is the tendency for consumers to value the promotional incentive outside the bounds of monetary value. To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s return to our coffee shop example. In the case of a free cup of coffee, it’s reasonable to assume the incentive has a monetary value of $2.

However, a lowly $2 cash rebate offered after 10 purchases would be unlikely to generate an increase in business. Customers are more inclined to consider the “value” of the free coffee based upon the experience they anticipate while enjoying it. ??This clearly works to a company’s advantage. A customer loyalty program can be designed to deliver a high perceived value to consumers while still yielding a respectable ROI for the business.

Remember, a Customer Loyalty Program is an Investment

Not all customer loyalty programs are going to provide an instant ROI. Depending on the length of the program, how it’s introduced to the market and the cost for the customer, a program can take time.  For example, a widely advertised customer loyalty program based on $2 coffee sales, something many customers buy almost every day, is going to bring a return faster than it would on, say, $75 haircuts, something customers may only purchase once every few months.

Don’t let this dissuade you from exploring a customer loyalty program. Instead, look at them as an investment, whether it be short-term or long-term. For companies that take advantage of it, a good customer loyalty program can yield dividends for years.

Promotional Currency (PC) is a digital promotions firm that merges digital technology, artist licensing and promotional risk coverage to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions that meet the unique needs and budgets of the brand marketing or b2b marketing client. Among product offered are: unique customer loyalty programs, promotional incentives, online promotions and mobile promotions.