Whilst just about everyone has a loyalty card in their back pocket these days how is a piece of plastic used to help my business when it seems i'm only going to be giving away profit?

Well, Loyalty is not really what the public think it is when you get down to it. In some ways it can be seen as deception but it's really all about customer management and parting the customer with their hard earned wages.

As a retailer it's hard enough these days to get a person in the shop nevermind to spend money or even give you their contact details, but if you do get someones details loyalty enables you to track the customers purchases, buying trends and gives you the ability to introduce the customer to other areas of your business and get them shopping with you on a more regular basis.

So do you know who your best customers are?

Who would you invite to a product launch?

Scenario:

• Mr Jones visits the store every November and June to buy areound £200 of Ladies Lingerie, but as he's embarrassed to be seen buying the stuff he's a quick in and out the door customer.

Using a customer loyalty card you can see when he's been instore, you can then send him offers for different times of the year to tempt him or his partner/wife to better use the shop. As he'll use his card on the visit to spend the vouchers you can see a change in his profile and enables you to cross sell product. Without Loyalty this is impossible.

Scenario:

• Wine evening for new product launch

Who do you invite?

In this instance it's not always best to send invites to all the best customers, they will probably be in the store within a week or so regardless. In these instances you want to capture the mid ground and the customer thats bought similar products. After all face it if you have 15,000 customers and a shop with fire regs for 50 you cant invite everyone. Use events like these to draw in the customers with average buying to improve the relationship and sell more. Your best customers will still buy regardless if they like what you do.

So whats the investment?

Loyalty systems can be purchased or you can tie into a company that can run the system for you. As most EPOS solutions already have a customer management element these days you can easily start off using it to get the loyalty scheme up and running. If this starts to improve sales and increase turnover you know it's working and you can put some of that profit into improving the system. So dont think it's a immediate need for software purchase or subcontracting out of your customer list.

You will need to invest in some plastic cards printed with your logo and a design. Sadly they are not free, and the average price i around 0.80p - £1.50 depending on content.

You can buy the equipment to print the cards yourself but card printers and consumables are expensive and the average cut off between self printing and bureau is around 15,000 cards. Even at tha point the time invloved in printing the cards is significant as it take over an hour to print 1 full colour side of 100 cards. Card printing can also be tricky to get right with artwork design fi you are looking for a fabulous design.

for more information on card printing please feel free check out the products below, the card printing section or if your still needing some assistance contact us .