Improving Customer Loyalty Using Deals and Discounts

BIZCATALYST360°
BIZCATALYST 360°
Published in
4 min readSep 4, 2018

Customer loyalty is key to the growth and expansion of a business. It entails attracting and retaining valuable customers. Building customer loyalty demands for effective strategies, immense effort, and deliberate actions. Customer loyalty is important in ensuring continuous income and revenue for the business.

There are many ways to promote customer loyalty. A business chooses a strategy that suits their nature, size, and budget. There is the use of reward points, coupons, deals and discounts among others.

Here we discuss how to use deals and discounts to promote customer loyalty.

Types of Deals and Discounts

There are a number of deals and discounts a business can offer to its customers. Nowadays, many businesses are offering different products, ranging from homegoods to electronics, at extremely low prices. The following are the most common types of deals and discounts you can adapt to attract your customers.

  1. Percentage-based discount: This is one of the most popular discount types. You can offer different percentages of discounts off your products for your loyal customer. You can start with relatively small discounts or offer larger discounts for old stock.
  2. Dollar value discount: This is quite similar to the percentage-based discount. However, this deal offers a specific cost reduction for a particular amount of purchases. For example, $10 off for $100 worth of purchases. It is advisable to use this offer only for purchases over $100, use the percentage discount instead for the lower purchases. You can find many coupons and deals here.
  3. Free Gift: Offer a free gift alongside some purchases. This encourages the sale of the particular products that have a free gift offer. It also helps to dispose of products that are not moving.

Offer free shipping: This reduces the amount of money the customer has to spend to acquire the product. To avoid loses, you can limit this offer to specific countries and you can have a minimum purchase value for customers to qualify for it.

Steps to Ensure Your Deals or Discount Programs Improve Customer Loyalty

The goal of offering a deal or discount to your shoppers is to ensure that they come back or they make more purchases and become your loyal customers. In fact, Forbes explains that “ discounts will continue to remain an important part of the retailer promotional mix as a way to engage shoppers” It is important to ensure that the programs you offer are able to meet this goal. The following are some of the steps you can take to maximize the outcome of your deals and discounts.

  1. Reward your most loyal customers

Offer more rewards to customers who have stayed with you longer than newer customers. This means you are rewarding your most loyal customers.

Rewarding the most loyal customers builds a stronger bond. This bond makes it hard for the customers to leave you or your brand in times of market competition. You can use codes, personalized emails, or create different levels of loyalty programs.

  1. Choose simple programs

Make your offer programs simple and easy to participate. Create deals that the customers can easily understand and identify with. If your loyalty program is too complex, customers may not be motivated to join.

Apart from simple percentage discounts, you can create point form system that the customers can redeem in products discounts upon their maturity. Easy programs are also easy to assess and track its effectiveness in generating sales.

  1. Offer a variety of deals

Use a wide range of discounts and deals to attract and retain a wide variety of customers. Different customers have different needs. Therefore, not every customer will appreciate a particular discount, deal or reward.

It is important to have a variety of deals that customers can choose from to participate which suits their needs and interest. For example, some customers will appreciate free shipping deals while others would appreciate a product discount instead.

  1. Consider all deals carefully

Some deals or discount may devalue a product. For example, some free gifts may devalue the products and services they are attached. Avoid attaching redundant products as freebies.

Further, when choosing deals and products to complement your services, analyze customer needs and attitudes. You can choose experimental rewards that the customers will appreciate.

  1. Incorporate social elements to your deals

Create a link and unique hashtags for your offers that your customers can share on their social media pages. You will be able to attract more customers.

You can offer additional discounts to customers who share the links. This way you increase your sales as you attract new customers. This strategy also serves to increase traffic to your products’ pages or sites.

  1. Focus on missed opportunities

Identify and follow up on missed opportunities. Offer incentives to customers that are considered as missed opportunities. These customers are likely to avoid your products or services.

Missed opportunities are customers who have been previously disappointed or dissatisfied with a product. Offering incentives to such customers would help to redeem their trust and loyalty.

  1. Stay in touch with your customers

Finally, it is important to stay in touch with your customers. This will help you to understand your customers’ changing needs. It will advise on the deals and discount you need to consider and it will ultimately improve customer loyalty.

You can also use communication such as emails to remind your loyal customers of the deals and offers they have, the deadlines and their accumulated points. Use personalized emails to keep in touch with your loyal customers.

Make the most of your deals and discounts. Set your goals right, understand your customers and create viable offers. You can use proper deals and discounts to effectively build customer loyalty, improve sales, and eventually meet your business objectives.

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BIZCATALYST360°
BIZCATALYST 360°

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