What every small business needs to know about their customers
Getting to know your customers is the key to driving your sales, or as we like to call it, future-proofing your business. But where do you begin when your budget is small, relies heavily on in-store foot traffic, or when you have little experience marketing in a digital age?
Small business owners face these challenges every day. Up until now, they’ve lacked the online tools to understand customer data and were limited to basic information (if any). Missing timely customer insights makes it that much harder to fuel targeted marketing and compete with larger companies.
Paper punch cards and one-off promotions largely remain the go-to methods for many small businesses looking to entice and reward their customers. But these traditional approaches fail to give small businesses the actionable insights they need, like understanding purchasing triggers, spending patterns, and a rewards programs’ overall effectiveness in maximizing profit and repeat business.
Introducing Neo for Merchants
Now, thanks to technology, understanding customers has never been easier. Neo for Merchants allows small businesses to level the playing field and better reward their customers while boosting business.
As a small business owner under the Neo network, you can partner with us to expand your reach. Become top of mind when members in your city search for smarter ways to spend and earn rewards.
This includes attracting and engaging Neo members who use their Neo Mastercard daily to earn instant cashback rewards from thousands of our partnered stores. We work with local brick and mortar businesses, like restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, grocery stores and more.
It’s where ‘supporting local’ benefits Canadians in more ways than one. Now, you can better incentivize and personalize offers to your customers. It’s possible to move away from mass advertising and, instead, towards one-on-one engagement. Every dollar invested to fund customer rewards can be linked to the revenue it delivers.
Neo’s Merchant Dashboard offers insights into your unique customer base by collecting data that defines purchasing behaviour. To start, the Dashboard provides transactional visibility on Neo cardholders spending with you and your return on investment.
In the future, as we build out more features, it will be your hub for analyzing your customers’ spending behaviour, such as how recently they shopped with you, how often and how much they’re spending, as well as other customer demographics, including occupation, age and geography.
Using this data, you can develop better ways to attract customers, retain them and meet demand regardless of whether your business is in-store, online or both.
Especially now, as we navigate through our recovering economies, understanding customer behaviour and motivators are vital to keeping your small business alive. With Neo, the bottom line is increasing visits, order value and sales by making a direct investment in your customers.
What you need to know about your customers
Here is what you need to know about the customer insights tools Neo provides (and has in the works), which can be leveraged to grow any business, regardless of size, location, or marketing budget.
Set your customers apart
Technology is incredibly handy for segmenting or splitting up your customers into types. Not all customers are made equal. You have your repeat customers and the one-off ones too, but what makes them each distinct?
Making sense of customer behaviour requires seeing the bigger picture. Whether it’s pinpointing their age, geography, or any other demographic, understanding your customers will put you in a greater position to develop relevant offers and promotions, as well as rewards they’ll actually want to earn and are eager to come back for.
Neo’s Merchant Dashboard will soon segment customers based on new and returning customers, their average monthly spending, frequency of shopping, age, occupation and more. These upcoming features will help you understand your customers’ background. Right now, you can field your customers’ transactional data by your store’s location to evaluate your business’ progress.
Know them from the inside-out with real-time data
This is the fun part. You can get to know your customers on a deeper level. Real-time analytics gives you a 360-degree view of the customer experience, which can set you up for more personalized service, so you can meet customers where they want to be met and understand what resonates with them.
Neo’s Merchant Dashboard captures transactional information by the minute, so your unique data is on the dot whenever you make time to view it. Know the average number of customers that visit your store on any given day of the week or month. See the total revenue you’ve made and how many offers were redeemed. Learn how many returning customers you have, or could win back.
Insights like the average time that customers spend between purchases at your store and the minimum dollar amount they spend on one visit will be upcoming features in the Dashboard.
These types of discoveries can put your business ahead because it identifies patterns to predict customer needs. Plus, having up-to-date information allows you to detect any significant problems for your business and immediately address them.
Achieve a healthy return on rewards investment
Without a doubt, the most rewarding part of collecting customer data is seeing the return on your investment. This is how you know your efforts are paying off.
The types of rewards you offer to your customers with Neo directly funnels into your revenue stream. We measure your rewards program’s success by tracking your return on rewards investment, so you can see exactly how much revenue each dollar of investment has brought your business.
Your investment in rewards drives additional revenue and profit to your business. Once you have enough customer data available, you can view insights about your performance.
In the screenshot above, for every dollar spent on rewards, this merchant earns back 17 times that amount. The number varies for each merchant based on their category profit margins, customer mix and richness of rewards offers. Across our network, we see healthy returns from 5 to 20 times the investment amount.
Neo for Merchants isn’t just a tool that covers the basics for small businesses. It thoughtfully compiles data relevant to any size business in an easy, digestible manner that provides more opportunities to serve your customers better and future-proof your business.
The benefits of leveraging customer insights
Insights that dig deep into your customer buying behaviour allow you to personalize their experiences with your store, making your service more enjoyable than before and more likely for your customers to spread the word and come back.
Leveraging easily accessible customer spending and rewards data is a worthwhile investment that can help you run your business more efficiently, cut down on ineffective marketing channels, eliminate blind spots on how your marketing dollars are being spent, and most importantly, keep your customers happy.
From recovery to long-term success
Healthy businesses adapt. They move with the changing winds of their customers’ preferences and create ever-improving experiences. When you integrate customer data into your business plan, you’re putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and really get the chance to understand their decision-making and purchase behaviour.
Neo for Merchants provides small businesses with a modern and cost-efficient way to gain valuable customer data and reward customers for their business at your store.
Our mobile-first digital platform makes it easy to personalize offers and purchase incentives based on your customers’ spending patterns, location and immediate needs, providing an incredible ROI to your business and turn strangers into loyal customers.
