MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

10 Quick Loyalty Marketing Tips

It’s more important than ever that the last component of your successful internet marketing mix is being monitored and managed, namely traffic, conversion and….. R-E-T-E-N-T-I-O-N.

When I talk about loyalty marketing with clients, they immediately think of Tescos and loyalty cards. And why not – they’re hugely successful!

MKLINK offers card and cardless loyalty technology by the way – register your interest at http://www.mklink.net

But for the rest of us, loyalty simply means keeping clients for longer, spending more with you and recommending more people to your business.

And to do it successfully, online or offline, you firstly need to :

• Identify WHAT you want to achieve (see below).
• Do IT.
• Track it.

Identifying what you want to achieve might be a single goal e.g. making people spend more with you per purchase or it might be several goals :

• Increase average transactional value #1.(Upselling)
• Increase average transactional value #2.(Cross-selling)
• Increase frequency of purchases.
• Increase longevity of average client term.
• Increase numbers of client referrals.
• Increase numbers of client testimonials & feedback score.

(By the way, make a mental note: try to start calling people who buy from you ‘clients’ instead of customers. It forces you to think in terms of a longer term relationship, rather than a one-off transaction.)

So, once you know what you want to achieve, you need to put strategies in place (see below)to achieve them. But like ALL aspects of internet marketing, you need to test & measure to know which strategies are working and which aren’t. So start measuring your metrics BEFORE you launch a loyalty campaign otherwise you’ll be running blind.

Ok – there’s millions of things you can do to keep clients loyal. Good service and regular contact are the bywords of course. Here’s a quick list of 10 :

1) Keep Your Website Content Fresh & Useful.
The reason that the BBC website does so well is because it’s got so much stuff on it which is constantly being updated. It doesn’t try and sell stuff (But if it did…wow!) it constantly gives great information. Your clients are looking to you for information. Keep giving it to them – constantly – and they’ll come back again for more.

2) Use Email to Communicate New Content.
This is why I keep harping on that you must capture data about your clients. The primary purpose of your website is to start a relationship – not to sell. That way, you can email once a month or so forever and every time you can encourage people to come back to your website again and again and again.

Remember to personalise your email.

3) Be Newsworthy
It might be that you run a regular competition and that people can sign up to see if thieve won or not. You might offer free consultations on a regular basis.

Perhaps occasional teleseminars or webinars would be worth running.

Whatever business you’re in, you can run some kind of “event”. Anything from a cheese and wine evening to a free promo-shoot for weddings. Anything is possible and everything can be explored.

4) Run an Affiliate Programme.
You can ask people to drive visitors to your website and pay them per lead, sale, signup or visitor. Each month you can run different promotions to encourage your affiliates to have an extra push to drive people to your site.

Reward your hard-working affiliates with bonuses that they weren’t expecting. treat them well – like you would do any other commission-only sales people.

5) Leverage Social Marketing.
Enable clients, suppliers and staff to really engage with your business. Sites like YouTube enable you to demonstrate people, services, testimonials, products in fact whatever you want. Setup your own TV channel!

Facebook is great for REAL interaction, polls, quizzes and feedback.

Twitter is good for broadcasting stuff as it happens and helping people stay in touch with you. All your tweets, YouTube updates etc can link back to your website if you need to engage with clients on your site. Try and keep Facebook people within Facebook though – good manners.

6) Offer Incentives & Loyalty Points
Like I said, it works for Tescos. Have a system in place to reward people to regular purchases. Have a “preferred clients club”. Give people discounts, coupons (virtual or real) or web-tokens for :

• Regularly returning to your website.
• Regular purchases.
• Regular attendances to webinars, seminars.
• Regularly interacting/participating on polls, questionnaires, surveys etc.
• Regular contributions to your blog, forum etc.

7) Give Clients Visibility (Especially B2B Clients)
Promote your clients. Make showcases of them. “This is how we helped ABC Company” etc.

Link to them on your newsletters, blog etc.

Interview your clients and put the interview on your website/blog/newsletter. Give them some visibility and they’ll reward you with loyalty. Simple.

Thank Your Clients. Often.
Send out a “thank-you” card to all new clients and occasional, random treats to longer established ones. Or a box of chocolates. Or a bottle of wine. Or anything applicable.

Brand gifts where possible to get more value over a longer period of time from them. E.g. a branded pen in a presentation box.

Too tight fisted or too expensive to give real gifts? Just a personalised email is better than nothing at all and shows that you care.

You can even buy “virtual” gifts. Seriously – Google it.

9) Use Business Intelligence.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM’s) these days are much more powerful, integrated and affordable. They enables you to intelligently segment your client base depending on type, spend amount, geographic location, age of account etc.

You can use business intelligence to largely automate, yet nevertheless personalise your communications.

So, if you sell insurance, don’t just wait a week before the renewal date is due. Be SMART. You could send people personalised birthday emails/cards/presents for example. You can send them news items about their type of car, boat etc.

How impressed would you be if your insurance agent emailed you with news about a product safety recall about your type of car? Hardly rocket science but very do-able. Again the list is endless and again MKLINK can help you if you need it.

10) Become a Client of Theirs.
You need to buy products and services right? Get them from your clients.
An obvious, if often overlooked strategy.

Not only can you usually negotiate better terms but it makes people think twice before leaving you for another supplier just because they might save a couple of quid.

Use your annual supplier/price review sessions to turn the conversation around and upsell/cross sell to them and deepen your business relationship.

Plenty more loyalty tips where these came from…why not get in touch and see how we can help with your client loyalty programmes?

Register for a no-obligation, complimentary consultation today :

http://www.mklink.com/getstarted

’til next time,
Mike Knight – MKLINK.