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Best Practices for Your Loyalty and Rewards Program

January 27, 2022 | AppCard Team

A new year often means taking a look at your initiatives and reassessing where to put your focus for the upcoming months. When it comes to loyalty and rewards programs, having fresh, new executions are important to catch shoppers’ attention, enroll new members, and keep them coming back. However, there are definitely some standard strategies that our grocery partners should apply to their programs and stick with throughout the year. 

AppCard’s customer success team weighed in on a few best practices that food retailers should implement to jumpstart or rejuvenate their loyalty and rewards programs in 2022. If you’re an AppCard partner, these are great guidelines to follow.

Here’s what Elaine Arnold, Director of Enterprise Customer Success, and Jenya Dyagilev, Director of Strategic Accounts, had to share:

 

Set clear goals and objectives for your loyalty program.

Setting clear goals will help you best utilize the marketing tools AppCard has to offer and measure the results of each campaign or promotion effectively. Some goals may include:

–Increase sales in a specific department

–Increase loyalty reach by 5%

–Increase the number of top shoppers by 5%

Collaboration is key, so be sure to work with your Customer Success Manager on coming up with programs and offers to support your business goals.

 

Understand the data.

Working with AppCard gives you access to more data than you can actually imagine. Using the Merchant Site reporting tools will allow you to have a better understanding of your business. You will be able to find which products sell well together, which time and day generate the most revenue, which lane typically has the most transactions, and much more. Using these data points will help mold your business into a revenue-driving machine that capitalizes on your shoppers’ purchases while still providing them with a positive incentive and experience. Work with your Customer Success Manager to better understand your data and how to leverage it for your store’s success. 

 

Use holidays, seasons, and important events to your benefit.

The benefit of AppCard is the flexibility you have in creating unique promotions. Creating promotions that coincide with particular events throughout the year will be a quick and easy way for you to attract new shoppers while offering great incentives to your current loyalty members. For example, the Super Bowl is the most popular game day of the year. We can easily create promotions that would drive the sales of specific products or departments that shoppers would be interested in purchasing for their Super Bowl gatherings. 

 

Communicate relevant information to your shoppers.

The power of AppCard is with your data! Use the AppCard campaign engine to communicate with your customers on a regular basis with highly targeted campaigns. Utilize the AppCard campaign tool to send targeted emails or text messages to your shoppers about upcoming promotions that are relevant to them. We highly recommend you strategize with your Customer Success Manager on some of the best ways to use the campaigns feature for your business. These may be a control group to help you effectively measure the lift of a given campaign or using A/B testing to compare which communication strategies best resonate with your shoppers.  AppCard offers tools that are built into the platform to help you perfect your communication strategies with your shoppers.

 

Follow-through & commitment.

With great freedom comes great responsibilities. Staying committed to your tailored loyalty program will provide the best results for your business in terms of customer retention and increased revenue. Staying fresh with new ideas and executing on them will result in longevity for your loyalty and rewards program that your customers will love. Following through with promotions, capitalizing on holidays & yearly events, and constantly looking for a new campaign to run for your customers is the recipe for success and a happy customer base!

Not an AppCard partner? Contact us today for a demo!

 

AppCard is a Member of the Intel IoT Solutions Alliance. A global ecosystem of more than 800 industry leaders, the Alliance offers its Members unique access to Intel technology, expertise, and go-to-market support, accelerating the deployment of best-in-class solutions. Powered by Intel CPU, AppCard J-brain ensures data is captured at the EDGE and transferred to the cloud where we run our machine learning and AI to guarantee that offers, rewards and campaigns are all personalized to shoppers and employees.

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