If you think that creating a program to build customer loyalty is only for big businesses, then think again.
You see, a customer loyalty program is all about building a relationship with your customers so they trust you and come back to buy your products and services again and again.
Want to learn how to get started with your own customer loyalty program?
Free Webinar: Thursday, March 15th, 2012 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ESTSign-up for this free webinar where I will discuss what you need to know to start your own customer loyalty program, including:
- How-to identify your most loyal customers,
- How-to use cross-channel marketing to build and retain loyalty with rewards and promotions, and
- Why loyal referrers are just as important as loyal customers.
Unfortunately, when most folks think about customer loyalty programs, they think about punch cards, plastic key fobs, branded credit cards and other expensive and time-consuming approaches – all things that are often out of reach for many small business owners.
However, there are other ways to create loyal customers; ways that cost less and take less time, are well suited to small businesses and that can be incorporated much more easily into your everyday processes and tasks.
To help you discover those less expensive and time-consuming approaches, I’ve gathered a bunch of links to useful posts and articles which will inspire you and help you get started in the road to building your own customer loyalty program.
And, because I’m so nice :), I’ve even taken a dive into some of the newer approaches for building customer loyalty using mobile loyalty solutions.
Enjoy!
Customer Loyalty Programs for Small Businesses
What is Customer Loyalty All About?
Before diving into the rest of the links below, I wanted to share this great infographic which introduces the basic concepts of customer loyalty:
Ways to Build Small Business Customer Loyalty
The approaches discussed in the links below are solid ways to build customer loyalty without spending a lot of time or money or using over-complicated systems:
- 100+ Ways to Create Customer Loyalty in Business – great input from over 100 different experts.
- Customer Loyalty Posts – This section of Pitney Bowes’ pbSmart Essential blog contains a bunch of useful information on building small business customer loyalty.
- Mastering customer loyalty
- Focus on Increasing Customer Loyalty to Increase Small Business Revenue
- 3 Ways Small Businesses Can Use Social Media To Drive Customer Loyalty
- Ideas for Building Customer Loyalty – great video!
- How To Create Customer Loyalty In Your Small Business
- 8 Ways to Make Customers Love a Local Business
- 5 Tips for Building Customer Loyalty
- How Your Business Can Build Customer Loyalty — and Profits
- Customer Loyalty – How to Build and Maintain It
- Loyalty Program Best Practices: 7 Lessons Learned at #DMA11
- Engineering Successful Customer Loyalty Programs
- When Loyalty Programs Are A Waste Of Money – an interesting perspective.
- Why Your Customer Loyalty Program May Be a Huge Failure
- Your Customer Loyalty Program: Improve It or Lose It
- Loyalty Programs and Perks That Work
- 3 Ways To Get Customer Loyalty Wrong
Going Mobile with Loyalty
It seems as if a new solution for loyalty programs pops-up every day, but the most exciting type of solutions are those that target mobile users who use iPhones and Droids.
There are a lot of ways to reach out to those customers to build loyalty and the best part is that they are affordable, easy-to-use and manage and often can be automated (love anything that saves me time!).
Mobile Loyalty Programs Overview
- Driving Customer Loyalty in a Mobile World
- Stepping Up Customer Loyalty In A Mobile, Social World
- Why mobile is becoming more about customer loyalty and lifetime value than customer acquisition – a video interview.
- Mobilizing Your Loyalty Program Acquisition
Mobile Loyalty Program Solutions and Case Studies
- 7 Customer Loyalty Options for Merchants and Brands
- Customer Loyalty and Prepaid Go Mobile
- Get Your Game On
- A Customer Loyalty Program (From Some of the Folks Who Brought You Groupon)
- Chatterfly Launches Mobile Digital Loyalty App
- Review of Mobile Loyalty Programs – Foursquare, TabbedOut, and Chatterfly
- How to Combine Foursquare and Your Loyalty Program
- Mobile App Digitizes Customer Loyalty Cards – all the benefits, none of the printing costs.
- Square adds customer loyalty and printable receipts to the mobile payment mix
- SMB Loyalty Programs Go Mobile
- A mobile app simplifies loyalty programs for smaller merchants
Weekly Link Roundup
Each week, I collect the 10 best posts that I’ve read and share them with you here.
These posts focus on web-based solutions, online resources and up-to-date news for small businesses.
Enjoy!
A Guide To New Facebook For Busy Social Media Marketers: This post boils-down the coming Facebook business page changes well and suggests some useful approaches for your business to take.
How To Spring Clean Your Website: A Complete Checklist: A handy list of steps to take to freshen up your site.
9 Hard-Hitting Content Strategies for Small Business Blogging: Great approaches with lots of images to help you absorb the concepts and steps.
7 Simple Action Steps To Build An Unshakable Blog Foundation: Some more blogging tactics and tips.
8 Tech Trends for Small Businesses to Adopt to Get To The Next Level: What are the hot technologies for small businesses right now? These experts give you the 411.
On Crowdfunding Sites, Age Doesn’t Matter: How can you get your business project noticed, and funded, on crowdfunding sites? Some great tips in this post.
B2B Marketing: 7 mobile and social media tactics: Some solid insights and tips for B2B businesses.
3 tips to keep spam mail out of your inbox: Old, but good, tips on keeping your business e-mail address out of the hands of spammers.
8 Useful and Easy Video Editing Tools: I’ve used almost all of these – a solid list of tools to check out for yourself.
10 Funniest QR Code Fails: Some funny moments in here.
I guess, customer loyalty goes beyond giving out freebies. Thanks for sharing these useful links; hope I can make it to your webinar… Best Regards! By the way, do you think it’s time to revamp the adage that ‘customer is always right’ — perhaps something like ‘customers deserves to be treated right’?
Aaron,
Thanks for your kind words – it would be great to see you at the webinar!
Yes, customers do deserve to be treated right, but if pushed too far, you should fire them. 🙂
-Matt