Thursday, April 2, 2009

Customer Loyalty

With the current state of the economy, consumers are re-evaluating how to spend their hard earned dollars. A study done by Scarborough Research shows that internet coupon use is up 83% from 2005. However, the Sunday newspaper remains the number one place for acquiring household coupons. Fifty-three percent of households get their coupons from the Sunday newspaper.

Many retailers issue customer loyalty or frequent shopper cards to their customers. These cards offer the customer lower prices on certain advertised items and/or point accumulation programs to allow shoppers to redeem points toward discounted or free items. These programs work well to attract new customers as well as retain current ones. Many grocers are utilizing the data collected from their customer loyalty/frequent shopper programs to make personalized coupon offers to their customers. The nation's largest traditional grocers say as many as half the coupons they send to their loyal customers do get used. One way they achieved this is to give customers coupons mainly for products they buy on a regular basis.

With the IBM POS systems that STCR offers, the consumers information is kept in your system when they sign up to receive their loyalty or frequent shopper cards. By utilizing reporting or data-mining tools, grocers can track their shopper’s buying habits. By offering targeted coupons to shoppers for items they purchase regularly, grocers increases the chance that the shoppers will use these coupons and thus create loyalty to the store.

Another way customer loyalty program helps is to connect retailers to its customer base. For example, the recent peanut butter scare had manufacturers recalling many products. Retailers with customer loyalty program would be able to report on which customers purchased recalled products and send mail to notify of the recall.

If you are running a customer loyalty or frequent shopper program there is no limit what you can do to create customer loyalty and to increase your bottom-line. For more information please contact your STCR representative at (607) 757-0181.