Loyalty programs play a crucial role in building a relationship with your regular customers.
It’s also important for rewarding your loyal customers, keeping track of their spending habits, analysing your sales, best-selling products, and so on.
However, all these cannot be done if customers don’t sign up for the loyalty program.
For your loyalty program to really work, you need your staff members to believe in it and push for sign ups. Otherwise, your loyalty program might fail.
Your staff members are the face of your business - your loyalty program can only work with their full support.
Let’s look at a few ways how you can get your staff to encourage customers to sign up for the loyalty program:
1) Explain the reason you have the loyalty program in place
The first step is to explain to your staff members why you have a loyalty program in the first place. Most employees might assume that it’s merely for record purposes and probably not that important.
However, loyalty programs go beyond that - and it is important that your employees understand that.
The loyalty program is crucial for customer retention. It helps you build a relationship with customers, reward star customers, and re-engage with dormant ones.
With a loyalty program, you can build a customer persona. This can help with targeted marketing and potentially bring in more customers.
It can also help to identify your best-selling products, track customer spending, total revenue from loyal customers, and more.
With more customers coming in, the business becomes more profitable.
This benefits both the company and employees. When you staff members realise this, they might be more inclined towards promoting your loyalty program to customers.
2) Provide sufficient training to help staff members understand the loyalty program
Make sure that your loyalty program is easy and straight-forward to use. If the system is too complex, your staff members might try to get out of doing it.
For example, with Eber, it takes only about 30 seconds to sign up a new customer.
When the process is simple and straightforward, it is easier for your staff members to push for customers to sign up for the loyalty program.
79% of Americans say they are more likely to join a rewards program that doesn’t require them to carry a physical card.
Wilbur
Ensure that sufficient training is provided to understand how the loyalty program works, why it is important, and how it can help the business flourish.
3) Give staff members a guideline on what to say to customers
This part can be quite tricky as some customers may not want to sign up as a member or divulge their contact details.
However, customers can be convinced if they too see the importance of a loyalty program.
Make sure your employees can explain why the loyalty program is important to customers and how they can benefit from it.
For example, employees can stress on the benefits and rewards like welcome points, gifts that can be redeemed after XX visits, birthday rewards, invites to exclusive events and workshops, and more.
Don’t just stop at “Would you like to sign up as a member?”
Instead, try “Would you like to be a part of our loyalty program that gives you birthday rewards, cashback, loyalty points, and VIP access to events? It will only take you 1 minute to join!”
The latter will surely catch their attention and get them intrigued to learn more.
4) Reward your staff members for new sign ups
Another way to encourage staff members to push for sign ups is to come up with a reward system for them too.
Give them incentives for every successful sign up or most sign ups for the day. They can also be acknowledged as employee of the month if they meet their target.
But make sure not to make it too stressful for them. Keep it fun and encourage some healthy competition among employees.
5) Ensure that a support system is in place for staff members
Whenever it comes to technology, there’s bound to be some technical problems. There may be some lag or new updates in the system that they are not familiar with.
It can be helpful to have a channel or chat group where employees can quickly share any issues they are facing and get help immediately.
When your staff members know that they have adequate support, they do not have to worry about making mistakes when handling the loyalty program system.
You can also conduct a meeting to find out what challenges are they currently facing in terms of the loyalty program. Is it the sign up time? Are the perks attractive enough? Are customers reluctant to sign up?
Once you identify the challenges, then you can work towards the solution and make things easier for your employees.
77% of suboptimal loyalty programs fail within the first two years
Capgemini Consulting
Make sure to also choose a loyalty program provider that is able to provide support whenever you need and answer any questions that you may have.
With all these practices in place, your employees will feel more confident and driven to promote the loyalty program to your customers.
Got a loyalty program but not sure if it's optimised for best results? Read here.
Need help with your loyalty program? Reach out to us at hello@eber.co