According to our loyalty program overview report in 2015, each customer now enrolls 13.3 loyalty programs in 2015 compared with just 10.9 programs in 2014. As can be seen, there are more and more store owners know about loyalty program and apply it to their stores. As a result, of this explode, customers tend to be lazier to interact with loyalty projects. Therefore, we have to find new ways to approach customers through reward points programs. Today, we will discuss one of these ways: Birthday loyalty program
What make a normal reward become meaningful and creative?
It is how you bring it to your customers. What is your feeling if in your birthday, while almost of all people around you don’t know or forget your birthday, then you receive a meaningful wish from the person that you don’t expect? I make sure that you will be very happy and want to go to the person and say a sincerely thank you. Because that is the person want you will be recognized in your special day.
Why that person aren’t us? We are store owners who have a quite good relationship with them. It’s the best opportunity for us to reach them, warm up the relationship and give them a meaningful gift: some points which can be used for buying our product with a lower price. This is a good reason for us to reach them and offer promotion and customers will think that these points are so valuable and meaningful, and they will use it. If we just offer them points for no reason, our points could be though as being useless.
Why did I think that? When we ask many our customers for what they think about receiving wishes from E-commerce brand, this is our record:
- I’m happy and appreciate because of the meaningful wish from your company.I know that it’s not handwriting note, but it make me feel recognized.
- There are more than 15 emails with the content are about birthday congratulation in my mail box
- There are only some emails were sent with offers, but I treat all of the emails the same, I’m happy with them.
- Some brands offer me $30 discount, free small gift ….
- 40% of emails that I received only for offer and congratulation, there is no wish.
After reading all of these answers from customers, we are wondering if birthday reward really work?
Does birthday reward work?
In the modern life, there is more and more wishes email was sent by an automatic bot, therefore, such emails are not valuable as it before. However, we always have other solutions to personalize our emails to send to our customers. With some powerful email tool such as Mailchimp and Get response, we can customize customers name by bulk.
As you can see, this email is customized with customer’s name and their birthday so they will be very happy and appreciated with this kind of email. We are happy when someone know and call our name, but it’s extremely exciting if they send a meaningful wish with our name.
As a cytology, we tend to spend more when we are happy. Applying this survey result, if we want customers buy more from us, we have to delight them, make them happy during our purchase process.
We giving them a gift for their birthday, not a normal discount
We have interacted great with customers, they are happy and then want to spend more but how to avoid the situation that they think that we come to them is not for the relationship but profit?
Some retailers just send a happy birthday email to their customers with the offer or not. If they just send only congratulation email without any offer, they are loosing an opportunity to catch customers for a sale.
Some better retailers think to include some coupon to email, they still think that it’s not good to accept an invitation to spend money before using the coupon.
It’s giving the true gift! What is the true gift?
The trick here is set a rule for using this points: they only can use these point within some days following their birthday. But in my experience, it is the best if you set for use point only today.
