Product promotions are great. Just coming off Black Friday and heading into the festive season you should expect to see a lot more of them. Even in 2020. Now if you’re in business your goal when choosing promotions should really promotions that improve customer loyalty. Your target to increase the size of the back end sales. Back end sale is a term for reselling to existing customers otherwise called customer loyalty. Here are 5 promotion strategies that work to increase customer loyalty and how well they do this.
BOGO
Buy One Get One refers to any promotion that involves giving customers a free item when a certain number is purchased. 2 for 1, 3 for 2, but 3 and get the cheapest one free and other such ideas. BOGOs lean heavy on value and are effective at sowing the seeds for customer loyalty. BOGOs do not carry well over time and are best carried out in limited runs. They are great for new launches or off-season periods if you have a seasonal product.
Nth one free
Buy 9 cups of coffee and get the 10th one free. This is the best way, to sum up, the nth one free promotion. It’s like the BOGO but where BOGOs are on the spot this happens over time. I mean its conceivable someone will buy 10 cups of coffee at once but rather the exception than the rule. These work very well at building a habit in your customer and what is customer loyalty if not a habit? Just avoid making it something the mind cannot grasp like 50 cups of coffee, that’s too much to keep track of.
Refer a friend
This is always a great one because it has a hidden effect. You will see this is very popular with internet-based products. Refer a friend and get 20% off or something like that. It’s brilliant because it introduces the product to new customers and rides off the relationship between the two parties and it creates loyalty within the referring party as well. Save for extreme cases (of duress such as excessive rewards) people find it difficult to recommend products they don’t trust.
Free sample
This works, as long as your product does. Offering free samples of a poor product will not get you anywhere. This method is best employed when the product sample is bundled with other products they use it with. In services, this can be likened to the 30-day free trial. Giving prospects the product experience is one of the best ways to get them in the door. Free trials for services work so well but make sure the duration of the trial is long enough to see results.
Loyalty discount
Loyalty discounts include some form of membership and perhaps a discount card. The idea is to provide every day continuous loyalty discounts or rewards to specific customers. The idea is simple but incredibly effective. It is the best way to grow individual customer back ends and it tends to bring high value to the customer. Between discounts and points rewards, I think customers will always pick discounts unless the points rewards system makes sense. This is not always the case.
Customer loyalty is about habit. So as long as your product is good your focus should be on embedding purchasing and using your product into the heads of customers.
