Recent surveys have shown that about 75% of people prefer patronizing small businesses that offer customer rewards over those that don’t. With this in mind, you should strongly consider setting up a customer loyalty program for your small business.

When you give a customer a reward simply for shopping with your small business, you’ll incentivize them to come back again. It’s an amazing way to build up customer loyalty over time.

You shouldn’t create just any old loyalty program for your customers, though. There are definitely going to be some loyalty programs that will work better for your small business than others.

We’ve put together a list of tips for designing customer rewards that will work wonders for you and your small business. Take a look at five tips below and begin using them to come up with customer rewards.

1. Consider Which Kinds of Rewards Your Customers Would Value

Before you begin giving out customer rewards as part of a loyalty program, you should give some thought to which rewards people might want. If you don’t come up with the right rewards, it’s going to be challenging to get people to sign up for a loyalty program.

In some cases, small businesses will give out free products and/or services to their customers after they spend a certain amount of money. In other instances, they’ll create custom cash rewards that will enable people to get their hands on cash after spending a specific amount.

It would be worth considering all your options so that you can go with the one that seems to suit your customers best. It’ll allow you to grab the attention of your customers from the start.

2. Think About What You’ll Ask Customers to Do to Earn Rewards

Once you know which kinds of rewards you’re going to give to your customers, you’ll need to decide what you’re going to make them do to earn them. You want to try to avoid setting the bar too high since it might make people feel like they have to jump through too many hoops to obtain customer rewards.

More often than not, small businesses will ask customers to purchase a particular product a certain number of times or spend a certain amount of money before they’re eligible for customer rewards. It makes it very easy for people to understand how they can get rewards from a small business.

3. Take a Look at How Giving Out Rewards Will Impact Your Budget

Ideally, dishing out customer rewards to those who buy things from your small business should help to increase your sales. You’ll be making more money than you would otherwise by giving away products, services, discounts, etc.

But at the beginning, you should be very cognizant of how giving out rewards is going to affect your budget. You might find that it’s actually going to cost you some money on the front end until your customer loyalty program becomes more widespread.

Fortunately, there is customer retention software that you can use to allocate funds for customer rewards from your budget. Check here to see how this software could benefit you and your small business.

4. Figure Out How to Let Your Customers Know About Earning Rewards

Setting up a customer loyalty program for your small business will only be half of the battle. You’re also going to need to find the best way to let your customers know all about it once you’re ready to start giving out customer rewards.

Typically, small businesses will do this by inviting people to sign up for their loyalty programs when they’re checking out in their stores. You might want to train those who work for you to ask your customers if they would like to sign up for your loyalty program.

You might also want to incentivize people to sign up for your loyalty program by providing them with a discount of some sort on the spot. It’ll increase the chances of people signing up for your customer rewards program when they’re shopping with you.

5. Make It Super Simple for Customers to Enroll in a Loyalty Program

When people start showing an interest in earning customer rewards from your small business, you should direct them to sign up for your loyalty program. You should also make it as easy as you can for them to work their way through the sign-up process.

You should have your customers provide you with:

• Their names
• Their home addresses
• Their phone numbers
• Their email addresses

That should really be all that you’ll need to provide a loyalty program account with your small business. If you start asking for more than that, people might be wary of joining your customer loyalty program, no matter how great the customer rewards that they could potentially earn might be.

Start Giving Out Customer Rewards and See How It Helps Your Business

People love getting things for free. It doesn’t matter if you’re providing them with free donuts, free clothes, or something else for free.

You should take advantage of this by offering those who patronize your small business with customer rewards. It’s going to make people feel like you’re offering them so many things for free. They’ll come to appreciate this and will be more likely to remain loyal to your business over time.

Are you interested in securing more tips on increasing your small business sales? Look for them in some of the other articles that have been published on our blog.