Driving Customer Loyalty Programs through your POS

Customer loyalty programs are essential to bringing back your most enthusiastic guests, again and again. The days of paper punch cards have passed, so how can you bring your business into the digital marketplace?

Your point-of-sale (POS) system is a great place to start collecting data about your customers. It’s where you can gather the most information about their behavior, like how much they typically spend, and what time of day they usually visit your business.

But, you could take it one step further, by empowering customers to be in control of their own customer loyalty programs. By giving customers the power to see how far they are along towards their next incentive, guests develop a vested interest in patronizing your store more frequently. That’s great for sales, of course, but it’s also great for developing a fanatic customer base.

Many POS systems can allow guests to, for example, scan their own receipts using their phone to earn rewards. The scanned receipts also provide customers a transaction history of their own orders, and allow them to easily re-order their favorite items. With these POS features, guests no longer have to remember to tell your staff that they are loyalty program customers before checking out. Their receipt becomes a scannable way that customers can earn points to work towards their reward.

The app-based loyalty program makes it fun for guests to use, but the data you will gather from this system is invaluable. In addition to phone numbers and email addresses, you can also see stats such as number of visits, average time spent in-store, lifetime rewards, and lifetime spend. This allows you to segment your customers and target them with promos, events, or specials. This is particularly valuable when their phone indicates they are within close proximity of your storefront.

If your current POS system does not enable customer loyalty incentives like we’ve just described, it’s probably time for an upgrade. Look for a POS systems that has built-in loyalty options as well as the option to work with 3rd party apps. In addition to making the customer experience fun and engaging, the data insights you’ll get about your customers make switching to a better POS a no-brainer. Not sure if your POS system is delivering value to you? Download our free POS checklist to see if your POS should be improved.

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