Many businesses use customer birthdays as an occasion to send out a deal or reward. It's a great way to build customer loyalty and prompt return visits. After all, everyone loves getting free gifts on their birthday. The best way to go about rewarding loyal customers on their birthday is to leverage your loyalty rewards program. With the best customer loyalty software, you can do so much more than simply let customers earn loyalty points.

You can:

  • Offer a seamless sign-up process right from your POS system that A) makes it easy for customers to join, and B) enables you capture the essential customer data you need—including their birthday
  • Create a custom sign-up bonus or first reward to motivate customers to join, as well as create custom rewards that are on brand and unique to your business and encourage future purchases
  • Make it easy for customers to earn points with each check-in and then redeem their points for custom rewards either using their phone number, email address, or loyalty app like the SpotOn consumer app
  • And, most importantly for those birthday guests, you can create automated deals for special occasions, including customer birthdays
A customer enrolls in a loyalty program while checking out at a retail store
Digital loyalty programs that are integrated with the POS make enrollment, check-ins, and redemptions quick and easy for everyone.

It's just important to remember that a lot of businesses have the same idea, and a glut of birthday emails are easily lost in a customer's inbox. To make sure your business stands out from the competition, here are 4 tips for successful birthday loyalty rewards programs.

1. Make your loyalty program personal

A good loyalty program is about more than just rewarding customers. It's about making your customers feel connected to your brand.

Personalizing your messages can go a long way to not only establish a more personal bond between you and a customer but also to make sure your message stands out from the clutter in their inbox and actually gets read. You can do this by simply using their name in your message, having the sender's email be from a real person rather than a company name, and making the language friendly and personable. These small steps can make your customers feel like there's a personal bond with your company and encourage them to redeem their birthday rewards from your business.

2. Provide compelling rewards

A barista pours an espresso
A good loyalty reward can be something as simple as a free drink, or something more unique to your business. Photo by Fahmi Fakhrudin / Unsplash

Another key to making sure your birthday reward stands out is to make sure it's irresistible. The type of reward is going to vary from business to business, of course, but the big idea here is to make sure the reward offers something of value to the customer and ties into what your business does best. So maybe it's a free meal, exclusive merchandise, or an upgraded service. Whatever it is, don't fret about not making a profit on the birthday reward itself.

In all likelihood, the birthday person will purchase additional items in store when they come in to redeem that reward. There's also a good chance they'll bring friends and family. So, while you are giving away a free product or service, you're are also incentivizing more paying customers to celebrate their friend's birthday at your small business.

3. Set up automated campaigns

It seems almost impossible to even keep track of customer birthdays, let alone manually send out birthday rewards to all of your customers. That's where automated campaigns with a digital loyalty program come in. Digital loyalty automation makes it easy to stay on top of your customers' birthdays by turning a tedious task into a simple click of a button. Your loyalty program software will automatically send your subscribers the birthday reward of your choice, taking the stress out of the task and ensuring that you don't miss any marketing opportunities.

That's not all. You can also set up automated deals through your loyalty program to reward current members who haven't stopped in for a while (aka "a lapsed customer").  Offering customers who have lapsed a freebie is a great way to remind them to stop in.

4. Encourage customers to sign up for your rewards program

In order for you to know when customers have birthdays, you first need to get customers to sign up in your loyalty reward program. Having a quick and easy sign-up process for your rewards program is a good start, but it takes more than that. Train your team to encourage customers to sign up for your loyalty program during the checkout process. You and your team can tout the fact that the customer will get free birthday rewards and any other deals, discounts, or rewards you choose to offer, which is usually all the incentive they need.

A small business employee meeting: 4 women looking at a laptop.
The success of your loyalty program could be as simple as training your staff to enroll customers. Photo by Kylie Haulk / Unsplash

If you are partnered with SpotOn, we make it as easy. You get active tools for having more customers sign up, including with our point-of-sale offerings and online ordering (for restaurants)—both of which are integrated with the SpotOn loyalty program. After customers sign up, you have the opportunity to send deals, discounts, social media campaigns, mobile alerts to customers using our rewards app, and more to your customers, prompting your customers to come back year round, not just on their birthday.

At the end of the day, earning rewards and getting something special on your birthday is the perfect recipe to create customer loyalty.

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