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. Unfortunately, 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 four tips for a successful birthday rewards program.
1. Make it personal.
Personalizing your messages can go a long way to not only establish a more personal bond between you and a customer, but to also 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 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.
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, a free product, 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 be coming in to redeem that reward with friends and family. So, while you are giving away a free product or service, you 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 dedicated loyalty rewards software platform come in. Digital loyalty automations make it easy to stay on top of your customers' birthdays by turning a tedious task into a simple click of a button. Your loyalty 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.
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 them to enroll in your loyalty program, so make sure to encourage customers to sign up by touting the fact that they will get free birthday rewards and any other deals, discounts, or rewards you choose to offer. If you are partnered with SpotOn, you get active tools for having customers sign up, including with our integrated point-of-sale offerings, online ordering (for restaurants), and ecommerce (for retail businesses). After customers sign up, you have the opportunity to send deals, discounts, social media campaigns, mobile alerts, and more to your customers, prompting your customers to come back year round, not just on their birthday.
