Page 24 - GBC Spring 2019 ENG

Loyalty Program Strategies
Loyalty programs give you the power to modify customer behav- iour with different experiences and incentives. If you struggle to ll certain times of the day, bracket your loyalty program with rewards for playing on certain days or at speci c times. More points should be given when a player books a low popularity tee time. Consider how the airline industry encourages incremental seat bookings by offering loyalty points deals in the low season and less valuable rewards in the high season.
Another loyalty strategy is to add automatic draws that enter customers’ names into a monthly draw every time they visit. Players that come more often are more likely to win. Not only do they get points for each visit, but they also get their name into a hat? Wow!
Generic loyalty programs fail. It’s time to move past those junky paper punch cards that can’t collect data. They’re susceptible to fraud and should be replaced with an online system. Realistically, punch cards are more like game packages that come with a free round. They aren’t a loyalty program, and most people won’t play the 9 rounds required to get that free one. It’s better to capture that value with a 10 game package that awards enough loyalty points to get a free round (or whatever the player wants!).
2. SOCIAL MEDIA REFERRALS ARE POWERFUL
Beyond retaining customers and ensuring repeat visits, customer loyalty programs have the added bene t of generating referrals from delighted customers. When your customers are happy with your loyalty program, they are bound to talk about it with their friends.
Today, word of mouth has crept into the online space. Customers are not afraid to share their opinion of your business online, whether they had a good or bad experience.
Obviously, we don’t want bad reviews to go online, and this can be prevented by providing a consistently good experience and handling bad ones immediately and respectfully.
Loyalty software helps to boost the number of positive social media referrals by encouraging customers to share online. In a social share referral program, a customer is awarded points when they share about their experience with their followers. The more followers they share with, the more points they get. This is a powerful strategy for getting the word out about your golf course while delighting your most popular and most loyal customers.
Those customers who refer others to your business are especially valuable, so make a big deal out of them with big rewards.
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Golf Business Canada
3. COLLECT LIVING, BREATHING, REAL DATA
Customer loyalty software makes it possible to collect high-quality data on everything. Know exactly who your top ten 20% of customers are and how they behave, so you can identify strategies for generating more of them.
The secret to getting the most out of your customer loyalty program is analytics. Advanced reporting that comes with most modern loyalty software makes it easy to identify purchase habit behaviours.
Loyalty software analytics allows you to segment customers into speci c groups: new, repeat, loyal, at-risk, and dormant. You can customize your segments based on your own understanding, and the software analyzes for you. A customer who visited 10 times in the last 6 months might be a repeat customer, whereas a customer whose last purchase was over 6 months ago might be at-risk.