The Convenience Retail Loyalty Playbook has been written to help retailers using our loyalty platform to get the best possible results from their loyalty program. Summarizing chapter 7, this video explains our top ten tips to in-store excellence for your convenience retail loyalty program.
Interested in reading more? Check out the loyalty playbook’s chapters below:
Chapter 1: Introduction |
Chapter 7: In-Store Excellence |
Chapter 2: Customer Connection Cycle |
Chapter 8: Rewarding With Stamps |
Chapter 3: How to Wow (Part 1 & Part 2) |
Chapter 9: Rewarding With Points |
Chapter 4: Recruiting Members |
Chapter 10: Success with Subscriptions |
Chapter 5: Engaging Your Members |
Chapter 11: How to Effectively Analyse Your Loyalty Program |
Chapter 6: Powerful Promotions |
Chapter 12: Operating Your Loyalty Program Successfully |
We love to share our knowledge!Explore the full Convenience Retail Loyalty Playbook by downloading it here
In-Store Excellence
As we’ve discussed, your “customer connection cycle” allows you to plan the most engaging ways to stay relevant to your customers, so in this chapter, we explain the in-store options available. Clearly, our intention is to ensure that your customers continue to enjoy a quick and efficient shopping experience, with your loyalty strategy designed to add extra moments of surprise and delight.
Happy customers spend more, engage more, and recommend your store.
Top Ten Tips for In-Store Excellence
- Only When Relevant: With our laser focus on optimising your customer’s experience, your loyalty programme in fact has a greater role to play outside of your store than inside, building your customer connections in ways you never had before. So our first tip is to only connect with your customers in-store if it adds value to THEM. What matters most for your customers in-store is that it is easy to earn and easy to redeem. It MUST be easy for them!
- Payment-linked Loyalty: This is perhaps the most powerful concept we’ve seen in recent years. By integrating your point of sale system with our loyalty marketing platform, your members can connect their payment card to their customer profile on our database, and then they earn and redeem their points and stamps effortlessly when they pay. Their payment card becomes their loyalty card so they don’t even need to open the app! Truly effortless loyalty.
- Eliminate Payments In-Store with Prepayments. Our subscription-led loyalty programmes offer so many benefits to customers and are particularly popular for coffee and car wash customers. By subscribing and pre-paying, in-store your members simply check out on the app when they pick up their coffee or start the carwash – and both your staff and your customers enjoy the revolutionary benefit of never needing to wait in line to pay.
- Personalise – carefully! If your store has regular customers, it’s sometimes really nice to greet them by name. We all love to see a familiar face but it can be hard for your staff to remember everyone’s first name. Our loyalty platform can be set up to show the customer’s name on the till so the cashier can say “Hello John” if it feels right! It can make the customer really feel welcome.
- Acknowledge Top Customers. One of the amazing benefits of a tiered loyalty programme is that even new staff can immediately identify those customers who are the most loyal to you and deserve to be acknowledged differently. By showing the customer’s tier status on the till, the cashier knows when they are serving a gold member, and by mentioning this, you can make the member feel happy and special.
6. Simplify Redemption and Let Members Pay with Points: Customers love the moment of redemption – when they enjoy the rewards they’ve built up over time. We actively encourage all programme operators to remind their members to redeem – as this is the real “proof-point” that builds trust in your brand and ironically also increases the member’s future spend in your store too! By allowing customers to burn their points at the time of a purchase transaction, their points finally feel like cash.
7. Plan Your Offline to Online Strategy: We believe in closing the loop between the ONLINE world and the OFFLINE world and building a complete “O2O” strategy. In the offline world for example, by placing unique codes on certain products, you can invite your members to share their feedback with you. They simply scan the code and then they can “rate” the product in the app.
8.Plan Your Online to Offline Strategy: Games are a perfect way to engage your members. Using our digital platform, you can print a game code on any receipt. The member can simply scan this code in the app to get unique content. For example, if they buy a Coca Cola, they can play the Coca Cola game with a fun chance to win a free Coca Cola voucher to redeem in your store!
9. Empower Store Managers. In our experience, your programme is most likely to succeed when it’s leveraged locally. You can empower your individual store managers with the ability to enjoy the full features of platform and set up local offers that are only valid in their store. Our customer excellence team can support you with the training they need to get started, and of course they can then take ownership of how their programme is performing using the programme as a powerful marketing tool.
10. Always Engage Employees. There are two great reasons for creating exclusive deals for your employees in your digital loyalty programme. Firstly, it makes them feel more valued and loyal to your business, improving your chances of keeping them on your team. Secondly, when your employees become active customers themselves and enjoy your exclusive employee deals, they truly experience a new way to delight their customers. This practical perspective ensures they understand how the programme works for the customer at the point of sale, and they will be more likely to recommend the programme and make sure their customers don’t miss out on the great deals you offer them. Truly a win-win approach.
Checklist for In-Store Excellence
About Us:
Liquid Barcodes is a leading global loyalty and digital marketing technology company specialising in the convenience store and foodservice industries. Our proprietary cloud-based technology platform allow retailers to create and manage their digital marketing campaigns with a proprietary process we call the “customer connection cycle’ to engage, promote and reward customers activities in real-time across digital and media channels.
How we do it:
We have developed the most advanced loyalty and digital marketing technology platform specifically for convenience store and foodservice retailers globally.
Retailers use our self-service dashboard to create and manage loyalty driven marketing campaigns that increase purchases with their existing customers, as well as effectively target and acquire new customers through partners or paid media channels.
One core component of live loyalty is gamification. We have gamified branding, loyalty and promotions. We believe this approach is essential in order to get customers’ attention and ultimately truly engage them with repeatable actions thereby winning their loyalty.
Check out some of our exciting/proven results here:
About Me:
Chief Content Officer, Liquid Barcodes and Loyalty Industry Podcaster
With over twenty-five years marketing experience, I specialise in loyalty marketing consulting, managing consumer loyalty propositions, strategy and operations. In addition to working with Liquid Barcodes, my clients have included Telefonica O2 Priority, Three Mobile, Electric Ireland, Allied Irish Bank and The Entertainer Group (UAE), as well as Avios – the global points currency for some of the world’s top airlines. I am also a former judge for the Loyalty Magazine Awards and host of the “Let’s Talk Loyalty” podcast.
