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About Loyalty Campaigns
First thing …. a Loyalty Programme is different to a Promotional Campaign. Though there are many cross-overs and the two can work in together to create nice complex scenarios.
A well designed customer Loyalty Programme offered by your company can be invaluable in driving repeat sales.
You may “incentivise” your clients with a Loyalty Programme by offering merchandise, rewards or loyalty points.
You can even create a Loyalty Campaign for your own CSRs.
There are many online articles about creating these “repeat business” incentives, but the one thing you don’t want to do is create an administrative nightmare for yourself where the time taken to run your loyalty scheme out weighs the benefits.
There is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple.
KISS – “Keep It Simple, Stupid”
My preference is to award loyalty points based on dollars spent, which can then be redeemed against a future purchase.
Why do I prefer points rather than free items for loyalty ? Because points cost nothing unless they are redeemed – Free items are an immediate cost to you and your business.
By default, the AU BOM has been configured as 1 Point earnt = $0.01 to redeem.
That is, 100 points to redeem equals $1.00.This way, your loyal customer doesn’t have to try and convert their points back into spending power.
Start Up Points
Let’s say you want to entice customers away from competitors or other online ordering platforms ( the pros and cons of this are a topic for a separate discussion ). Maybe you have just started up and want to encourage customers to sign up wt=ith your Loyalty Programme. Perhaps you are just a nice person and want to share the love a bit 🙂
In BOM / System Settings you can specify Start Up Points that get automatically awarded when a new customer registers.
Manually Update Loyalty Points
Sometimes it may be necessary adjust a customers Loyalty Point Balance manually.
Navigate to BOM / Customers / Customer Name / General Tab and select <Change Points>
Note that you can not only change the points, but also set start / end dates for their use too ( so you could give away some points instead of comping a meal and set that they have to be used within a month )
( While there I’d change that 1970’s photo too ! )
Earn Loyalty Points
The principle here is “Spend More to Get More !”
Every time your customer participates in the Loyalty Campaign they will get a predefined number of loyalty points depending on what and how much they purchase, either with or without a minimum receipt value.
To encourage your customer to enroll in your loyalty programme, you may optionally award them “sign up points”, as well as offer bonus points for birthdays etc.
These points can then be redeemed for future purchases.
The following table will hopefully make it clear, based on the idea that “on a future customer purchase I want to give a discount as a reward for loyalty”.
Today Spend |
Points Earnt |
Tomorrow Spend |
Redeem Points |
Which Equals |
“Discount” |
$1.00 | 5 | $1.00 | 5 | $0.05 | 5% |
$1.00 | 10 | $1.00 | 10 | $0.10 | 10% |
Limit The Use of Loyalty Points
Maybe you want to limit how many points can be redeemed at a time.
When you create a Customer Group ( BOM / Customers / Groups ) you can enable “Set Points Limit”. You can then set the maximum number of points that can be redeemed per day / week / month / quarter.
Tiered Loyalty Points Programme
Now it is time to get real snazy with your Loyalty Programme.
Basically, the more Loyalty Points your customers receive, the higher loyalty level they will reach. The higher the level, the more rewards they will get. This will be done with an “Auto Filled Customer Groups” and Promotional Campaigns targeted at that / those Customer Groups.
More in another post, but Customer Groups can be either :
Manual Customer Group : It is up to you to manually add / remove Customers from the Group
Auto-Filled Customer Group : BOM lets you create rules / criteria for dynamic membership of a Customer Group
Let’s do this by example ( we have used Group1000, Group2000 Group3000 – but you could just as easily call them Bronze, Silver & Gold ( Dungeon Keeper fans would prefer Imp, Demon Spawn & Warlock ).
In BOM / Customer / Customer Group create a new one called Group1000
Enable “Auto Filled”
Set Total Points as a range FROM 1000 to 1999
Do the same for Group2000 ( but the range is 2000 to 2999 )
Similarly for Group3000
They will look something like this ….
Now you can create Promotional Campaigns targeted to these Customer Groups
For example :
Promo5 – 5% discount for Group1000
Promo 10 – 10% discount for Group2000
Promo15 – 15% discount for Group3000