Loyalty Plans
| A well-designed loyalty plan will encourage customers to shop more often and spend more when they do. More importantly, an effective plan must increase sales enough to justify the cost of managing the plan in addition to covering the cost of the awards. The Merchant Plus! Loyalty Plan module offers tremendous flexibility in allowing a retailer to tailor plans to maximize true growth through rewards. Merchant Plus! provides not just the tools to analyze the Return on Investment of Loyalty programs but the flexibility to change plans as needed to meet profitability goals. |
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Award Options |
Features |
Plan Types
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Point Accumulation & Redemption Options
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Promotional benefits: The Merchant Plus! Data Mining tool can help drive traffic into the store for various reward promotions. One of the great benefits of a loyalty plan is that identifying customers with sales is easier when the customer is motivated to be linked to each sale. In addition, customers can be selected based on available awards, current points balances, points till the next award and if points are soon to expire. Customers can also be issued bonus points and points can even be redeemed through automatic selectivity. “Silent Plans” optionally allow for redemption through such selectivity so awards aren’t displayed at POS (this might assure another visit as opposed to customer demands to apply newly earned awards to the current sale).
Multiple Loyalty Plans: Any number of loyalty plans can be established and managed concurrently to allow various promotions targeted by customer types. Some plans can focus on increasing sales of the most loyal customers, others to increase the number of loyal customers. Plans can even be targeted to turn “sale shoppers” into regular price customers.
Customized Plans: Each Plan is highly configurable to meet a retailer’s needs, from basic reward programs to very targeted promotions for specific customer types. Retailers have great flexibility to control how and when points are earned as well as redeemed.
Example Plans: While the number of plan options is virtually unlimited based on the programs flexibility, the following are common types of plans:
- Basic Dollar Awards
- Basic Percentage Off Awards
- Buy X, get 1 Free (great for focused items such as cosmetics or shirt clubs)
- Buy X, get a Percentage Off
- Retained Percentage Plans, with or without increment accelerators
- Unused Savings Awards such as spend $X on clothing and receive $X in free alterations.
- Buy now and save later plans are a great incentive to build traffic or reward in-season shopping with sale event discounts
- Silent Plans allow for flexible and personal awards instead of published plans.
- Cooperative promotions such as Gift awards for another reciprocating business, such a local restaurant.
Analysis: Perhaps the most important aspect of any successful loyalty plan is that it works: that it generates enough additional revenue to more than cover the costs to manage the program in addition to the awards offered. This can only be determined by analyzing retention and how it is affected by the incentives of the plan. Tools are provided to measure changes and trends in spending by customer type as well as analysis of how awards are being redeemed and their margins and costs.
