Loyalty marketing is a marketing approach that is based on strategic management in which a company decides to use certain incentives in order to retain existing customers and get new ones.
Loyalty marketing includes product marketing, brand marketing etc; as strategies or ways that will induce the customer to continue buying the products or taking advantage of the services being offered in the future or leave off.
Types of Loyalty Marketing
Branding
Branding is a necessary way to ensure that the customer remains loyal to your product or services as the branding process ensures the maintenance of the brand so that the name is only ever considered by your customer or potential customers in a positive way.
As such brand management involves looking at how much to charge for the product, how to make the brand look attractive and reputable to the customer etc.
Brand management concentrates on the brand and how that brand can remain favorable to the current customers who are applying for the company’s services and products.
Maintaining your brand the right way can guarantee that your there are higher sales of not just the products that customers are generally buying but other products or services that are associated with your brand as well.
For instance if you look at Pillsbury biscuits, if the company continues their brand marketing in a very successful way then this will ensure that more customers return- not just for their biscuits but for other products sold by them as well such as their chocolate chip cookies.
Product Marketing
Product marketing is meant when you are pitching or launching a brand new product to the public. Product marketing focuses on the product type, the customer’s needs as well as the geographic region whereby the product will be launched and the type of customer who will be likely to buy the product or take up the services being offered.
There are four main questions that product marketing aims to answer:
1- Which products will be offered?
2- Who will the target customers be?
3- How will the products reach their target destinations
4- At what price should the products be offered?
In order to make certain that these questions are rightly answered and that a better understanding of the customers’ needs and the kind of products they need are being offered by the company, you often have one person who acts as PMM (Product Marketing Manager) in order to address all the issues mentioned above.
This person is thence indirectly responsible for ensuring that customers remain loyal to the product- based on the information s/he collects about customer preferences, the areas in which the product may be marketed etc, the organization sets about creating the product which will then in the end be either favored by the customer or rejected.
Loyalty Reinforcement
At the same time there are also certain steps that you can take to ensure the loyalty of your customers towards your products
For instance you can use a Simple Points Program
This means that whether you decide to offer the customer a freebie or discount, after a certain number of purchases you can offer customers a number of points to gain some reward- Bolocco for instance grants its customers free purchases for some time after they have initially spent at least $50 on some good- be it a large burrito or even a small drink their customers will be motivated to return because they know that their purchases after a certain amount will garner some form of a reward!
Use a Tier System
Another way to ensure that the customer keeps coming back for your products is to use a tier system; which is to say that you keep offering small rewards that build up to a bigger reward to enable the customer to desire to return to your organization and buy more and more products or make use of the services being offered.