Making your customers feel valued, appreciated and connected gives you more than just warm fuzzies. New customers are great, but you should never forget about your existing audience.

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These loyal buyers or users of your service obviously matter when it comes to sales, but they can also share their love of your business with others – and that’s more valuable than any ad.

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The perfect way to do this is through incentives programmes, especially designed for the outcome you want. Whether that’s encouraging customers to buy more, repeat a specific action like renewing a subscription, write a review or refer a friend.

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Here’s how it works:

You already give your customers a unique product or service – their incentive experience should be unique too. You can develop a programme that best fits your audience needs by finding out the following:

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Goals: What are you trying to achieve – repeat purchases, subscriptions, reviews or referrals?

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Budget: what are you prepared to spend on meeting your goals?

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Customers: What are the needs and wants of your customers, and what does your relationship with them look like? What kind of insight can you get from the data in your current system?

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Churn: Who are the customers at risk of leaving and who deliver the most value?

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Turning insight into reality

Once you’ve answered the questions above, you can move forward to bring your programme to life in three steps:

1. Planning: A programme designed to match your customers’ needs and wants.

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2. Delivery: Bring it to life, by building a software platform and sourcing gifts and incentives from incentive partners.

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3. Communication: Communicate your new scheme to your customers and put the rigour around to support them if they need it.

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