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Leveraging Digital Loyalty Schemes for Local Business Growth

05/03/202403/27/2024 by scmarketing

With constant competition and evolving consumer expectations, it’s no secret that local businesses need an edge. A digital loyalty scheme, if created and deployed with finesse, can deliver just that.

If you’re a local business owner in the Croydon area navigating the digital revolution, a well-executed scheme can drive customer loyalty, attract new patrons, and position your brand at the forefront of your community.

The question isn’t if you should deploy one, but rather, how do you make your digital loyalty scheme not only work but excel for your business?

Benefits of Digital Loyalty Schemes

Increased Customer Retention

Loyalty schemes are a beacon of appreciation towards your customers. By implementing a digital format, you streamline the user experience, and by doing so, you inherently increase customer retention. With rewards on a mobile device, you’re front-of-mind every time a customer checks their phone.

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Digital loyalty schemes can turn your customers into brand advocates. Word-of-mouth referrals are amplified when shared online, and the visibility of your brand grows with each digital stamp or point earned.

Boost in Customer Acquisition

A well-crafted digital loyalty scheme has the power not only to engage your current customer base but also to act as a magnet, drawing in new customers. When locals discover the added value in your scheme, they’re more likely to choose your establishment over the next.

Implementing a Digital Loyalty Scheme

Choosing the Right Loyalty App for a Local Business

When selecting an app, prioritise those that offer customisation options, good reporting features, and a user-friendly interface for both your team and your customers. Tailoring the programme to your business’s unique requirements is key to its success.

Some customer Loyalty Apps we’ve seen include Reward Stamp or Stamp Me.

It’s also worth researching any local specific apps you can register your business on. For instance in Purley, Croydon there is the InPurley App which lists local venues, shops, offers and more.

The hospitality sector is well versed in loyalty schemes and often with the use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to enhance loyalty and manage customers to help drive engagement such as with SevenRooms.

Setting Up a User-Friendly Loyalty Program

Simplicity is key. Clarity in communication, easy-to-understand rewards, and a clear progression pathway are crucial.

Training Staff and Educating Customers

Your team must be well-versed in explaining the scheme to customers. Clear and consistent education materials for patrons, both online and in-store, are also non-negotiable. When your staff and customers are in the loop, the scheme is far more effective.

Digital Marketing Tactics for Promoting Loyalty Schemes

Social Media Campaigns

Leverage the power of your customer’s favourite social channels. Engage with your local community through social media by using your loyalty scheme as a talking point. Contests, customer spotlights, and sneak peeks into rewards can generate online buzz.

Email Marketing Strategies

Your customer’s inbox is a prime real-estate location. Create targeted and personalised emails to communicate the benefits of the loyalty scheme. Whether it’s a welcome email, a progress update, or a special offer, ensure that your emails add value and provide clear calls to action.

In-Store Promotions and Signage

Physical marketing materials within your store help bridge the gap between digital and in-person experiences. Well-placed and attractive signage can inform customers of the digital rewards waiting for them.

Collaborations with Local Influencers or Businesses

Teaming up with local influencers or businesses can extend the reach of your loyalty scheme. A recommendation from a trusted local source can have significant clout with your community, and joint promotions can also add allure to your scheme.

Digital Loyalty Schemes – The Possibilities

The digital loyalty scheme landscape is a rich tapestry of possibility for local businesses. It’s a fusion of technology and personal touch that can transform the way you interact with your customer base. The key to unlocking its potential lies in strategic implementation, clear communication, and consistent promotion.

By investing in a digital loyalty scheme, you’re not just investing in a rewards programme; you’re investing in the growth and sustainability of your business in the local community.

If you need support navigating this arena, just drop us a line and we can chat further about your digital marketing plans and how we can support.

Digital Marketing Trends for 2024

12/19/2023 by scmarketing

As we head into 2024, it’s time for small business owners to start planning their digital marketing strategies for the new year ahead. While 2024 will surely bring its own challenges, understanding emerging trends will help you stay proactive and make informed decisions to move your business forward.

In this article, we outline key digital marketing trends that are projected to gain even more momentum in 2024. Whether you’re just beginning your digital presence or looking to optimise your current efforts, understanding these shifts in consumer behaviour and innovation will help ensure your business makes the most of online opportunities well into the new year.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming one of the most important digital marketing trends for 2024. AI can be used to automate many tasks such as content creation, lead generation, and customer service.

AI can also be used to create personalised experiences for customers by analysing user data and providing tailored recommendations. Consumer behaviours have undergone quite a transformation. In the past, customers could only sit and wait for a business to respond to their queries. However, times have changed, and now, customers demand immediate responses. Conversational marketing, powered by AI chatbots and virtual assistants, has become the go-to solution for this need. With artificial intelligence (AI) guiding customer interactions in real-time, businesses can provide the seamless personalised experience that customers crave. Such interactions increase customer satisfaction by providing instant solutions to their problems and providing shopping assistance, ultimately leading to increased sales.

In 2024 and beyond, forward-thinking brands will rely on conversational marketing to reshape how they engage with their customers. By leveraging AI, businesses will be able to increase their efficiency and reach more potential customers.

Enhanced Personalisation

Consumers expect unique and personalised experiences that cater to their specific needs and preferences. With the abundance of data available from various touchpoints, brands are leveraging sophisticated analytics to tailor their marketing strategies to individual consumers. This approach enables brands to provide content, product recommendations, and advertisements that are customised to each individual, resulting in a more engaging and effective marketing campaign.

As big data technologies and machine learning algorithms continue to evolve, personalisation will become more refined, making mass marketing strategies increasingly obsolete. The ability to provide enhanced personalised experiences will be a key differentiator for brands in the future, and those that succeed in this area will gain a significant competitive advantage.

Video Marketing

In the world of marketing, video has long dominated in recent years. But with the rise of short-form content platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, the dominance of video marketing has taken on a new dimension. Short-form video’s visually stimulating content is perfectly aligned with the modern audience’s attention span, resulting in its widespread consumption. Brands have taken notice of this shift and are using short-form videos not only for advertisements but also for other storytelling purposes, product launches, and customer testimonials. As a result, video marketing’s importance has only been compounded, and it looks to be the driving force of advertising for the foreseeable future.

Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that allows users to interact with virtual objects in real-world environments. AR has already been used in some digital marketing campaigns, but it is expected to become even more popular in 2024 as more businesses look for ways to engage their customers in unique ways. Businesses can use AR technology to create interactive experiences that allow customers to explore products from different angles or virtually try on clothes before making a purchase decision.

Automation

Automation is another digital marketing trend that is likely to become more prominent in 2024. Automated marketing tools can help marketers streamline processes such as social media scheduling, email campaigns, and website optimisation (SEO). Automation will enable marketers to focus on more strategic tasks instead of spending time on mundane tasks such as manually creating content or tracking analytics.

Leverage Digital Marketing Trends in 2024

As we head into 2024, ensuring that your business is keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends and leveraging them to stay competitive will help you remain at the forefront of small business success and prepare for new opportunities as they arise. With the right understanding of today’s market conditions, you’ll be well on your way to using digital marketing to advance your business goals in 2024 and beyond!

Get ready to make big moves and capture an even bigger audience with your digital marketing efforts in 2024!

Digital marketing must-haves for 2022

08/19/202211/23/2021 by scmarketing

Now is a great time to take a look at some of the digital marketing trends that you can tap into to help your business be seen online.

Create and manage your database to greatness

So, a database may not be a marketing trend as such, but it is a key asset for your marketing strategy. If you haven’t already got a database, consider this vital for ongoing personalised communication.

There’s a number of tools that can help with gathering data in an organised way that allows you to manage creating your email marketing database moving forward.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can help such as Hubspot. However, you need to capture people’s details in the first place so it’s important to have tools such as a pop-up box on your website so that you can ask for web visitors email address in return for receiving something such as a regular newsletter.

Think about what may entice people to part with their email address such as creating some interesting one-off campaigns for quality content such as an ebook with sector insight relevant to your target audience, or industry specific templates or discount codes.

Video

We’ve said it before, and we’ll most certainly say it again – make sure you incorporate video as part of your marketing plan. The pandemic made sure that video was vital for communication. But even more so for stand out when you are marketing to cut through the noise and be visible on social media.

Once you have web visitors, videos are known to increase engagement which keeps people on your website for longer.

Word of mouth

Let your customers become part of your marketing. Whilst the traditional view of the marketing funnel sees the customer at the end, if you change mindset and envisage a circle with the customer at the centre, then this becomes a very exciting proposition.

Keeping the customer central to all that you do will help them become brand advocates and help to promote your service through word of mouth sharing to their networks on social media.

Improving content

Fresh and regular quality content is so important for search engine optimisation (SEO), but you may sometimes feel overwhelmed at the thought of having to write blogs each week and constant social media or monthly e-newsletters. So, firstly think quality rather than quantity.

Then look back at all the content you have produced over the years. You’ll find that on your website you can look back at historic blogs and repurpose them with up-to-date statistics, new keywords or links to articles.

Not only that but taking existing content and repurposing it for a new podcast, webinar, or blog post can be an efficient way to keep your website relevant in search engines.

Digital marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice relating to local SEO services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals for the year ahead.

Wooden dice with email symbol for digital marketing communications

5 benefits of email marketing

01/31/202202/23/2021 by scmarketing

Research indicates that 99% of consumers check their email every day with many citing that it is the preferred way to receive brand updates. With this in mind, here’s some of the benefits of incorporating email marketing into your overall digital marketing strategy.

1. Build your own database

Having your own contact list is invaluable for brand awareness and reaching your target audience.

With the stats showing that consumers are continually checking their email all day, every day. This digital marketing tactic provides a great way to spread your brand awareness.

Having a pop-up box on your website means you can ask people to sign up to your email newsletter for updates on promotions. This can help you grow your database which will be GDPR compliant.

Owning your own contact lists is vital for lead generation. Whilst social media is great for awareness and can help with long-term search engine optimisation strategy (SEO), remember that you don’t own the list of followers on that platform.

2. Personalisation

We often talk about personalisation and reaching your target audience at the right time and how they choose. An email marketing campaign can certainly help you achieve this.

You can segment lists so that tailored communication goes out to the appropriate audience at a time suitable for them.

You can also split test your subject lines to work out which resonate with your target audience the best.

Marketing automation can also help with timely emails when an eBook is downloaded from your website.

When you are sending emails, make sure your tone of voice resonates with your target audience.

3. Build your brand awareness

An email design that is consistent with your brand colours and messaging will help you build and maintain awareness of your business.

You can repurpose content from your blog posts and place into your email template which saves time and also provides another way for people to read your insight.

Analytics such as Click Through Rate (CTR) will help you understand the type of content that your contacts like to receive so that you can continue to tailor your communications accordingly.

Email platforms such as Hubspot also measure Click To Open Rate (CTOR) which analyses the percentage of unique recipients who clicked a link after opening the email.

This type of analyses helps ensure that you continue to personalise your emails in relation to your target audience needs as you can understand what content or types of Calls to Action (CTA) are engaging best.

Having this insight into understanding what articles are proving most popular with your audience will help you to continually tailor your content marketing whether email, social media or PPC advertising.

4. Cost-effective and timely promotion

Whilst email marketing allows you to run your regular monthly update email it also means you can run timely communication about promotions at short notice.

Unlike a traditional marketing campaign of print advertising, email marketing is very targeted and therefore cost-effective.

5. Increase website traffic

Your website is the centre of your digital world, everything you do should lead back to it. This makes email marketing a perfect way to help drive traffic back to your website and specific landing pages.

With interesting newsworthy content in your email marketing, make sure you have bold call to actions that encourage people to click through to ‘read more’ or ‘download’ via your website.

Once on your website, good navigation will help keep a visitor on your website for longer and ultimately your goal of either purchase or booking a consultation for a service.

This strategy also helps with your ongoing website optimisation.

Email marketing agency resources

Email marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re able to offer businesses inbound marketing support for improved lead generation including developing an email marketing strategy.

Other digital marketing tactics include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.