How your POS system helps drive customer loyalty to keep them coming back

You don’t need to employ a large marketing department to keep customers focused on your brand and drive consumer loyalty. POS systems are a quick and cost-effective way of driving return business to your organisation. Traditional methods such as point based schemes or financial rewards are not enough these days to engage with consumers.

1 in 2 customers are regular users of a brand loyalty scheme and engage at least once a month or more. However, 40% of consumers have said, when asked about their attitude to loyalty schemes, they would need more that just collecting points to continue shopping with a brand. Customising your POS system with loyalty marketing offers that opportunity of engagement, relevance, personalisation and exclusivity required to put your business ahead of the competition.

Tracking consumer activity

In order to offer a personalised reward system, you need to be able to have the software to track customer activity and log the rewards they are building up. Multiple sources of data can be held centrally on your POS system, from stock inventory to record of sales which tracks both online purchasing and over the counter orders.

This allows the organisation to build up a picture of individual consumer habits and a transaction history. This is the cornerstone on which your customer loyalty programme can be built.

Customised loyalty rewards programme

Consumers want to feel special; they want to be recognised as individuals and a good POS system helps to build in this individual approach. You should be able to offer a personalised loyalty card linked to their POS account number and this can be branded with your logo.

The system will be able to apply discounts automatically to the consumer depending on their spending habits. There is no point offering 10% off all iced coffee drinks when it is clear from their spending habits, they are a regular smoothie drinker. What you might want to do is offer a discount on a food item that complements their regular purchase, to encourage them to spend more.

Offer group discounts and gift vouchers

The POS system should also allow you to manually apply discounts to groups of consumers. This is good for groups of regulars to the premises, such as office workers, local meet and greet clubs or just family and friends who like to hang out once a week.

Offering a discount or a loyalty card that applies bonus points for ordering bulk orders of food and drink (for example pay for 4 adult meals and one child in the group eats for free) encourages repeat business. Another way of ensuring a captive audience is to generate gift vouchers only to be used at your venue. A great way of retaining loyalty, POS systems will also automatically log when the vouchers have been used or when they are out of date.

Personalisation

In order for consumers to use their vouchers or reward scheme, they should have to create their own account with the relevant details. This enables you to capture valuable data, not just a way of communicating directly with them, but to gather more information.

You can then automatically generate a ‘thank you’ email, with a small bonus gift such as a free drink or discount voucher. From there, by integrating the POS system information with the backend, you can build up to sending out a voucher when it is their birthday, if they eat in-store and bring a friend. New products can be showcased, and you can share updates or promotions customised to their preferences and spending habits, so they feel part of the brand.

Make sure your POS system does all this and more by speaking to the experts today.

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Interesting related article: “What is Customer Loyalty?”