Why Is Targeting Your Audience Important When Deciding Your Offers?
Target marketing is the most effective form of marketing to fulfill the end goals of each business i.e. ROI and sales. Any marketing strategy that does not keep into consideration the target audiences will always end up frozen in time with no effective results. Such vague communications never reach out to the prospective buyer and fall flat on the ground. Targeting audiences is a very important component of the marketing mix.
To understand the concept even better we have chalked out the benefits of targeting your audiences which are as follows –
Set Goals and Achieve Them
There is nothing more satisfactory than the fact that you set goals and achieve them too. Streamlining your efforts towards the designated goals can help you get great ROI. Scattered efforts in reaching out to a scattered set of audiences will not be worth your while. Talk to a designated group of audiences who share similar buying decisions and have similar buying patterns.
Gather Information and Interpret
Measure the results of the campaigns you run and interpret what worked. Divide the data into fragments and understand what percentage of your customers enjoy what offers and use them too. Experiment with a different set of audiences offering them different discounts and offers. This will help you understand your audiences and reduce wasteful efforts.
Know What works for you and Why
Understanding demographics and streamlining target audience is not an easy task. It needs consistent efforts and some experiments to understand what campaigns work and what offers work for your target audiences. Take time and understand what did not work for your business and enjoy what worked of course!
Here are a few tips of targeting to your audience –
Talk to and Benefit a Defined Set of Audiences
To save in time and effort, a business must understand that talking directly to a defined set of audiences will deeply affect them and they will feel the connection. Any offer or communication that connect with the desired audiences will hit the bullseye and make way for more orders.
Be Effective and Earn Customers Loyalty
Offers are lucrative and the higher the gratification the better. Ease of using discounts and discount coupons can help you as a brand to stay in memory retention resulting in getting customer loyalty. Bring effective in communication is the key too.
Opt for a Focus Centric Approach
As a business streamlining your focus can help you outshine your competitors and help you earn customers. Focus driven efforts are always fruitful in reducing errors and winning a loyal customer base.
Keep an Eye on Changing Trends
The market around is evolving each second and keeping pace with the change is the key. Keep a check on the latest trends ruling the charts and offer what you have at the right time, at the right place. This way you will hit the target audiences and offer what they want.
Putting effective efforts in decoding on how to target your audiences will eventually help in deciding offers for them. Keep in sight and stay together with the changing marketing trends will help you win business. Segregating your target audiences will help you offer them with the offers that best suit their needs. Like in the case of a company, one can easily opt for loyalty points for the audiences through loyalty program management tools.
Rewardport is an initiative that provides an end-to-end solution for any corporate in reward program management. Whether working separately or together. Through research and our collective expertise, we guide our clients with choices to help them motivate their people.
5 Power Moves to Retain Your Customers
Retaining your current customers isn’t going to be easy anymore unless businesses are flexible to bring innovative changes with the design or delivery of their loyalty programs. Hence, we bring you five power moves that will help you to retain your existing customers base.
1. Surprise with a reward
Holding your customers’ hands through their buying journey makes them feel appreciated. Surprise rewards bring added joy to your customers. Plus this element of surprise will encourage your regular product purchasers to keep an eye on your new offerings. It helps to deepen the relationship with your customers. Tap your existing customer’s data to draw beneficial insights into their ever-changing preferences. Targeting those specific needs and surprising them at an opportune moment with the right reward can aid in retaining them.
2. Segregate loyalty program
You have to be smart and agile to devise your loyalty programs based on the customer type. For instance, a firm selling makeup products can redesign its program for novice users, regular users or master make up artists/professionals. This differentiation helps to reach the targeted audience. Customers are likely to appreciate this move and want to purchase more.
3. Improve online user experience
It goes without saying that customers want to have the best buying experience online. Hence, it should be accessible on all devices and must be optimized accordingly. The rewards redemption process should be easy for customers. This power move will not just enhance the customer’s online experience such as swift navigation or gamified content and help companies boost their sales.
4. Give time-bound promotions
Firms can offer festive time-limited promotions that will keep their customers wanting for more. These promotions increase the conversion rate as customers act quickly to grab the best deals. Just remember to keep refreshing the discounted items as per the customer click insights and product preferences.
5. Add an extra touch of care
An additional touch of kindness or care exhibits your brighter side to your customers and shows that you care about their safety or health. To quote an example, a pizza shop updated their customers to feel free to take shelter in their shop in case they feel threatened. This touched the customers at a personal level and there was an increased engagement with the existing customers. This helped them to increase their sales and build a trust bond with existing customers.
The point of any brand’s loyalty programs is to drive more sales and increase the number of loyal customers. These points are sure to help you create better customer retention for your brand.
5 Festival Marketing Tips to Increase the Attention of Your Customers Online
Festivals are a joyous occasion for most people. More so, for loyalty program companies. It’s the perfect time to set in your marketing communication to grab more attention of your target audience and promote your incentive programs. A smart and tactful marketing campaign is key to nurture and expand your business converting regular customers to loyal ones.
Any festival is an invitation to purchase. This is when the shopping frenzy starts on full mode for most customers. Statistically, festival or the holiday seasons makes for the perfect platform to pitch in new campaigns and expect a fair share of response; in this case, sales of loyalty programs. Of course, it all boils down to you doing it right!
Here Are Some of the Festival Marketing Tips to Increase the Attention of Your Customers Online:
1. Emote well
Irrespective of what type of service or product you sell, make sure to sell it with all your heart. Or at least, your promotion techniques must reach the hearts. This simply implies that your promotional activities must have an element of emotions, it may leverage elements of sharing, kindness, etc. Such elements enable you to create more tangible and experiential memories for your audiences.
2. Mark up
Nothing screams intelligence and efficiency than a loyalty program promotion that utilizes the festivity to the optimum. The simplest but most savvy way of doing so is by hiking up the value of the services and products you offer. It might sound contradictory to common assumption but it’s a trick! The trick is “creating a sense of urgency” amongst customers.
3. Making every click count
Yet another tactic to leverage is by maximizing the pay-per-click spends ever so slightly. It is likely to make a world of difference for your brand by generating more potential customers. They could be further converted into faithful customers.
4. Goodwill matters
Do your brand charitable favour: partner with a nearby influential charity foundation or an NGO that works for a cause that your brand connects or relates with. This reflects the goodwill of your brand which most often connects with customers. That’s sure to add value to your brand image and subsequently increase your sales.
5. No stale mails
Email campaigns are one of the most recurrent modes of promotions especially during festivals or holiday occasions. Strategy, innovation and adept marketing skills are what a good email promotional campaign banks on.
The evolution of customers is constant and a necessity for the industry. This also adds to the demand and supply of innovative, quirky and motivating promotional activities. Every strategy executed upon by loyalty program company must be intended to create recurring customers whose faith lies with you and your rewards in the offering.
10 Ways to Build your Business with O2O – Online to Offline
A Garter Survey says that 98% marketers say online and offline marketing are merging. What does it mean for offline businesses who are feeling that they are losing out to online businesses? Simply put they have to embrace a O2O – Online to Offline business strategy.
What is O2O or online to offline Marketing?
The best & simplest definition is “A business strategy that draws potential customers from online channels to physical stores.” Online-to-offline commerce, or O2O, identifies customers in the online space, such as through emails and internet advertising, and then uses a variety of tools and approaches to entice the customer to leave the online space. This type of strategy incorporates techniques used in online marketing with those used in brick-and-mortar marketing.” as defined on investopedia.com
Marketers of large companies have moved beyond digital marketing techniques and are expanding marketing’s role to create new digitally led business models. The sweet spot of the physical and digital worlds represents opportunities for marketers to apply customer insights to create and test new digitally led experiences and business models.
Baidu and Alibaba are doing this in a big way in China while on demand services companies like Airbnb and Uber have made these into unique business models.
But what does this all mean for the small and medium size business. How do they adjust to this with limited resources?
10 Ways to Build your Business with O2O – Online to Offline Marketing
1. Customer Data
Start collecting data of visitors and buyers. This is the starting point and perhaps the key driver of your O2O strategy. The fancy e commerce valuations you see are mostly driven by data. Merchants need to put in place a system where you collect information such as name, email, mobile number and as you move ahead you can add transaction history and other data points.
Reward customers with offers and freebies to share data via website, sms or on paper. A simple tool to start with is www.zoho.com to manage the data.
2. Email and SMS
You have now data of visitors and customers. Segment it. The more data points the better segmentation. This is not very scientific. Just segment it by gender, area, age & transaction initially and then evolve to by birth date, preference, days of visit etc. Reach out to them by email or sms. Update them on offers, invite them to events, and wish them on their birthdays.
A good DIY tool for email is MailChimp , ConstantContact. SMS is a very cost effective direct to customer tool .There are local vendors who will provide this service for prices as low as Rs.0.10 per sms
3. Facebook
Most likely your customer is on Facebook. Set up your page and get people to like your page. Keep the page active with 4 or more posts a week. Always use images and if possible videos. Unfortunately, now it doesn’t mean that if you post all your fans see your post. So you will need to “boost” you post for a little fee. Use the Audience feature to add your data on Facebook to get people who already know you. This is another effective way to reach out to your prospects and customers.
Based on the size of your business it would be a good idea to manage the page yourself for a while and probably engage an agency when your ROI is up. There are many other tools on Facebook to help push your business. Create offers that can be redeemed in-store.
4. Twitter
A recent study by Small Business Customer website shows that nearly 60% of Twitter followers buy from an SMB. One way to initiate more traffic to your Twitter business page is by integrating a “follow” button on your website. Once your profile becomes familiar with existing customers, you can tweet to your followers about your upcoming product launches or trade shows and encourage them to retweet about your event. You can consider offering special discounts or freebies to your Twitter followers when they and their friends attend the offline event.
5. Instagram
Instagram will soon join the 100 million users club and if you haven’t yet used this innovative visual storytelling platform to meet your business goals, it’s high time you considered it. You can build anticipation among your Instagram community about your upcoming offline event by taking instant photos of your event’s stage being set and so on and post it on the website.
Another way is to send exclusive invites to your Instagram fans and encourage them to meet up at your store or on the streets and post photos of them using your products or services. It would be a cool idea to host such real life meet-ups among your online community to build your brand offline.
6. Google – Places and Maps
More than 70% of online Google search activity is related to finding local stuff. And nearly 80% of online local searches on Google Places can end up visiting your offline store. It’s time you considered it carefully to build your business. Here’s a way to initiate it. Make sure you have a 100% score on the Google Places listing by filling all details. Optimize your listing description with product/service keywords. Encourage your existing customers to give good reviews on the Google Places & Maps to stand out among your competitors.
7. Strategic Partnerships
Strategic partnership can jointly benefit you and your partner as you can offer value added services to your existing customers. It spreads the marketing load to each partner while promoting their respective products/services. More importantly, your relationship with customers gets strengthened. For example, if you are an offline music training center you can partner with an online music instruments selling website to attract new students.
You can distribute to your existing customers a free e-book or an online demo of your product/service that features you and your strategic partner(s). Make use of exclusive online discounts as a way of promoting your partnership among new and existing customers.
8. IOT
With the onset of the Internet of Things (IOT), offline businesses can harness it to offer customers a virtual like shopping experience. Take for instance, a fashion clothing store that makes use of iPad or tablets in changing rooms to help customers request various colors and sizes. IOT isn’t just about increasing sales, but leverage it effectively to boost overall shopping experience for your customers.
As an offline business, you can access the same level of information just like an online store to improve your new or existing customer’s experience. One way is to follow up data on your customer’s recent online shopping journey and offer special discount on products they looked online.
Your message can be something like, “Hello Jenny, the trousers you looked online two days ago is now available at our store at 10 percent off and its available in three additional colors.” The IOT technology can be harnessed to build better relationships with your customers like never before.
9. Wallets
Digital/online wallets can now be used not only for online shopping payments, but even for offline businesses. You can make use of this trend, whether you have a food store or a cab services company. Give your customers the freedom to pay through online wallets anytime, anywhere.
This can result in increased revenue, as your customers will be long satisfied since they aren’t required to carry cash or plastic cards to make payments when they avail your services or products. So whether you are a small start-up or a growing offline business, you have the option of choosing an extensive range of digital wallet services.
10. Loyalty
Simply put, there’s no shopper who doesn’t like to get rewarded. A loyalty program should aim at encouraging the loyal engagement of your customers, in other words get buyers to patronize your business. It can’t get any easier than using the digital platform to promote your loyalty program for increased offline revenue with repeat customers. You can reward loyalty points to your existing customers when they subscribe to your online newsletter.
You can also reward them when they refer their social network friends to visit your offline store. Another way is to conduct special online loyalty surveys to know more about your customers’ shopping activities both online and offline to gather valuable data. Just ensure the redeem limit is not too steep to reward your customers.
Following all these strategies require time and planning, get a team to work on these and plan accordingly. Similar to online revenue, offline store can gain more profit and revenues by being up to date. All the best!