AU Special – Loyalty Program
A Non-Banking Finance Company (NBFC) headquartered at Jaipur, Au Financiers reaches out to low-income groups, self-employed individuals, First Time Users/ First Time Buyers and others, at far-flung locations across 10 states in India. Au Financiers provides financing in three primary segments –
- Vehicle Loan
- Housing Loan
- MSME Loan
The customers:
Customers from : Rural Areas / Semi-Urban Areas/ Tier 2 Cities/ Farmers
Their Presence:
Au Financiers is present in 9 states – Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Goa , where Majority Business comes from Rajasthan (~50%)
The Need:
Au Financiers did not have a customer engagement program. Its customer segment is primarily rural and dispersed in small pockets across the 9 states and doing traditional marketing is not a cost effective method here. Also, low technology penetration makes it inevitable for Au Financiers to use any form of digital marketing campaigns.
RewardPort’s Solution:
RewardPort offered an exclusive program, designed to make Au Financier’s customers journey as rewarding as possible – AU SPECIAL
- A Program developed on SMS & WEB to ensure maximum participation.
- Customers were offered various (Platinum, Gold, and Silver) Tier’s to marry the different/extreme spend patterns, {High/ Med/Low}.
- Personalized membership cards along Individual Login Id & Password.
- Regional language communication for better penetration and understanding.
- Differential Points were offered to Au Fin customer on (On-time EMI payment, 3-month consistency point, 6-months consistency points, add-on purchase points, guarantor/co-borrower, referral)
- An exclusive reward catalogue that offered unique products/ experiences to redeem points earned.
- A unique offer where Au Financier’s customers could redeem the points earned to pay their EMI’s
Result’s of AU SPECIAL Program:
- Increased sales By Including Enticing Awards
- Increase in Market Share
- Repeat Buying
- Retention of existing customers
- It Provided Vital Market Research
- Happy Customers
- Created brand advocates
- Edge over competition
Planning a #selfie contest?
First let us accept the fact – people love taking selfies! According to various reports, the average millennial will take 25,700 selfies in their lifetime; and about 93 million selfies are taken worldwide each day. People are more comfortable taking a selfie than asking someone to click their picture.
So is your brand doing anything to take advantage of this Social (here-to-stay) phenomenon? Selfie contests ensures the most direct engagement and connect between your brand & the consumer.
When planning a selfie contest –
- Come up with a great idea; the one that is simple & easy for people to connect with.
- Ask the consumer to feature your brand, this is a must!
- Give a compelling reason to participate: reward or fame will work well.
- Incentivise for multiple actions – Post, shares, tags, likes, etc.
- For a successful selfie promotion, it should run at least for 30-45 days, to have larger reach among your target audience.
- Engage actively on all the possible social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others.
- To gain the trust, pick winners and reward them, EVERYDAY!
- Make it less cumbersome; don’t put in too many conditions – just click, post, tag & win!
- Promote the contests, online & offline.
- If your target group is the youth, play around friendship. If its family then involve the participation of children.
Don’t let your brand miss out on the #selfie phenomenon!
10 Ways to make your Sales Promotion actually Work!
Sales promotions are a great way for any organization to incentivize & reward potential customers and motivate them to make the purchase. The key to a successful promotion campaign is the plan – right from the launch of the campaign until the very end of it.
Different Techniques That Make Your Sales Promotion Actually Work
1. Incentivization – Changing perceived value of the product.
Incentives are keys for a successful sales promotion as it increases customer participation & stimulates brand interaction. While choosing incentives, you should always think of your actual target audience. They need to be relevant. For instance, cartoon toys for the kids or movie vouchers for youngsters. incentives appeal to your target audience, that your brand is providing a value add along with the purchase. These incentives helps you sell more & gets your customers engaged with your brand for a longer time.
2. Communication – Online & Offline
Today, your customers have become more technology, online & offline media friendly, compared to how they were until few years back. Hence, they can be reached by social media or through internet on their smartphones. Combining the offline & online media is an effective & swift way to reach the target audience.
3. Collect, Manage & Nurture Data
Data collected can help in customer acquisition & retention. While maintaining the database, unusable data must eliminated from time to time to avoid disorder & confusion. To extract a long term loyalty from your customers, you need to make them realise their importance in your organisation, which can be done through the data collected.
4. Be Relevant
Sales promotion must be relevant to the product & target audience, easy to understand. This increases the probability of it resulting into a sale. It is necessary that the promotion hits customer at a particular behaviour stage.
5. Customize and Localize – attitude & behaviour of the target audience.
The sales promotions must suit the psychographics & demographics of the target audience, well adjusted to their requirements & conduct.
6. Clarify objective & provide tangible benefit – gain the customer’s trust.
The campaign should be able to clearly convince the customer that value received is much higher than the amount spent on the purchase. Be truthful about the objectives to foster a trustworthy relationship. Lay the foundation or a long term loyalty by offering substantial benefits & clarified objectives. The customers like to measure the added value they receive along with the purchase.
7. Timing, duration & frequency – maintain them.
If introduced at an appropriate time, sales promotions can yield great results. Being a time driven economy, in India festivals, occasions & seasons are great influencers for customers. If repeated too often, customers will be unable to differentiate between the added value and the original product.
8. Engage your customer – involve them.
The customers wants to feel special & appreciated; recognize this need & nurture it to witness groundbreaking results. Engage them with the brand and induce a sense of association & bonding with the product. Appeal them with contests, sweepstakes, coupons & rewards.
9. Integrate with the promotional mix
Sales promotion is an aspect of the promotional mix including advertising, personal selling, direct marketing & public relations. Intensify the efficiency of sales promotions by complimenting it with the other elements of promotional mix.
10. Integrate with social media
Promotions must be run on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & others. This generates sufficient word of mouth to increase effectiveness of the campaign.
Customer Engagement in 2015 & Beyond
A customer is not an interruption to our work, but the purpose of it. There may be a controversy about who quoted this, but the inherent truth in the statement can never be contested. Companies spend millions of dollars every year to attract customers, yet they manage to retain very few. Technology can help to bridge the communication gap between customers and brands, yet it threatens to make them lose the human touch. To quote an example from our everyday lives- how many of us have the patience to wait on the IVR until our call is connected to a human customer service representative?
Here’s What Every Business Needs to do For Customer Engagement in 2015 and Retain them for Years to Come:
1. Know your customers and know him well
When Wally Urtz, a store manager at the Food Emporium in Hastings-on-Hudson, a New York City suburb was transferred to a nearby suburb, the entire village of around 8000 people rallied around him. A manager may seem to be an unlikely person to set off such an emotional outburst, but he represents ‘a dying breed that is being replaced by something that people are resentful to and very unhappy about because the human element is missing’, quotes an article about him in the New York Times (October 26, 2003). Incorporating the human touch in our business isn’t difficult. Simple steps like calling clients, sending them letters/emails, or meeting them in person can go a long way in knowing customers and making them feel special.
2. Personalize the experience by using technology to automate communication in a scalable way:
Technology can be used to automate communication. This can be tackled by creating interactive documents and integrating elements such as drop down menus, data feeds, etc.
3. Emotionally engage…its beyond offers and discounts now:
Companies are obsessively fighting the price war, yet customers are more fickle than ever. Only those that can move beyond the price tag zone and create real value for customers can survive. As earlier said, know your customers well. And use this information to surprise them and personalize their experience. A discount driven approach cannot sustain for long, but one driven by customer loyalty can. To be successful in customer engagement, make sure that you tweak your business model to rely on loyalty.
3. Engage across channels:
A typical modern day customer refers to not less than 6 to 7 communication channels before deciding on a product. Some of them include website content, in store, or social media. Businesses should ensure that information passed through each of these channels shouldn’t be conflicting or ambiguous. Technology can help in this regard by standardizing enterprise wide systems, thereby allowing companies to send out branded messages via emails, SMS’s etc.
4. Mobile engagement is most effective…get this right:
Smartphone searches are all set to replace desktop search. Companies are now busy exploiting this trend with location based messages and mobile ads, incorporating mobile SEO and adapting a responsive web design.
5. Reward them for actions…even the simplest one:
Don’t we all thrive on attention? Rewarding customers with small surprises can go a long way in creating brand loyalty and increasing customer retention.
6. Make customers feel like a VIP:
The easiest way to show that you value customers is by being polite. Words such as ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ often seem insignificant until someone stops using them. Get to know customers interests and wants by using technology such as Google Think Insights and include these habits by publicizing and praising them openly.
7. Use technology effectively…build or outsource, but do it:
Technology can be used to get your message across its intended audience. Webinars can be hosted on topical issues, using QR codes, Wi-Fi targeting and arranging virtual meetings are some of the things that businesses can do. If adapting to technology seems an overwhelming task or if you are starved of time, outsourcing is a good option.
8. Use the Internet of Things to engage:
Market researchers have predicted that by 2020, more than 212 billion devices are likely to be connected through IoT. To explain IoT in a nutshell, this is a technology that enables people to connect everyday physical objects to the internet, enabling them to communicate with other devices and even transfer data. With IoT, you’d never run out of grocery supplies because your fridge could be preprogrammed to monitor stock and send a message to the local grocer automatically.
9. Participatory engagement- involve customer in your next product development:
A new product development need not necessarily involve inventing something new. More often than not, it involves modifying an existing product by eliminating its limitations. Involving customers in this process not only results in better customer engagement, but also ensures that the end result is in line with customer expectations.
Customer engagement needs patience and creativity. Creating brand loyalty is the ultimate goal because this is directly linked to profitability. But without maintaining a fine balance, your efforts are likely to backfire, because you may end up overwhelming him. There may be different ways of engaging a customer, but at the end of the day the main aim of every strategy is to create happy consumers who can promote your products to one and all.