Jewelry Industry and Retail News
We permanently get informed by our friends and partners from around the Web - about news, trends and/or best practice advice, loosely related to the jewelry retail business. Therefore, we present you here the most interesting or most useful of this information every month - from the following 3 top categories:
| Trends | Sales | Tech |
|---|---|---|
| Hot new/continued jewelry trends as presented to your customers from around the Web. See what they see when they scour the Web and think about your inventory. | Marketing news and related info that you could use in your daily operations. How to get your name out there, wherever you can and get people to know about your business. |
Tools and Trends (mostly tech related) that can make your business life easier. These are tools or trends that can help your business grow, get more organized, save more money, and/or streamline operations. |
Hopefully, you will get some tips/suggestions for your own business activities from this!
August 2016
Loyalty Programs Keep Customers Coming Back
For many small businesses, gaining new customers is a huge part of their growth strategy. New leads are important, but if you really want to expand your business, you might want to turn more of your attention to your current customer base.
According to marketing solutions provider Collect, loyal, repeat customers account for about 20 percent of your total customer base, but can generate up to 70 percent of sales because they spend more over time. Numerous reports have also shown that the cost of acquiring a new customer is much greater than the cost of retaining an existing one, anywhere from three to 10 times higher, depending on the industry and other factors, said Ben Hamilton, CEO of private air-travel service ImagineAir.
So how do you keep your customers coming back? One increasingly common strategy is launching a loyalty program. "Loyalty programs help retain core users and, when combined with delivering an exceptional customer experience, help turn them into evangelists for your brand," Hamilton said.
Of course, there's no set formula for a loyalty program, and there are a lot of different routes you can go. Some businesses choose to go low-tech and simple with a punch card, while others have an app connected to a digital-rewards database. Your biggest challenges will likely be in determining what benefits or discounts to offer, and sourcing or building a technology platform to support the program, Hamilton said.
To decide what to offer, Hamilton advised speaking to current customers to understand what matters most to them. This helps you avoid adding benefits that absorb resources but don't add much customer value, he said. "In developing our Platinum loyalty program, for example, we learned that realizing significant tax benefits is as important to our Platinum Members as providing the least expensive way to fly private," Hamilton told Business News Daily. "This insight played a major role in shaping our program."
If you're looking into tech solutions to help administer the program, Hamilton said to identify and prioritize your technical needs up front. Thoroughly research and vet the development talent to deliver those needs, or find existing technology platforms that can be customized to meet them.
"In some cases, initial implementation stages involve more manual, human effort, with automation to track and support the program coming later," he said. "Small businesses, though resource-constrained, also have the benefit of being more nimble, and therefore more able to implement new processes more easily."
Nicole Fallon Taylor | bnd.com
