How to Start a Membership Club for your Loyal Customers

When you operate a business, whether a small shop or a large franchise, you know how important your customers are to your success. You do your best to ensure your customer satisfaction is always high and that they’re having positive experiences in your locations. Even when customers are happy with their experience, 60-80% may not return to you. A loyalty-membership-rewards-perks club (or whatever you want to call it!) is a great way to combat this statistic and keep customers coming back to you. You can offer freebies, promotions, and discounts to members. No matter which angle you decide to pursue for your loyalty program, it will help you with return conversion rates – and return customers are prone to spending 67% more than new customers. Your current customers are definitely worth the investment into a rewards club.

Every type of company can benefit from a rewards membership club for their customers!

Food Services

Whatever type of food or beverages you offer, you know that your customers tend to stick to what they know and like and that they’ll come back for more. Offering a simple club app, card, or stamp-able coupon that tracks purchases as they work their way towards a free anything (coffee, sandwich, pastry item) is a great way to reward your customers that frequent your shops the most.

Retail Stores

Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, there are ways to provide sample size products to your customers for free.. Reach out to companies related to your brand (local artisans, too!) and see if they would be willing to provide free or inexpensive samples of their products. Offer these products to your rewards club member customers as a way to incentivize sign ups. This not only introduces your customers to new products but could give you an idea of the type of items customers are looking for so you can stock your shelves accordingly.

Small Business

When you’re a small business, you can often feel like you give enough away for free or at heavy discounts to simply drag customers away from the big guys. A rewards program does not have to run you dry. Use the rewards program as a way to upgrade or give access to additional products. For example, your customer could have the ability to buy certain products that aren’t offered to non-members and can be a way to incentivize people to join your club. If you sell makeup, offer a monthly lipstick colour that only your rewards program members can buy.

How to Drive Sign Ups to your Membership Club

Club membership rewards are all about getting your customer base to want to be a part of your business’s program. In brick-and-mortar or ecommerce, you need to drive sign ups. There are a few ways to pique interest and monitor the success of these.

Grab sign ups in-person. At the register, ask people to sign up for the membership rewards and have something available to incentivize them right there.
Encourage sign ups via email. In your email campaigns, share the limited access or the special offers that membership club customers receive.
Put your perks on a microsite. Build a microsite all about your perks program. Hover offers the .CLUB domain name, which would be perfect for your microsite! If a microsite isn’t necessary for this endeavour, simply create a landing page dedicated to your brand’s loyalty program that you can link out to in advertisements.
Share about the perks on social. Whether your customers are posting about their freebies or you want to brag about the membership offerings, share it on social. Make sure to have a custom hashtag like #yourbrandsclubperks.
See what works. If people are clicking through on your email, liking your social posts, and visiting the microsite, yet they’re not signing up for your program, it’s time to do some better research. If you haven’t already (and you definitely should have!) ask your customers about what perks matter most to them and what they would like to receive from your brand.

Incentivizing loyalty is a great way to maintain your customer base. If your customer knows they’ll work their way up to a free breakfast sandwich if they visit your coffee shop on the way to the office, as opposed to your many competitors, then they will be more keen to choose you. Get your customers involved in your membership club and give them the perks they deserve!

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