VEMT

Mastering Retail Loyalty: Building a Strong Local Customer Base

In today’s competitive retail landscape, offering great products isn’t enough to keep customers coming back. Local businesses need to focus on building loyalty and engaging with their community in new ways.

Here are some essential insights to boost customer retention:

Optimize Your Visibility
Make sure your business is easy to find both online and offline. Consistently update your details across online directories, including Google Business Profile, and enhance listings with high-quality images and videos. This acts as your virtual storefront and increases foot traffic.

Leverage Local SEO
Local businesses need to prioritize local SEO. By targeting location-based keywords and optimizing for mobile, your store will rank higher when potential customers search for products or services in your area.

Build Loyalty with Reward Programs
Loyalty programs are vital for driving repeat business. A well-designed program not only incentivizes customers to return but also increases customer lifetime value. Solutions like VEMT’s Loyalty Manager make setting up and managing these programs simple and effective.

Turn Customers into Advocates
Referral programs can turn your most loyal customers into powerful brand advocates. Offering perks to both the referrer and new customer fosters a win-win scenario, driving organic growth.

Investing in these strategies ensures that your local business stands out and thrives in the digital age. Read more at: https://www.vemt.com/becoming-the-local-hero-boosting-your-business-with-loyalty-and-smart-marketing/

Marketer: do you experience elastic or inelastic demand?

The pandemic is still there. But growing vaccination rates cause consumers to return to pre-pandemic behavior… or aren’t they? This is a crucial question for marketers like you: are your customers picking up old patterns again (including purchasing your products or services), or won’t they? And what are you going to do about it?

Elastic or inelastic demand
Part of the marketing-puzzle is to figure out if the demand for your product or service is elastic or inelastic to the pandemic. If your customers stayed away due to store closure, travel restrictions or changed behavior, will customers catch up (soon) for all missed turnover? If so, then your demand is elastic. We see this in some parts of the travel industry: people are now booking extra luxurious trips since they want to ‘make up’ for missed adventures. Business Realtors, construction and even cosmetic surgery are other examples of companies that experience strong ‘catch-up behavior’ from consumers proving demand can be elastic.

But if you run a restaurant, it is unlikely that guests will come in and order 20 meals to catch up for all the missed romantic dining nights. You’ll deal with an inelastic demand and will not able to fully recover from missed turnover. Similarly, when your company is a (shoe) fashion retailer, cinema, hairdresser, event management bureau or catering company. The list is quite long, unfortunately. Are you unable to recover all missed 2020-2021 sales?

What can you do?
In that case, you probably wonder how you can make your business less sensitive to inelasticity. Some companies have learned during the pandemic that owning a high-quality subscriber list, or even better, a strong customer loyalty program that goes beyond transactional rewards, is an important part of the formula. Both mean that:

Read more on: https://www.vemt.com/marketer-do-you-experience-elastic-or-inelastic-demand/

Interesting to see what Deloitte mentions as one of the 6 new post-covid emerging digital trends: (the stuff we've been doing for some time) Innovative Rewards. Check this out: https://www.vemt.com/deloitte-mentions-innovative-rewards-as-one-of-the-six-emerging-digital-trends-in-post-covid-2020/