Customer Loyalty Programs

Using cards to retain customers & increase shopping frequency

The winners in the battle to retain customers are those who create one or more competitive advantages in the minds of consumers. A Loyalty Program is a powerful way to provide continuous reasons for your customers to prefer your business over another.

Points for purchases
The first step in creating a Loyalty Program is to decide what point value to assign to customer purchases. You may assign points per dollar or per purchase (frequency). For example:
$1 = 1 point (recommended).
$1 = 10 points (or other amount)
1 purchase = 10 points (or other amount)

Award levels & redemptions
Loyalty programs may be set up in a variety of ways to reward customers. The three most common are Auto Rewards, Mutliple Rewards, and Open Rewards. See descriptions at right.

The Loyalty receipt
The terminal prints a receipt which tracks the points added to the customer’s Loyalty account and provides a total for all points accumulated to date and available for redemption (point balance). To eliminate confusion, no previous redemptions are shown.

Reports
The system will provide reports indicating loyalty points earned through purchases, a summary of redemptions, transactions voided, balance inquiries and other activity relative to that merchant’s program.
AUTO REWARDS PROGRAM:
a simple, extremely powerful way to reward your customers by automatically converting points to spendable value on the card. Merchants select a single point level and the reward amount the points are worth. For Example:

$1 spent = 1 point earned.
50 points = $5 reward added to the card.

This approach is successful because your customers will have either points or cash value (or both) on their cards at all times.

MULTIPLE REWARDS PROGRAM:
up to 6 (six) Award Levels may be set up for a card program. Each time an award level is reached, the terminal will print a message advising the merchant and cardholder that the cardholder is eligible to redeem an award at that time. The cardholder has the option to not redeem an award and continue accumulating points towards the next award level. Award levels, values and prizes are determined by the merchant and may be changed at any time.

OPEN REWARDS PROGRAM:
with open rewards, no reward levels are set up at all. Points simply accrue and are redeemed in any amount the merchant chooses. This allows a merchant to change the metrics of their reward program at any time without making any changes to the parameters that are set up in the host system. Merchants who anticipate running continuous specials and one-day loyalty promotions should set up under the Open Rewards program.