How to Reward Loyal Customers Around the Holidays

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, loyal customers even more so. They are the ones who constantly choose your product or service over anyone else’s. They spread the word about you to their social circle which results in new customers for you. In a lot of ways, they are your biggest marketing asset. It goes without saying that you should show them how much you appreciate them.

But how do you go about it?

The answer is simple, really:

Reward their loyalty by offering coupons, discounts, and promo offers.

Before dishing out coupons and promo offers, it pays to spend a little time creating a solid customer loyalty strategy for the upcoming holidays. You can learn a lot by analyzing your current customer data and find what makes them take action. Based on the results, you can then set out to create coupons, discounts or even products. Make sure to outline terms and conditions for each holiday offer you create to avoid any confusion.

Here are a few holiday promotion ideas which you can use this season to reward your customers.

Create a special coupon to reward every customer that makes a purchase early in the season.

Consider offering a significant discount on an item of the day over a certain time period. You could offer it in the days leading up to the holidays or during 12 days of Christmas.

Ramp up your sales during the last few days just before Christmas by offering a free item or two and make sure to let your customers know exactly the time frame your offer is valid for.

BOGO sales are always effective so there is no reason to exclude them during the holiday season. Offer a buy 2 get one free or buy one get the second item at 50% for your most popular products and watch your sales go through the roof.

Consider offering free shipping on purchases over a certain dollar amount. Almost everyone is a fan of free shipping so why not put it to use?

Create a mystery gift along with some clues to intrigue your customers. Let them know the value of the gift in question or create a special holiday pricing for it but don’t let them find out what’s in the box until they make a purchase.

Once you create coupons or holiday discounts for your customers, you want to make sure they know about them. The most obvious way is to create attractive calls to action and place them on your website. A few great places include:

You also want to promote your holiday offers on social media and you can even take it a step further to offer coupons directly on Facebook and Twitter.

Finally, use email marketing to reach out to your customer base and notify them of the holiday deals.

Now that you have a plan in place and you came up with a marketing strategy, here are a few tools that will help you integrate coupons into your website as well as offer them on social media and in your emails blasts.

Coupon Creator is a free plugin for WordPress that will help you create various coupons that you customers can print and bring to your store to get a discount on your products. You can download the plugin from the official repository and there is also a paid version if you need more features such as custom range expirations, more visual styles, integration with WooCommerce, and more.

If you’re using WooCommerce for your online store, you can use this extension to allow your customers to buy credits for themselves or gift to others, automatically issue coupons on product purchases, generate coupons in bulk, “Apply Coupon with One Click,” and much more. A basic license for one site is $99.

Easypromos app allows you to increase visits to your store by distributing coupons which can be redeemed for discounts or gifts. Your promotion can be embedded as a widget or as a stand-alone micro site on your website, as well as live on your Facebook page, blog, Twitter, and link through a newsletter, email campaign, or through all of them at once.

Take your holiday promotions a step further with mobile marketing. Coupontools makes it easy to get started with mobile marketing. It’s the most powerful mobile coupon builder and distributor on the market. It allows you to manage digital coupon creation, distribution, user engagement and interaction, validation, data capture, and statistics to increase sales and grow your business.

This Magento extension integrates with the Cart Price Rule module to help you send coupon information to customer groups. It’s easy to use and includes several email templates that you can customize and then use to send coupon information to your customers.

This OpenCart plugin is a great option for generating coupons and offering them to your customers in exchange for an email address. It’s a great way to get your customer base interacting with your website and collecting their email addresses so you can stay in touch with them and send them coupons or discount codes during the holiday season.

Local businesses can take advantage of Facebook’s Offers features to create coupons that are posted to your business page’s timeline. Anyone who visits your page can then claim the offer and Facebook will send them an email to the address associated with that user’s account, which will contain information about the offer they’ve claimed. Users can then either print the email or show the email on their mobile device to staff at the brick-and-mortar business in order to redeem it.

It goes without saying that customer appreciation should be at the top of your mind throughout the year. But going the extra mile during the holiday season makes us all love our favorite brands even more. Use the ideas and tools mentioned above to get your creative juices flowing and create awesome holiday coupons and discounts.