.png)
One of the most challenging aspects for marketing consumer packaged goods is building and maintaining customer loyalty. Many CEOs of CPG brands focus their marketing strategies on attracting new consumers, but fail to implement a tactic to keep them. According to SalesCycle, “returning loyal customers spends 67% more than new customers”. Instead of putting most of your marketing dollars in lead generation, you should consider investing in a customer loyalty program.
Customer loyalty is building and maintaining a positive, interactive relationship between your brand and your customers. Coming up with marketing strategies to build brand awareness is the first step to attracting your target consumers. Attracting shoppers is fantastic but now what? You still have to make it worth their while to stick around. Shoppers want your online presence to be positively interactive, entertaining, and consistent. They want their shopping experience to feel painless and easy. The key word here is consistency. You can build trust with your customers with consistency over time!
Just like building a relationship in a budding romance, your person of interest wants you to be consistent in your actions, your words, and they want to be heard. The same goes for maintaining a loyal customer base. To apply this concept into an effective marketing strategy, you can create a CPG loyalty program.
The first step in building a customer loyalty program is to know your target customer. If you haven’t already, create a buyer persona of your ideal customer and imagine what their lifestyle is like. What do they do for a living? Where do they live? Age range? Hobbies? What social media platforms are they into? Also, think about how your CPG products can solve any challenges they may face in their daily lives, and cater your marketing towards that.
Next, look into your database to see which products your current customers value the most. You should check into your retailers, website entries, social media analytics, and any third party data collection to see the demographic insight of your customers and which products they like the most.
Once you have the data in hand or in sight, you can create a loyalty program that will be valuable to your ideal customers. When it comes to CPG marketing, you have to be creative and innovative to effectively stand out from other brands. No longer should you only rely on in-store marketing, you need to move into the online digital space to connect with more customers all over the world.
Related Post: In-Store Promotions For CPG Brands
For an effective CPG experience, your brand messaging and product packaging marketing should be consistent. This is where product psychology comes into play. Since people associate things with experiences and emotions, you will want to ensure your consumers are viewing your product the way you intended. Creating your brand, product, and online presence should all have a strong identity that customers can relate to.
The main focus is to create an image in your customers’ mind using words and visual cues that will resonate with them. This is effective with display ads, television ads, and, believe it or not, social media. To build a relationship with a customer, you will have to put your brand and products out there by introducing yourself and showing them how your product works.
Catch their attention with colors, images, shapes, and show them all the benefits they will receive if they buy your products. In your video content, narrate a story that will resonate with them. Give them plenty of reasons why your product beats out the competition. The key is to give your new and existing consumers the opportunity to think about your brand before and after they make a purchase.
Speaking of social media, you can create visuals for people to interact with. One way to build customer loyalty is to get and keep your customers involved with your brand. Give them a reason to like, follow, and share your content with their friends and followers online. This method will keep you subconsciously in the forefront of their minds. The next time they see your brand in retail stores, they will remember the positive experience they had with your social media account and make a purchase.
The most popular types of CPG loyalty programs are the point systems rewards and tier rewards. There are many other loyalty programs out there, but for consumer packaged good marketing, these two are the most favored by consumers. Both types allow customers to easily sign up online or in-store, and offer valuable promotions and incentives to keep current consumers buying more. Not only will this increase sales, you will also create a long-term relationship with each customer.
Consumers love these loyalty programs because it builds excitement. You reward them for being loyal, and it gives them a valuable reward to use. A certain amount of points can redeem digital coupons and free products.
If you are a CPG brand in the food and beverage industry, one way to use these programs is to allow customers to upload their receipt onto your website or app, using their membership login credentials.
This loyalty program rewards customers points based on certain behaviors and transactions. After signing up for the program, you can give your customers points for every dollar spent, or a certain amount of points for each product. Or you can get creative and allow points for subscribing to email newsletters, referring other customers to download your app, free points for their birthday, etc.
This customer loyalty program is similar to the point system, but uses a different method. Tier rewards offer incentives based on their spending levels. Each level unlocks a different benefit or coupon for the customer. For example, for every $20 spent in a month, the customer receives a $5 off coupon. For every $50 spent in a month, the customer receives a $15 off coupon. Or for every $100 spent in a month, the customer receives an exclusive free sample or full sized product.
You can get as creative as you want with loyalty programs. But when building one, make sure your ideas meet the needs and wants of your consumers.
Sampoll helps your CPG brand with customer loyalty and retention by offering an unique loyalty program with cashback rebate product sampling and exclusive offers! They help reach new and existing consumers using a multi-channel hyper targeted approach, which attracts high intent local shoppers to get to know and try your products.
Once the customer opts in, our digital brand ambassador “Sam” engages and educates your new customers through customized 1:1 conversations at scale! “Sam” uses your brand’s tone and verbiage to communicate with your customers, giving them a positive, consistent experience.
Based on your consumer’s convo with “Sam”, it will collect first-party data, so that actionable insights can help effectively target your marketing dollars, identify behavioral trends, and understand customer sentiment. Sam captures this real-time feedback and analyzes trends in Sampoll’s insights dashboard.
Sampoll recently announced a new customer loyalty program that encourages repeat purchases and higher customer LTV known as the “Receipt Upload Challenge”. This new program helps answer the following 2 questions during your campaign “What are my shoppers worth to me?” and “How much does it cost to acquire that customer?” New pilot partners in early Q1 of 2023 are expected to benefit from the new “Repeat Purchase” feature and it comes complimentary for 60-90 days after the initial pilot campaign has lapsed!
If you are ready to see what Sampoll has to offer your CPG brand, book a demo with one of their sales reps.