Shaping Up With Nutrition Shop Loyalty

USING A CUSTOMER LOYALTY PROGRAM TO ENHANCE YOUR NUTRITION SHOP

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Your mom always said to take your vitamins, and Vitamin Loyalty is the best supplement for your nutrition shop!

The nutrition industry has seen a steady increase in business over the last few years, and there have been positive trends towards fitness and personal well being. An industry analysis found that one in five Americans has a gym membership. IbisWorld also noted that consumers are seeking a healthier lifestyle, and are increasingly using products that help meet nutritional needs. These are some of the driving factors to the success of nutrition shops, and because of this interest in fitness,nutrition, and health, many of the associated products have also seen a spike in popularity. A study found that the global nutrition supplement market is worth $82 Billion dollars, and is expected to see annual growth between 5-6% until 2020.

What these figures show is a continually growing industry, full of both consumers and new retail stores entering the market all the time. To ensure that your nutrition store is the one that prospective customers choose, you must provide incentives that go beyond the point of purchase. All of your competitors are probably selling near-identical products; it’s up to you to find a way to differentiate your business.

One of the best ways to set yourself apart from the competition is to utilize a customer loyalty program. A loyalty 3.0 program, such as the one offered by TapMango, connects your business with its customers, and creates value beyond the sale for all parties involved. One innovative way to increase customer engagement is to create marketing campaigns with your loyalty program. It’s fast, simple, and can truly increase your customers’ experience with your business.

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE FOR YOUR NUTRITION STORE’S MARKETING CAMPAIGN

The following is a guide to using a loyalty program to create and run a multi-step promotional campaign for your business. By utilizing a number of different features, you can create seamless ways to increase your customer engagement. This will allow your business to strengthen its relationships with customers, while also increasing in-store foot traffic.

To take you through this step-by-step guide, we’ll use a specific example of a nutrition store that uses and demonstrates some of the features of customer loyalty to help facilitate the process. This guide will provide your store with its own personalized initiatives, a strong selling point for your business.

Our marketing campaign example:

Campaign Title: 8 Week Fitness Challenge & Protein Bars
Product/Service: Weekly fitness exercise and consultation + ISOFlex Protein Bars
Length: 8 weeks
Communication: One email per week (with challenges to complete throughout the seven days) + Ongoing nutrition consulting throughout the challenge

This campaign ties the fitness challenge you provide your customers with the protein bar promotion. Throughout the fitness schedule you provide, the protein bars will be marked for when they need to be consumed, to tie the two together. This will help to generate sales for your store, and lets your customers know of the fitness challenge you have started. With the outline of our campaign example in place, we can now begin to put the necessary steps in to bring it to life.

Follow the process below, and look for the infographic at the end of the blog.

STEP 1: START YOUR CUSTOMER LOYALTY PROGRAM

Your very first step in creating your fitness challenge is hopping on the loyalty craze! Whether you’re upgrading your pre-existing system to loyalty 3.0, or you’re starting from scratch, you’ll have access to a number of features that will automate the process, and make your life as a merchant far easier. While each individual feature has its own function, when they work together they become cogs in a machine, all working towards a unified goal. When used well, a loyalty program is the best tool your business can use to create its marketing campaigns.

STEP 2: MAKE THEM AN OFFER THEY CAN’T REFUSE

Now that your business has a loyalty program, you can begin to innovate the ways you offer your loyal customers targeted promotions. For example, Instant deal is a major feature highly used with loyalty 3.0, that allows customers to pre-purchase using sms or email when you want to provide a promotion for a specific product or service. This gives them the option to pay digitally, and come into your shop later to pick up their purchase. It also means you can collect your profits immediately, by letting your customers make the payments online instantly. This way you don’t have to wait for them to come into your store. Instant deal also allows you to set limits on both time and quantity to make the promotion exclusive.

To create a sense of urgency for your instant deal promotion, set a maximum number of participants to 30, and a time limit on the promotion for 48 hours. We recommend sending it over the weekend, so your participants will have more time to review it. By giving consumers certain parameters, you’ll increase their desire to purchase as soon as possible, and those who miss out will learn to act quicker the next time you send them your promotions. You’ll be surprised how quick people will jump on these deals.

With our fitness challenge example, here is a breakdown of the cost, and how your business would value it for its customers:

By offering an exclusive discount to your loyal customers, you strengthen your relationship with them, and in turn, generate long term profit.

STEP 3: TARGETED COMMUNICATION

As a nutrition shop, the products you offer yield a number of different kinds of customers, each visiting your store with a different purpose in mind. Ensuring your customers receive only relevant promotions is imperative, as it will be one of the reasons why they choose your store over another one. A study found that 74% of consumers are frustrated when online promotions have nothing to do with their interests, so your business should stay clear of mass messaging its customers.

One way to guarantee that your loyal customers will only receive relevant messages from your business is to group them based off of their purchasing patterns. Your loyalty 3.0 program can automatically create different consumer groups based on predetermined criteria you choose, and you’ll be able to select who you send your specific promotions to. It will keep a digitalrecord of all those who are taking part in your fitness challenge, and will store all the necessary information about each participant. This way they’ll know that every time your store sends them a message, it’s tailored to their interests, and they’ll actually make an effort to read it.

Set the grouping feature to automatically create a list of participants for you, consisting of only those who bought your instant deal from step 2. This allows you to send the fitness challenge to only those who signed up for it, and no one else.

STEP 4: START YOUR CAMPAIGN

Now that 30 of your customers have purchased the promotion and signed up for your challenge, you can initiate your campaign. The campaign feature automates the delivery process for the messages you send to your customers, so once you have written out your content, it can be scheduled any time in advance. This is great for updating your customers with the different challenges you’re planning, and giving them notice ahead of time.

For your fitness challenge, create a timeline for when you want to send check-in messages to your participants (say every Sunday), and your digital loyalty platform can deliver them for you! Automating your messages lets you plan for the future, meaning once you put them into the system, all the work is done for you. This allows you to focus on other aspects of your business, while running your fitness challenge at the same time.

STEP 5: INCREASE THE INCENTIVE

As your challenge is on its way, offering your participants an additional incentive to promote your business can easily be integrated into the process. With a loyalty program, there’s a number of simple activities, outside of making purchases, your participating customers can do to earn points at your store, or any rewards you choose to give them.

For example, have your customers upload a selfie to Facebook of when they’re completing your challenge to receive $5 off their next purchase. Or get them to refer a friend to your store, and your loyalty program will be able to reward them for their recommendation. Providing your customers with a reason to promote your store is a great way to spread the word, and it will benefit everyone involved.

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STEP 6: UPSELL YOUR CUSTOMERS

Once you’ve scheduled your fitness challenge messages, your participants will begin to come into your shop on a weekly basis to pick up their ISOFlex protein bars, and receive their one-on-one consultation with you. This is a great opportunity for you as a merchant to talk to your customers and build a relationship. Checking in on how they’re doing with the challenge and asking them for feedback are great conversation topics that can go a long way in fostering a connection.

Additionally, when your customers come into your store to pick up their purchase, you have the opportunity to upsell other products as well. Within the eight week period of your challenge, there is a great chance that your customers will want to buy other products, and your fitness challenge will create a reason for them to come back to your store at least once a week. Make sure that your emails mention that you have other promotions in store! For nutrition shops, there’s many products like meal replacements or vitamin supplements that customers are always looking for, and this means you can capitalize further on the instant deal you’ve already conducted.

STEP 7: REWARD YOUR LOYAL PARTICIPANTS

While loyalty programs may offer a number of great features for your business, you cannot forget its fundamental component: Customer Loyalty! Showing your customers that you value the relationship you have with them is important, and will bode well for your store. Being known in the large nutrition community is vital to your success, and there is potential for your customers to speak positively to their friends on your behalf – if you treat them right!

Show your appreciation for those who participated in your fitness challenge by offering themrewards every time they complete a weekly challenge. Whether it is points for your loyalty program, or a small discount, anyway you reward your customers will let them know you appreciate your relationship with them. These incentives will create more desire to complete your future fitness challenges, and in turn, visit your shop more often!

_{Image sources: Ada Florea Fitness, Hypepotamus, Colour Box, PNGPIX, HH Fitness}

IT’S TIME TO GET IN SHAPE

With more and more people jumping on the fitness and wellbeing train everyday, there is no better time to be in the nutrition industry than now. With so many different kinds of consumers making up your customer base, and with all the competition that is out on the market, finding ways to provide benefit beyond a customer’s purchase is ultimately how you’ll obtain their loyalty. By using a customer loyalty platform like TapMango’s, you are able to connect with your customers, and can offer them personalized content and services that best fit their individual needs. Using our promotional blueprint, you can see how the different features of a customer loyalty program come together to create campaigns that will help shape up your business.

TapMango offers your retail store the above and many other features to help your customer base grow. To get more information regarding customer loyalty, and marketing campaigns for your retail store, feel free to contact us here.

For any questions or concerns regarding this article, please contact us at pr@tapmango.com.