Best practices

Although Loyalty Manager is very flexible and allows a lot of interesting scenarios, there are some more typical scenarios to consider.

Loyalty ideas

Please consider the following common sense ideas about a retail loyalty program:

The simpler the loyalty program is, the more effective it is. When the customers do not understand the rules and red tape, they do not feel the loyalty program benefits them.
Do not restrict but reward. For example, instead of limiting certain groups of customers from collecting loyalty points, reward the most frequent customers with additional perks, such as Sales accelerators (e.g., all customers who historically spent more than $2,000, get double points).
Create tiers of loyalty by using either Customer Groups, or the Club Accelerator. Add the most loyal customers to the top tier, but do not deny participating in the loyalty collection to the new customers
Encourage new customers by adding “New Customer Bonus” points.
Be generous and make your rewards sizeable. In general, the customer should get about 10% or higher discounts for participating in the loyalty program. A program which rewards the customer with 1-5% discount is not enticing.
Use Coupon redemption type and set the time limits on the coupon as way to encourage the customers to visit more often. Remember that lowering your margin by implementing a loyalty discount, will be offset many times over by the item and customer turn generated by the loyalty program.
Although Loyalty Manager does not require customer cards, it may be a good idea to have such. Design and order from your local supplier sequentially numbered loyalty cards and/or key tags (with barcode or mag-stripe) and distribute among your customers. On the first visit, add the card number to the customer’s Aliases list. At subsequent visits, simply scan the card into the POS “Scan” entry field and the customer’s account will be automatically found and attached to the transaction.

Typical loyalty scenarios

Hero Points

A sample scenario from the legacy Hero Points 3.X for Dynamics RMS. This scenario is designed to reward a customer with 10% loyalty discount.

Collection:
- Type: Price Points
- Point per Unit: 1 point per $1 spent
- Rounding: Up
- Show collected points detail: Yes
- New customer bonus points: 100
- Limitations:
  - Exclude employees
  - Exclude customers with discounts
  - Exclude customers with price levels
  - Exclude for vouchers
Redemption:
- Type: $ Discount
- Reward value per point: 3 or more levels, e.g., $10 for 100 points, $20 for 200 points, $30 for 300 points, etc.
- Reason code: a dedicated loyalty reason code

Such program may be made more granular by including or excluding certain incentives (item groups). Without those the collection schedule applies to any item in the inventory (except for those sorted out by the item type). When using incentive groups, you may limit which items do or don’t collect the loyalty points.

Moreover, with incentive groups it is possible to create different collection schedules that will allow you to collect a different loyalty value on different product groups. For example, instead of putting slow-moving items on sale, you can award higher collected loyalty value on these items.

Using customer groups you also can create different collection schedules with different accumulated loyalty value. This way, you create various “loyalty tiers” for your customers.

Q-Rewards

The following is a sample scenario from the legacy Q-Rewards for Dynamics RMS. This scenario is designed to reward a customer with a free item at the end of the collection cycle. The program only makes sense with an incentive (item) group, which includes the items of similar attributes: type, price, manufacturer, etc.

There may be more than one such loyalty program. For example, a coffee shop may have only few such incentive groups, e.g.

“Small hot regular beverages”
“Large hot regular beverages”
“Small hot premium beverages”
“Large hot premium beverages”

But a pet supply store that runs a “frequent buyer” program may include hundreds of these incentive groups, congregating the products by type, size, price and manufacturer. E.g.:

“Canidae Dog Small 4lb food bags”
“Canidae Dog Large 20lb food bags”
“Pedigree Premium Cat Small 4lb food bags”
“Pedigree Dog Small 4lb food bags”
Etc. …

A quantity points scenario:

Collection:
- Collection type: Quantity Points
- Include incentive group: “Canidae Dog Large”

Points per unit: 1 (one points per each purchased item)
Show collected points detail: Yes
Limitations:
- Exclude Employees

Redemption:
- Reward per point: for 10 points - 1 item at 100% discount
- Applies to the same incentive group as Collection: Yes

This loyalty program will collect 1 point for each purchased item from the “Canidae Dog Large” incentive group, and reward the customer with the free 11^th item from the same incentive group (essentially, it will apply a 100% discount to the 11^th item).

NOTE: Multiple collection schedules (one per each incentive group) can use the same redemption schedule, as long as “Reward per Point” stays the same and the rule to apply to the same incentive group as the collection, is turned on.

Basket Points

A following is a sample scenario from the legacy Hero Points 3.X for Dynamics RMS. This Basket Points scenario awards the customer with points only if a certain subtotal value (basket size) is reached, and rewards with a coupon discount.

Collection:
- Type: Basket Points
- Points per basket value: 100 points for $30 basket
- Limitations:
  - Exclude Employees: Yes
Collection
- Type: $ coupon
- Reason Code: Dedicated loyalty discount reason code
- Reward value per point: $3
- Coupon time limits: Activate after 7 days, valid for 30 days after activation

This configuration will award 100 points every time the customer spends at least $30 (before tax) and as a redemption issues a $3 coupon which activates in 7 days after issuing and is valid for 30 days thereafter.