Rewarding Your Fans/Customers- How Will That Impact Your Business?

    Of you’re running an online e-commerce platform or you’re an influencer with a decent follower base, you don’t have a lot in common. Your business model, your daily activities, and your long term plans will be completely different, the one thing you’ll have in common, however, is that the revenue you generate largely depends on a number of core clients/followers, and the way you treat them and approach how you handle them will have very long-lasting effects on your business’s success rate and growth. Here are ways you can reward your customers/fans and how that can be massively beneficial to you: 

    Rewarding Loyalty is a Really Good Idea 

    There is a reason why so many big chain-markets have reward programs where they offer discounts and free credit for their loyal customers. I can guarantee it isn’t because big corporations hate money and want to give away stuff for free, but, rather, it is empirically validated that the discounts actually drive more sales in the long run even if you’re selling those products at a loss. These are even more important to someone with an e-commerce platform or an influencer than it will be to big businesses: 

    • You have a much smaller list of core clients/followers that you need to keep happy: because of your position in a niche corner of the Internet, this means there will be a limited number of people who are going to be interested in what you have to offer. And as business school and real-world data tell us, only 10% of your customers/followers are responsible for most of the revenue you’re generating. Keeping this group happy and engaged is much more important than getting a few extra clicks on your website or social media channel in the long run. 
    • Offering rewards for desirable behavior is what all of economics is built on. It indubitably works, and we have more than a century of studies to back it up. You can use to your advantage: for example, influencers can use Fourthwall to reward their followers each time they buy one of their merch. This can be a great way to ensure they sell more merch and capitalize more on their follower base. This is just a single example of many innovative ways you can incentivize desirable behavior in your customers/followers by offering rewards. 

    Encouraging Your Clients/Fans to be More Engaged Means More Money

    If you talk to older shop owners, you’ll probably hear old stories about tricks they’ve used to keep their storefront look “busy and products in-demand” so, paradoxically, more people would go to their store. While those old tricks won’t work in today’s digital work, there is an eerily similar process at work behind the curtain. Search engines and social media algorithms take a plethora of variables into accounts before showing a piece of content to someone. 

    The main variables that decide you’ll be featured on your followers’ home page, on YouTube’s front page, on Google’s first search engine results page all are the number of interactions and reactions your website/platform is getting. When you’re rewarding your fans for being more loyal and interacting with your website/social media more, you’ll be able to use them to get more popular in the long run. You don’t need to do many expensive stunts, replying to your customers’ feedback, offering individual discounts, and replying to your fans in the comment section can be an excellent way of rewarding them and driving up the engagement on your platforms. 

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    • Tom La Vecchia

      Founder of New Theory & X Factor Media

      Founder and Publisher of New Theory Magazine and Podcast. Serial Entrepreneur who loves wine, cigars and anything that allows to people to connect and share experiences.

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