Acquiring and keeping customers is critical to building a profitable, thriving business. Repeat customers help to ensure continuous growth for your business and are, therefore, essential to your success. As a result, loyalty programmes are fast gaining traction worldwide as a means to encourage and retain repeat customers. In addition, these programmes provide valuable customer information and buying behaviour data, which can be used in marketing campaigns.

Arch Retail Systems, leading supplier of integrated retail management solutions in Southern Africa, offers a loyalty solution, integrated with Arch Retail (in-store solution). Infinity is the software assurance partner of choice in this offering.

The Arch/Infinity rewards solution provides a competitive strategy, essentially a relationship between store and loyal customer, where both parties gain from it. Customers have the following benefits with the solution:

• Earn CashBack rewards.
• Transparent and easy to understand.
• Automated competition entries.
• Discount to cardholders only promotions.
• No card/membership joining fee.
• Bank-your-change benefit allows the customer to save their change onto the loyalty card.
• Cashback earned can be redeemed at point-of-sale.
• Till slips display rands awarded and the balance.
• Gift cards can be loaded onto a loyalty card.
• Balance enquiry can occur in-store (self-service kiosk) or online.
• Cardholder app – substitute for a physical card.

In this symbiotic relationship, retailers also have benefits:

• Less expensive overall than acquiring new customers.
• Increases revenue because loyal customers trust your brand – statistically customers with a loyalty card spend more than a non-loyalty customer.
• Allows for growth turnover without sacrificing profitability.
• Helps to develop targeted marketing campaigns with measurable returns using product preference and buyer behaviour data.
• Direct mobile marketing channel via SMS – 90% of SMSes are read within three minutes.
• Supplier campaign involvement - carries part of cost and offers product level rewards.
• Presents an integrated internal or supplier-backed competition platform.
• Can apply different reward percentages to different products.
• Can allocate different rewards percentages to different customer tiers. Pensioners tier, etc.
• Management report options to measure system performance.

Since inception of the loyalty programme (2015), Arch and Infinity have seen tremendous growth in the application of the solution in Arch stores in Southern Africa. The biggest group running with the solution is OK Foods (399 stores). The impact/success of the solution is continuously measured. See the following case study, courtesy of Infinity – “Growth challenge – results after one year on loyalty”:

It is evident from the above that the success of the program prompted the issue of more cards. Not only did the number of cards increase, but the revenue per cardholder also increased. The total revenue increased by 32.04% within one year. The revenue growth was fuelled by an increase in average spend/cardholder (80%) and an overall growth of basket size (35%), with the loyalty basket growing by 46%.