Nurturing current and attracting new customers to sustain and increase profits should be a core marketing initiative of all retail businesses.

According to marketing strategists at Outboundengine, increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to a profit increase of between 25% to 95%. The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%. Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 4x as likely to refer and 7x as likely to try a new offering.

So why not reward these customers?

adumo Engage is a cost-effective service that adumo clients can activate on their standalone payment devices, or integrate via their adumo integrated payment services to their point of sale (‘POS’) systems.

By enabling adumo Engage on their standalone card machines, retailers are able to reward their customers based on the value of their spend. adumo’s POS-integrated Loyalty solution, offers deeper insights into individual product purchases and basket composition enabling them to reward customers at basket and item level.

Jodi Kearns, Senior Manager for adumo Customer Engagement notes that “the adumo Engage platform allows clients to deploy their own simple and transparent loyalty programme that is easy for customers to use and understand” noting that if rewards are not immediate and uncomplicated, customers tend not to bother with the programme”.

The adumo Engage solution is a customisable, plug-and-play marketing tool that is fast and seamless to implement, as opposed to expensive, enterprise developed loyalty systems which can be complex and take long to get off the ground.

Kearns notes that one of the key benefits of adumo Engage is that it offers a closed-loop network, meaning that customers can only spend their earned rewards at designated merchant stores. This ensures that the value is retained and the programme owner is guaranteed of the spend returning to their store network. Customers are instantly notified of their reward on their current purchase, printed on their payment slip, as well as their loyalty balance available for use for their next purchase. This drives return visits, repeat purchases and customer loyalty.

Looking ahead, Kearns says that there are a number of new features and enhancements that are being designed within the adumo Engage platform to increase visibility and insights into customer and programme data which will provide valuable input into retailer and store manager marketing strategies and campaigns.

“We are converting anonymous swipes into known customer purchases, providing transparency of transactional activity and purchase behaviour and allowing the retailer to better understand and engage with their customers,” concluded Kearns.