Is Your Business or Club Missing Out on the Benefits of Membership Cards?

More than ever before, savvy businesses are using membership cards to strengthen and sustain customer loyalty. Whether you're grappling with customer retention issues, seek to sharpen your competitive advantage, or want to increase upselling and customer lifetime value, a membership card can support your overall marketing efforts in a real and meaningful way.

Besides the positive impact on the top line, the value of retaining customers becomes apparent when you consider that the cost of acquiring a new customer is over 30 times that of keeping an existing one. Winning consumer loyalty can be quite challenging given the following statistics:

A membership card that offers discounts and special offers can be the incentive that customers need to make repeat purchases and curb the tendency to compare brands before every purchase.

A powerful marketing tactic for small businesses

Small businesses may initially be focused on cash flow and revenue generation, and effective customer engagement may not be a huge priority. The first thing that may come to mind on the subject of membership cards can be 'money-off deals', instead of the value of rewarding customers for their business and continued patronage.

Customer reward strategies can go a long way in making customers feel special and cared for. Small businesses are already well-poised for intimate and personalised interactions with customers. Membership cards can grow and solidify the relationship, helping ensure that the brand is always in customers' minds. This front-of-mind awareness is crucial in pushing customers towards your product/service every time they experience such a need.

A reputation enhancing tool

61 per cent of consumers would tell their family and friends about their brand experiences. Membership discounts and offers give consumers a reason to recommend your brand to their contacts. Not only do they increase customer appreciation, but also pique others' curiosity about you, encouraging them to try out your offerings.

Retain existing customers

Customer retention rate has a direct impact on the top line as well as the bottom line. In five years, a business with a 70 per cent customer retention rate would have lost up to three times as many customers than a business with a 90 per cent retention rate. Membership and loyalty cards offer a strong reason to continue buying from a business. It is often seen that once customers start using special offers and redeeming rewards, their enthusiasm for the business as well as engagement with it grows.

Gain new customers

The perks offered by your membership card will determine how effectively you will be able to acquire customers. As already stated before, it is more profitable to retain customers and try to increase their lifetime value or upsell to them, than invest in new ways to get more customers.

In his research involving a well-known retailer, author and loyalty expert Brian Woolf found that after a year of becoming a customer, just two out of every thousand new customers - a mere 0.2 per cent - were in the top customer segment, while just twelve - or 1.2 per cent - were in the second segment. Also, between 95 and 96 per cent of new customers were either in the lowest segment or had abandoned the business by the end of the year.

The quality of new arrivals can be improved by assessing the data of loyalty programs. The data can help understand the demographic similarities of existing, high-quality customers, which can then be used for tailored targeting of prospects who fall within similar demographics. In fact, access to customer data is a huge benefit of membership cards. Cards that have magnetic strips capture customer data at the point-of-sale, giving you a glimpse into customers' frequent purchases, so you can create suitable discount vouchers reflecting their preferences and buying habits.

An analysis of customer data, purchasing behaviours and loyalty levels will reveal who your best customers are. You can spend the necessary time, money and effort on your best customers to increase their shopping cart values and the return on your marketing investment.

How Plastic Membership Cards Can Increase Membership Numbers

Do you have a club or association? Would you like to increase the number of your members?

Then you should know that people like to feel that they belong to somewhere and that they can be proud of their ideas, values and lifestyle, the reason people choose to join a club and organisation being the fact that they can find all these over there.

So the way to turn the odds in the favour of your organisation is to do something that will make people proud of belonging to it, something that will help to prove their belonging.

A plastic membership card is the best solution, as you can offer such a membership card, designed to incorporate your club’s or organisation’s distinct signs, to every member that will choose to adhere to the actions and activities you unroll.

The plastic membership card is a discreet sign, something that will be held only by a member of an organisation, as an appreciation for his or her interest and efforts towards that organisation.

To make such cards a minimum amount of funds are required, as the manufacturing process is rather straightforward. You can choose to make the cards general or personalized, for some of the most trustworthy members of your club.

A personalized card will always have a bigger impact because people enjoy being noticed and appreciated within a community, even with the help of simple gestures like offering them a membership card.

If you want, you can make cards for different levels of involvement or based on the experience of a member of the organization. You can have cards for newcomers, for the most active, and so on, as you are the one to determine the levels of evolution within your group.

Another reason that makes investing in plastic membership cards an excellent choice is the fact that the members that have such cards can promote your club or group.

They may talk to other people, tell them about the group their joined and what it is happening during meeting and activities, also showing them the membership card.

Of course, this is not something you can ask from your members, but it will happen involuntarily as they will want to share their experience with the people around them.

So soon, you may see new people interested in joining your club and organisation as well, as they have seen the elegant card and have listened to the enthusiastic story presented by the ones that are members already.

So if you were looking to become a more presentable entity and help members, and future members, feel like they belong to certain social movements, the plastic membership card will help you achieve such a status.

Many clubs and organisations already opted for this feature, choosing to create personalised cards for each member, as they are much more appreciated than the general membership cards.

Extra value for customers

Membership cards allow businesses the opportunity to enhance their value proposition. If you're a store owner-operator for instance, your membership card can offer exclusive cash rewards, early shopping hours or discounts. Free shipping or other value additions also increase the appeal of a membership. They all serve as incentives to buy from you instead of turning to the competition. You can't stop consumers from comparison shopping; but offering extras and inducements can tip the scales in your favour.

Win back inactive customers

The success rate for converting prospects is typically five per cent, while the rate for reactivating inactive customers can go as high as 20 per cent. Winning back customers has a high rate of success than acquiring new ones. An advantage you have with lost/inactive customers is information about their purchase history, contact details, and preferred communication channel.

Your customer win back program can help you identify the kind of incentives and rewards that elicit positive results and those that don't. You can use this information to attach the most-appreciated rewards to the specific products you want to share with customers/clients.

Leverage as a relationship building tool

Building long-lasting relationships with customers isn't exactly an easy job. A number of factors may work for or against you in your effort to engage, win and retain customers. Age is one factor. Studies in the UK have shown that customers under the age of 45 are most loyal and those over 65 are least loyal. Some other studies haven't found a clear relationship between age and loyalty.

We live in a world of the highly connected customer who checks reviews, ratings and peer recommendations on review sites and social media to make informed purchase decisions. Businesses that earn positive word-of-mouth are more likely to attract healthy traffic to their website, calls or requests for more information from prospects.

Building and nurturing relationships is less of a challenge when you have customers knocking on your door. But the task of reaching out to your target audience, identifying leads, and converting them to customers is effort-intensive and time-consuming. Here's where simple yet effective tools like a membership card can help in forming relationships and motivating customers to come back for more.

Self-sustaining

Once you've handed out membership cards to customers, they will keep doing the work for you. As long as they have their cards, your customers will want to make the most of your product/service and special offers.

The self-sustaining nature of membership cards can also relieve some your marketing costs. You don't have to keep sending out promotional material or invest in outdoor advertising in order to remind customers to keep buying from you or using your service.

Additionally, satisfied customers can act as brand advocates and personally recommend your business to their friends, family and associates. It can supplement your own marketing efforts and expand your customer base.

Printed membership cards have become a staple at clubs, associations and societies. If you own a club and don't have any kind of membership card program in place, here are four reasons to invest in one:

Unique card identity

You can personalise your club's membership cards with member data and protect it through an encoded magnetic strip. Sequential numbering on the card will serve as proof of the unique identity of the card-holder.

Motivate subscription renewals

Issuing membership cards annually has been seen to encourage a prompt response at the time of renewal. Unless your customers have made up their mind to discontinue your service, you can expect the membership card to keep reminding them of their association with your club and all the advantages that come with it.

A status enhancer for new members

People join clubs to participate in activities they like or socialise with like-minded people. The appearance and quality of a membership card can add to this appeal, hastening recruitment and retaining interest.

Security

Printed membership cards also act as a security tool. They can be manually checked or swiped to permit entry into your premises. It can ensure that only members have access to your premises and non-members cannot make unauthorised use of your services.

Why Colour Plastic Cards is the preferred provider of membership cards

We've been serving a diverse customer base of small local businesses, multi-national organisations, and sports, hobby and recreational clubs for several years now. Our company is founded on principles of superior quality and a customer-first attitude. A sizeable percentage of our sales comes from referrals and we're proud to have a large family of satisfied customers who rely on us for all their membership card printing needs.

Excellent value for money - top quality is our guarantee

Our locally printed membership cards are made from top-grade plastic to ensure the highest strength and durability. We don't cut corners and provide a quality product that enhances the reputation of your brand.