One lesson most eCommerce store owners learn early on is that growing revenue and sales is made a lot easier if driven from a loyal, repeat order customer base. Whilst one time orders from fleeting customers have their place, they will never provide the sort of confident growth path that a burgeoning community of regular shoppers can create. With this topic in mind, let’s take a look at a couple of ways Mailbeez can both help to engender loyalty to your store, and increase customer created content.

Start a rewards programme

With Mailbeez, starting your own rewards programme is actually incredibly easy, and begins with a super handy module we call Reorder Advanced. What this deceptively simple module does is to monitor how many orders a customer has placed, and when that number reaches a predefined level (1, 2 or even 3 orders over a certain time span for example) it fires off an email to the customer with an embedded personalized coupon code. The value of the coupon code is of course completely up to you, but let’s look at some examples that strike a good balance between reward and profit retention:

• **1. If customer orders twice in 40 days

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  Suggested coupon: Offer free shipping for their next order
  1. If customer orders three times in 60 days

  Suggested coupon: Offer 20% off their next order
  1. If customer orders three times in 90 days

  Suggested coupon: Offer 10% off their next order

Next steps

Once your rewards programme is in place, it’s time to tell your customers about it. Whilst we would hesitate to give explicit details of your rewards scheme, it is definitely a good idea to put some copy and images in and around your website and general emails stating that regular customers get access to discounts and offers first. Have a think about the phrasing and what you want to achieve, but do try to make your wider customer base aware that you value and reward regular custom.

Reward content creation

What is one of the first things you do when looking for something new at your favourite online store? Our guess is that you just said ‘look for product reviews’, and if not, it’s probably in your top 3 of things to do before pressing the all important buy button. For your own store, it is equally important that you have a rich, recent and relevant quantity of product reviews to aid the buying process, but did you realize that you can also reward review creators with a discount code or offer?

The Mailbeez Review Rewards module is a recent addition to the Mailbeez stable (just a phrase, we don’t actually have horses) that gives you the tools to reward review writers. It works by simply scanning for new reviews written since the last cron job was run, and firing off a fully personalized reward email with an embedded pre-defined coupon code to their creators.

When rewarding review writers, the key to deciding the discount coupon value to provide is to measure how much the review is actually worth to your store. Remember, search engines love new content, and orders will increase as more reviews are written, so we would suggest being quite generous with your reviews, and offering customers something that will keep them writing, and buying.

Tell the world

Just like for the order rewards programme for regular buyers, it is a really good idea to tell your customers about your new Review Rewards programme, and for this we would suggest putting a dedicated page on your site to explain more, peppering product pages with references to the rewards available to review writers, and finally making sure to include reference to it in your transactional emails.

From a brand new customer in two minds as to whether to make a purchase at your store, or simply as a means to retain regular customers and reward loyalty, your new rewards programme could be the deciding factor that tips the balance towards greater sales in 2012.