To keep people coming back for more, there is nothing more powerful than saying “thank you”. Here are four new ways to reward your loyal customers for visiting your stores, purchasing your products, engaging with your content or creating content for you.

1. Reward In-Store Interactions:

While apps like Foursquare allow businesses to reward customers for checking in to their locations, there are far more interesting ways to customize the behavior that gets rewarded at the moment of in-store interaction.

For example, a pizza place could give away a free slice to any customer who posts a photo with their pizza on Facebook or Twitter – with an @-mention shoutout to the awesome restaurant that gave them a free pizza.

Snapping a photo is a lot more engaging than simply checking in, from the customer’s standpoint, and also from the standpoint of their audience – who is more likely to click on a picture or video than recall a checkin.

This also provides the business with ideal content for creating a strong presence on short-form, image-driven platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest. In case you haven’t heard, these are the places to be right now.

Creating a custom in-store promotion may be more involved than a simple Foursquare campaign, but in terms of brand exposure – an in-store photo/video campaign can make far more of a viral splash. Clients are sharing more engaging content to larger audiences on websites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. Creating mechanisms to stimulate content creation and content sharing is the best way to approach this trend in social media consumption.

Other Posts in This Series
Reward Gaming
Reward Social Participation
Reward User Generated Content