Loyalty campaigns have become a critical way to embrace your great customers and drive sale. This Christmas retailing season is a great time to kick your loyalty campaigns up a gear.

No doubt you will experience increased shopping traffic through your bricks and mortar store as well as online stores for those involved in omni-channel retailing. This increase in traffic gives you the opportunity to spread the word about your loyalty campaigns and encourage greater participation in them.

The first step in any loyalty programme is promoting the fact that you have a loyalty programme. Sounds simple but often is an overlooked critical component.

As you will have increased customer traffic, your opportunity to spread the word is greater. Your marketing will now have the opportunity to reach more people for the same amount of effort.

Promoting your programme in store through signage or staff prompting customers to register are simple and effective ways to promote your loyalty programme. A simple counter display might just be the answer.

For online stores there is also an opportunity to prompt customers through pop up messages or messages at checkout.

The next step is to have customers sign up to the programme. You can either ask the customer to fill in a form while their sale is being processed or the sales staff can enter details directly into the POS system.

For online stores, a simple electronic form process can see customers join your loyalty programme.

Now that you have used the opportunity to expand your loyalty campaign participation, you can embark on increasing sale post-Christmas utilising your new database as the catalyst to communicate.

Post-Christmas sales are a peak time for retailers and driving loyal customers back to your store during this time is critical, not to mention providing further opportunities to increase your loyalty programme database.

You may offer an incentive for customers to sign up to your loyalty programme pre-Christmas and gain a post-Christmas discount? This will not only drive participation to your loyalty programme but drive repeat business in January.

The work that you do over your Christmas trading period can set your loyalty programme up for years. You now have a database to communicate your great retail offerings to and incentives for returning to your store to purchase. Not to mention a greater understanding of your customer purchasing habits now that you can track their purchases.