As a small business owner, your to do list piles up pretty fast. You are handling inventory, scheduling employees, bills, rent, customer service, and somehow you need to squeeze in time for marketing and advertising.

On top of that you have so many marketing choices out there: Facebook ads, daily deals, email marketing, Yelp promotions, print advertising, search engine marketing, coupons… it can get overwhelming.

Download our free retail customer loyalty success guide to learn how to drive customers back 2x more.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a full time marketing team to help sift through the madness, handle your marketing and promotions tasks, and send useful reports with results to see if your campaigns are working?

Well, I bet you can guess at what I am getting at…

Fivestars AutoPilot. Smart marketing without lifting a finger.

This is what we at Fivestars have been up to! We’ve built this incredible new feature for our Fivestars small business owners that essentially handles customer engagement and gets your customers back in–automatically.

• We populate and enrich your Fivestars customer data
• We run optimized marketing campaigns for you
• We give you the results in an easy to understand format

But these aren’t just simple, automatic blast campaigns. Our messages are catered to individual customers based on their spending habits at your business.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1. A customer walks into your small business and buys something.

Just the usual, they come up to the counter and pay.

Step 2. You sign them up to your customer rewards program on your point-of-sale, which is powered by Fivestars.

The fastest way to sign up a customer is to scan a card, input the customers’ phone number, click submit, thank the customer, and they are on their way.

Step 3. Rest easy, AutoPilot is preparing for take off by grabbing more emails, birthdays, and filling in the blanks.

This is when Fivestars takes the wheel for you. You can now rest easy because your just-in-time marketing is launching without you lifting a finger.

Considering that some customers will only have time to give you their phone number when they are signing up for your loyalty card, we want to give them another chance to fill in the blanks. This allows you to communicate to customers in the ways that fit them the best.

So, once they are signed up for your loyalty program in store, they are sent a text asking for their email if they prefer to be sent specials, promotions, etc. in email form. We also grab their birthdays so we can send them birthday messages and rewards on behalf of your business. With bonus points as incentives and the ease of sending in information through text, we are able to collect a lot more emails and birthdays from your customers for you–automatically.

Step 4. AutoPilot has lifted off the runway and is now smooth sailing, sending the right messages, at the right times, to the right customers.

Now that we have the right customer information, we launch these five sets of marketing auto-campaigns. We work with you ahead of time to customize the specific messaging, offers, and timing associated with each trigger. Then they are sent to your customers via email or text. You never have to worry about blasting your customers with the same offer and risk giving away too much or leaving money on the table, target the right customers with the right offer at the right time. Never sweat the details of your marketing again; once it’s set up, everything runs on its own, so you can forget and focus on other important things.

• New Customer Campaigns. Over 50-60% of new customers don’t come back after their first visit. Once you sign up a new customer to your Fivestars loyalty program, we help get them back in the door with a special offer to return within a specific time frame.

• Business Growth Campaigns. Repeat customers drive 80% of your revenue, but if you send them a promotion, you can increase their visit rates by 25% or more, so we periodically send them special offers to get them coming back even more frequently.

• At-Risk Campaigns. A customer’s likelihood to return drops 50-75% every 30 days. We help you engage at-risk customers before it’s too late and get them back into your store.

• Lapsed Customer Campaigns. As time passes, and customers don’t return, the odds that they will return are very low. However, if you send them a good offer, you can increase their likelihood of returning by up to 4 times.

• Customer Birthday Campaigns. Birthday rewards are a great way to get your customers back to your store on their birthday, so we send them a birthday gift 7 days before their birthday.

Step 5. Customers claim their custom offers and you see immediate results.

In order to reduce fraud and offers unnecessarily spreading online, we have created a way for promotions to be claimed once by customers via text or email. When we text a customer a promotion, they can reply back to claim it. Alternatively, when we email a customer a promotion, they can click on a button to claim the offer. When the customer claims a promotion, we will push the promotion to the point-of-sale software. When they go to the store and scan their card, they can redeem the promotion.

Step 6. A success report of all your campaigns gets sent directly to your inbox. Easy peasy.

We include in your weekly email from us the data on the total number of emails and birthdays collected that week and the total number of customer claims and redemptions.

 

All of this is awesome. But how do I get this new AutoPilot feature? Do I get it automatically if my business is already part of the Fivestars network?

The Fivestars new AutoPilot features are easy to set up if you are already part of the Fivestars network. We just need to upgrade your account and set up your five auto-campaigns with you over the phone. If you are new here and want to learn more about Fivestars and how we can help you combine customer loyalty and customer behaviors to your email and text marketing efforts, we can help you with that too. Just click on the relevant button below to get started!