5 Step Guide to Starting a Dog Daycare Loyalty Program

Starting a loyalty program for your dog daycare can be a great way to incentivize regular customers, keep track of their spending, and reward them for their loyalty. Loyalty programs are a win-win for both business owners and customers – customers feel valued and get special perks and discounts, while businesses benefit from increased customer retention and repeat business. Everyone knows how great it feels to finally get that final punch on their favorite coffee shop's loyalty card. You've been giving them business for a month and you finally get that free muffin and coffee. And, you know what, you're most likely going to ask for another card and start again since you've built a loyal relationship with the business.

The question is, how does a dog daycare or kennel boarding facility go about starting a loyalty program. It can seem a bit daunting at first, but once you get down to it, it's not too hard. Here is a five-step guide to starting a loyalty program for your dog daycare:

Define Your Loyalty Program Goals

Before you start creating your loyalty program, it's important to determine what you want to achieve. Are you looking to incentivize repeat business, reward customers for their spending, or encourage customers to bring in new business through referrals? Knowing your goals will help you to create a program that is tailored to your specific needs. Some of the easier programs to design are simply giving clients additional services if they buy numerous services at once. Let's say you sell your daycare in 5-packs. You could start a simple program where if someone buys 10 days of daycare, you gift them one or two days for free. Simple things like this show that you care about them as a client.

Choose Your Rewards

Once you've established your goals, it's time to decide on the rewards you want to offer. Consider offering discounts, free services, or special perks for repeat customers. You could also consider offering referral bonuses for customers who bring in new business. Referral bonuses are great, but you need to make sure it's worth it for your client to refer someone. If your referral bonus is $5 off their next invoice, that's not really much and they might not even think about it when they're talking to their other pet owner friends. However, if they get 5 free days of daycare for every new client that they refer, they might just start carrying around little referral cards so that they can quickly tell every pet owner they know about your business. In the end, you're not going to lose money by giving away a few days of boarding or daycare, because the new client's business will cover those costs and more.

Decide on a Loyalty Program Structure

There are several different ways to structure a loyalty program, including point-based systems, tier-based systems, and hybrid systems. Decide on the structure that will best meet your goals and the needs of your customers. You don't need to get too fancy. With DoggieDashboard, you can easily print out monthly reports of how many appointments each client had during the previous month. Using these reports, it's easy to see that Jane Smith is one day away from hitting her goal and John Doe still has quite a few more days of daycare until he'll reach his first free day.

Implement the Program

Now that you have your rewards and structure in place, it's time to put your loyalty program into action. Make sure to communicate the program to your customers and let them know how they can sign up and start earning rewards. It can be a good idea to start out slow with your referral program so that you have time to work out the kinks. Talk with your best clients at the start and let them know about the program. As you see how it actually works, you can slowly tweak the program to make it better for your needs.

Monitor and Adjust the Program

Regularly monitor your loyalty program to see how it's performing and if it's achieving your goals. If necessary, make adjustments to ensure the program is working effectively for both your business and your customers. You can also do some AB testing. Perhaps you have one loyalty program for a certain cohort of clients and another loyalty program for another cohort. You can then see which of these programs is providing the best results and then tweak your program(s) accordingly.

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