Emailed Receipts, POS Distraction or Customer Loyalty Tool?

Would you like your receipt with you, in the bag, or in your inbox?
Is the emailed receipt a service and perk to your customer, a distraction at the point of sale, or a brilliant customer loyalty mechanism? I am going to go with, “two of the above”.
As a shopper I love getting my receipts sent to my inbox. Traditionally I am a “with me” receipt kinda girl, in my mind there is nothing worse then pulling out my wonderfully wrapped new purchase from its delightfully branded shopping bag and seeing a receipt reminder of my blown budget. And so, my wallet overflows with receipts. I should employ a better filing system that doesn’t include my wallet, but the reality is that I don’t. By the time I do finally get around to sorting my receipts most of them have reverted to blank slips of paper thanks to thermal printing, and let’s not even bother venturing into the receipt recovery for return/warranty purposes discussion! So, when asked at the point of sale if I would like my receipt emailed to me, you bet I think it is a huge benefit and perk of shopping with you. Now my point of sale receipts are all in one place, digitally locked in time, and neatly filed away in case I ever need to refer to them again. It is a thing of beauty.
How much is all of this worth to me? Well, the very thing loyalty conscious retailers covet, my email address and I am talking about the one I actually read. And there lies the brilliance of emailed receipts as a customer loyalty mechanism. Your loyalty program begins at the point of sale, at my request. The idea is ingenious; I get my receipt emailed to me and you get an open door for your first post sale touch point with me. They say that to effectively build customer loyalty you should reach out to your customer a minimum of 6 times a year, how much easier to accomplish when you have an established email list of customers who have consciously opened the door to hearing from you?
Is it a distraction at the point of sale, I suppose it could be. Is it worthwhile? Absolutely. If you view this process as part of your customer loyalty strategy and consider what Frederick Reicheld had to say in his book The Loyalty Effect, “a 5% increase in customer retention yields profit increases of 25% to 100%.” If you look at it this way, a small time investment at the point of sale for a worthwhile customer loyalty strategy can result in real returns for your business.
It is true that not all of your customers will accept seamless email receipts as enthusiastically as I have, but a lot will! For the customers that do accept emailed receipts you will be a step closer to capturing their loyalty. There is hope for attracting the loyalty of those that do not; you will just need to pull out your thinking cap! Customer loyalty is key, and the busy high volume holiday shopping season is an amazing opportunity to kick start your loyalty program, whatever it may look like. There are a lot of options out there to aid your customer loyalty campaign, from specific loyalty programs to your point of sale software’s built in customer information field’s, to integrated plug-ins like seamless email receipts. Now is the best time to get your team, POS system and loyalty campaign up to speed. Go and capture the information of all of those shoppers rushing through your doors this holiday season, and then follow up with them. Give them all sorts of reasons to come back to your store, with their friends!
Canadian Retail Solutions Inc. (CRS) specializes in Inventory Control and Point of Sale Systems for retailers across Canada. Our business philosophy reflects an unwavering dedication to quality, integrity and personalized client support in all we do.
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www.retailbycrs.com