Loyalty Programs : What are good ways to maximise customer involvment without shelling out much on carrots and advertisements?

One great way to do this is to tie http://www.socialannex.com/public/index/customerloyaltyin with advocate marketing (aka social commerce) programs. You can reward customers with loyalty points for engaging with your brand by http://www.socialannex.com/public/index/ratingsandreviews, http://www.socialannex.com/public/index/visualcommerce, http://www.socialannex.com/public/index/referafriend, etc. The points system is a bit better than a discount in that customers have to work their way up to it. While giving them points for engagement means that they'd have to spend less than they would in a traditional points for purchase only scheme, they're marketing on your behalf as they're earning points. If you're interested in learning more about what my company calls advocate loyalty, I recommend this http://www.socialannex.com/public/index/whenloyalmeetssocialand this http://www.socialannex.com/public/index/advocateloyaltyebook. Here's one stat from these materials: one of our customers started out with a traditional points for purchase only program, and then switched to an advocate loyalty program after 2 months. After 2 months into the new program, their revenue from their loyalty solution grew by 370%! Hope this is helpful!

Tell them something they'll find useful. Become a trusted source of information about the product/service they're looking at, beyond just what they can buy from you. Focus on intrinsic value, build an emotional connection, forge trust. Be a maven, and build a community of the same around you. Interact, take questions, answer without a 'cost'. Be likeable and approachable. Personalized content is the key to making your loyalty program meaningful, and that requires an understanding of your customer, their needs, and what products/services would be most useful to them. If you have a product you want to sell, don't cram it down everyone's throat; it'll just give your customers the impression that you don't understand them, and damage that hard-won trust. This is why data is so critical in a successful loyalty program, even though it's often misused or the purpose for it misunderstood.

One good way would be to encourage customers to share the images of the products they have purchased on social media channels. Using the http://bit.ly/1Ql4de0 app from ShopSocially, you can display a photo gallery on your website to act as visual testimonials. After setting a hashtag of your desire, you can encourage customers to share their selfies with the product on social media using the chosen hashtag. The Photomonials app will automatically aggregate these customer photos and it will be featured on your website. This is a great reward system to encourage customers to share their photos and it’s a great way to reach out to customer’s followers who might not yet know about you or might not know of the product. By using these visual social proofs, you could potentially see a 21% increase in conversion rates. http://bit.ly/1OQZ7WS is using the Photomonial app and has an impressive photo gallery on their site full of customer generated images. They are now converting 4.84% of all website visitors into email subscribers by using social proof as their social word-of-mouth marketing.