Nearly one in four small and medium-sized businesses offer a loyalty program according to Wave 20 of our Local Commerce Monitor™ survey of small businesses (Q3/2016). The top industries that use loyalty are other personal services, retail, construction/contracting, and computers or software. While there are a large number of loyalty-based apps and programs available to small businesses, the majority of these loyalty programs are being operated in-house using a paper tracking system. Only about a third of SMBs who offer a loyalty program report using an in-house digital tracking system.

Opportunity lies in helping SMBs who use loyalty programs to migrate their customer lists and loyalty program data to digital as well as showing them the advertising tools to optimize their loyalty campaigns.

Nearly a third of SMBs say they are likely to start offering a loyalty program in the next 12 months.

With more SMBs wanting to add loyalty to their marketing mix, showing them the benefits of a cloud or automated service should focus on time saving, flexibility and accuracy vs. manually tracking their offers.

* There are 1,000 SMB respondents in our full sample. Of these, 24.2% currently offer a customer loyalty program.

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