If you’re a small business owner, it’s very difficult and often very expensive to find new customers. We’re making it easy and affordable.
Small Shops United (SSU) uses digital loyalty and rewards to encourage local shopping, capture customer behavior, and help small businesses better connect to new and existing customers.
Here’s how we’re doing it:
Any consumer can create a free online account at smallshopsunited.com, where they are assigned a unique member ID to use with the loyalty programs of every participating merchant in our network. Points are awarded and redeemed in stores using our proprietary merchant-facing application, allowing us to record the transactions, build customer profiles, and provide customer insights back to the businesses. This is all valuable information, but what we’re about to build is where it gets exciting…
Soon we will begin work on the SSU Message Center. This provides business owners a direct channel to connect with existing customers. During setup, merchants will create personalized messages and set trigger points to determine precisely when each message should send. (For example, I might create a reminder to go out to any customer that has not visited my store in the past 6 months). By automating the process, we’re eliminating the need for merchants to manage this new marketing channel. We do it for them!
Once the SSU Message Center is operational, we will leverage our entire database of customers to help small businesses segment and target new customers with relevant offers. With each campaign, we’ll demonstrate to the merchants how many people were targeted, who opened it, who claimed it, who redeemed it in-store, and how much they spent when they redeemed. We’ll push the results to the merchants, so they know exactly what their return on investment is for each campaign.