For years, Rite Aid was toying with the idea of instituting a customer loyalty program. They finally put one into place in the last few years and the program is now helping one of the Drug Industry’s least productive retailers to generate (finally) strong results.

As part of a team of loyalty marketing consultants to Duane Reade (now a part of Walgreens), we on several occasions had discussions with Rite Aid about rolling out a loyalty program with them. Rite Aid saw how the loyalty program that Duane Reade re-launched  helped them to turn same store sales from an industry worst -2% to an industry leading +7% over the course of only 18 months and they sought similar results.

The principals of retail loyalty marketing that we deployed at Duane Reade were fairly simple-find your best shoppers, tailor programs to them and watch your share of their wallets increase rapidly. Along the way, sweep in some of your leading manufacturer/suppliers into participating jointly in the program and viola, profitable sales accumulate rapidly.

These same concepts should be the “mother’s milk” of customer marketing. However, more often than not, we see companies taking their loyal customers for granted and focusing their efforts on the “holy grail” of finding new customers.

For those interested in learning more about basic and effective loyalty marketing in the retail space, I advise reading “Scoring Points” about Tesco’s program. http://www.amazon.com/Scoring-Points-Winning-Customer-Loyalty/dp/074943578X

Please also feel free to check out my case study on Duane Reade at: http://michaelrothadvisors.com/duanereade

For more on Rite Aid results, see today’s news at http://www.drugstorenews.com/article/wellness-loyalty-program-wellness-format-stores-continue-lift-rite-aid-performance?utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=mroth@getzlerhenrich.com&utm_content=DSN-EDIT-Breaking%20News-6-21-2012