Adding membership cards to your business is a great way to reward loyal customers, boost sales, collect customer data, and more so that you can more efficiently serve your area. However, your membership cards can’t just look like any plastic card in your customer’s wallet; you need to design them so they’re attractive and have the right information your customer might need. Keep reading to learn how to design membership cards and what essential information to include on them.
Designing Your Cards
If you order your membership cards from a business that offers custom printing, you can design your cards to look any way that you want. However, there are some guidelines to follow to make the card aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.
Start by choosing a durable material. Most membership cards are plastic, so they’re lightweight and won’t take up too much room in your wallet, but they also won’t tear, bend, or get stained. Next, choose the color of your card. You can choose any color the printer offers—but remember that this is a card your customers need to be able to easily read, so lighter backgrounds are best. You can add pops of color by including your logo on the card. Lastly, make sure you design the card to include the essential information on the front and back. This way, the font can be big enough and spaced out enough to be easily read, while fitting all the essentials. Arrange the front and back of your card by leaving one side for the business details you’ll learn below and the other side for the identification information and membership specifics. These design tips make including membership card details much easier.
Business Details
Your customer probably already has a lot of cards in their wallet, from business cards to bank cards to your membership card. They need to be able to quickly identify your card as their membership card, so they can pull it out whenever necessary without flipping through all those other cards in their wallet. Including your organization details on that membership card will help make your card identifiable and easy to pick out.
Details To Include
When including your business details on your membership card, you don’t want to include too much information. This is because it will overwhelm the card, either making the card impossible to read or requiring a card bigger than can fit in a wallet, which means it may be forgotten at home. Limit your business information to necessities, while including some design elements like your logo.
Necessary business information to include on your membership card includes your business name, physical address, website address, phone number, and email. If your business’s physical address is different than your mailing address, make sure to include both and mark each clearly. And if you have different phone numbers or emails for after hours, include both with explanations of which contact information to use when.
Identification Information
While you can create membership cards with just your business details, those often end up looking just like plastic business cards instead of membership cards. Membership cards need to also include information about the member that the card belongs to. This ensures that the card can get back to the person if it’s lost, and you can also save this information in your system so you can track spending habits and send them personalized ads and discounts.
Information To Include
You may feel hesitant to include too much identification information on your client’s membership cards. After all, if it does get lost or stolen, someone could use that information in a criminal way. But as we mentioned above, this identification information helps make sure that the card can get back to the right person and so that you know who is using the card when they come to your store.
Keep the essential information on your membership cards simple and straightforward by asking for their name and signature. You can print this on the card with a specific membership number that they can write down or memorize if they lose the card. Consider including a barcode or QR code as well, so your cashiers can scan it when your customers shop. This will help you clean spending habits and gives you the opportunity to send personalized ads and discounts, as we mentioned above. Lastly, consider adding a photo to the membership card to prevent someone else from using the card and claiming your member’s identity.
Membership Specifics
Your membership cards should have the business details and identification information they need to be useful to both you and your customer. You can stop there, but including membership specifics can take the card one step further. Membership specifics keeps both you and the customer informed about what type of membership they have, and on the details associated with that membership. While you can link your membership cards to online accounts where you and your customer can check such specifics, being able to glance at their card and learn everything they need to know will make your customer’s life simpler. This is essential information to include on your membership cards.
Specifics To Include
What specifics will be helpful to both you and your customer? If your business has multiple types of membership, start with what type of member they are. If you don’t have multiple membership tiers, then move on to when they became a member. This will help you keep track of how long they’ve been a member so you can offer timed awards to celebrate month and year anniversaries. If your membership requires a subscription, you can also include the renewal date, so your member knows what date they need to renew or cancel their subscription by. If the subscription is automatically renewed, make sure to include that information as well. You may be able to keep more members by automatically renewing their accounts and only telling them in the small print, but honesty is the best policy with your customers, and they will appreciate the transparency.
Design your membership cards and fill them out with the essential information that will make them easy for your customers to use. This means choosing a durable material, light background color, and using both sides of the card. On those sides, print the business details, identification information, and membership specifics that will keep both you and your customer well-informed. If there’s pertinent business or membership information that you can’t include on your membership card, make the information available in another way that is easy to access, such as paperwork, a virtual membership portal, or an email. Remember that the point of these cards is to reward loyal customers and grow your business, so offering a well-designed, informative card is essential to completing that business goal.
If your business needs custom-printed plastic loyalty cards, Silk Cards will be happy to help you design them. We offer various sizes, materials, and finishes that will help your business stand out from the competition and have people flocking to join your membership program. Contact us today!
