Loyalty Dogs Blog

by David Rosen | SVP Strategy and Channel Development

I’ve been following two trends that make me very excited to be a Loyalty marketer. Developing high-value, enduring relationships with loyal customers/guests/shoppers/members isn’t new. But what were starting to see on forefront of smart marketing is simply awesome.

Trend One – Farm Cash for Fans.

I used to work at a company called MyPoints. It’s an amazing marketing engine that could change the behavior of hundreds of thousands of members by offering points in exchange for purchases, registrations, surveys, etc. Problem was, points are expensive. Basically it costs about ten dollars to reward a member with a ten dollar Starbucks card. And we mailed a lot of Starbucks (and Target, and Red Lobster and Macy’s and Amazon, etc. ) cards.

Last week players of Zynga’s amazingly popular game Farmville were offered Farm Cash for fanning Bing. Twenty Four hours later, 400,000 virtual farmers had taken the bait and signed on. In a flash, Bing surpassed Google in the hyper-followed ranking of “how many fans do you have on Facebook” stat.

And guess how much Farm Cash costs Zynga? A lot less than a $10 Starbucks card I’d guess.

Trend Two – Check In and Earn Points.

I’ve been watching for this one for some time. The very cool fro-yo shop Tasti D-Lite is now offering loyalty points when its members check in on Foursquare. Cool on so many levels: drives engagement, posts to Facebook – and more interestingly begins the process of geo-based permissioning for offers.

I strongly believe that location is the next frontier for right offer at the right time to the right person. However, geo-based targeting really does bump up against the marketing creepy factor. Loyalty programs bridge that gap by establishing a fundamental permission level for members and rewarding that additional permission with some type of gift or reward.

More to come on this one and we’ll make sure that we’re driving what happens next.

by Joshua Tretakoff | EVP, Services

According to TechCrunch, Amazon is attempting to make a revolutionary counterattack to Steve Jobs. If you haven’t followed, Amazon introduced the most successful e-reader to date, the Kindle.  It’s been so successful, it’s been compared to do for books what the iPod did for music. Naturally, there’s a certain CEO in Cupertino who decided he wanted that segment, so he introduced his answer, the iPad, complete with iBooks.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Does Amazon simply lay down and surrender their leadership position to Apple? Not according to TechCrunch: they have decided to fight back by giving away a Kindle to every one of their current Amazon Prime subscribers.  Amazon Prime allows loyal Amazon customers to pay $80 a year for the privilege of getting all of their purchases shipped 2-day air, free of charge. That’s a profitable and loyal customer base; if you have paid for Prime, why would you ever shop anywhere else? Now, reward that loyalty with a Kindle, and you have an enormous customer base who can only buy content through you; if even a portion of those loyal customers buy a few books, you dominate the space, and the iPad plays catch up.

Will it work? Will they do it? Stay tuned, but one thing’s for sure: Loyalty will tell the tale.

By Jason Hornik | Senior Director, Product Marketing

Recent initiatives from P&G and General Mills signify a continued investment in e-commerce by CPG brands looking to build direct selling relationships, engage consumers, and garner insights. P&G is planning a full-scale launch of their eStore in the spring of this year despite the fact that e-commerce sales represent less than 1% of their total annual revenue. The site will primarily serve as a research lab to test search, coupons, store promotions, and social media integration. P&G intends to share consumer findings from their new site with their retail partners.

P&G currently sells direct through theEssentials.com, a site they inherited as a result of the Gillette acquisition in 2005, and through partner sites which include Target.com, Walmart.com, CVS.com, Drugstore.com, and Amazon. Overall, P&G is looking to aggressively move their annual e-commerce sales from $500 million to $4 billion.

General Mills is also making deeper inroads into e-commerce, as well as developing digital content for their brands. For example, their recipe site Tablespoon.com boasts 25,000 recipes with detailed nutritional information and at BettyCrocker.com you can download their Digital Kitchen Assistant app for interactive recipe building and sharing with friends.

Leadership at both P&G and General Mills are voicing their increased level of attention to e-commerce:

“The eventuality is a one-on-one relationship with every consumer, and obviously e-commerce needs to be a big part of that.”
P&G CEO Bob McDonald (AdAge.com)

“The beauty of digital is it’s very effective–great ROI and very efficient–to talk directly to consumers and to give them customized and more relevant information about what the brand can do for them.”
General Mills CMO Mark Addicks (Forbes.com)

There is no doubt that CPGs and other consumer brands will create innovative strategies and programs to connect with their most loyal consumers as the iron curtain for selling direct continues to come down.

by Joshua Tretakoff | EVP, Services

Imagine you are a retailer. You want to know not just the purchases that your customers make, but when they visit your stores and don’t make a purchase.  Hard to do, right? What if you could make a benefit of  your loyalty program tied to just that?

That’s just what a maker of GPS software, Navizon, has done.  Instead of just charging their customers for their software, they actually are paying customers to install their application on their iPhone, so they can use their loyal customers to map cell towers and WiFi access points.  Now, the customer has an ongoing incentive to use the software, and the company gets rich, real-time geographical and behavioral data, all with the user’s permission.

Being able to make your customers more loyal, and your loyal customers your most valuable ones, is the name of the game. Knowing when your customer comes in and doesn’t buy, especially your most loyal ones, is often more valuable: where are they going after they leave you?

By Jason Hornik | Senior Director, Product Marketing

In his updated bestseller, CRM at the Speed of Light, Paul Greenberg digs into Social CRM with nearly 700 pages of lively guidance and practical examples of how brands can innovate to better engage their consumers. This book provides a comprehensive view of the Social CRM landscape and is bound to trigger ideas for your strategies, tools, and techniques as the title so claims. A recommended cover-to-cover read:
http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=471477

By Michael Greenberg | COO

Ever since the WSJ article on the end of email, its been a cage match between email service providers and social media/emerging technology. Hyperbole aside, this is just part of the natural evolution of technology. Ideas that were cutting edge become mainstream and eventually become background noise.

What makes this time so different from years past is the sheer number of channels for interaction. Its tempting to try and take on all of them, but unless you have a large team or superhuman skills, you won’t be able to put enough time and energy into each channel to get a good return.

So the key here is to pick your battles, find the channels that make sense, and put in the resources to make them work. We love what Express is doing on Twitter – focus, cadence, good content, personality, and fits naturally with the rest of their marketing and brand voice. We also love what Pink does on Facebook – it also has focus, cadence, good content, personality, relevance, and stays exactly on brand.

Brands can learn a lot from these examples. Success in the new (mostly) social channels comes from resourcing and focus more than anything else. Just check out Chris Brogan, who has become the foremost social marketing guru through sheer force of will…51,000+ tweets, over 100K followers. And he seems to have conversations with every single one.

by Joshua Tretakoff | EVP, Services 

One thing loyalty programs try to do best is identify customers; many times, that can be the sole purpose of them. Why? To ensure that the company can better understand each person as an individual, and reward them for their ongoing patronage. In the quest to get better usage by customers, companies employ technology to make it easier for customers: key fobs, using your phone number, even simply waving your cellphone at a pad…all in the name of better identifying customers.

Now comes a new approach being discussed: what about using a license plate as a loyalty card? Seems crazy, but for large loyalty programs, at destination retailers, it may make financial sense. Imagine not having to carry anything into your favorite store, but still getting credit for your purchases. Convenience, taken to the extreme.

by Michael Greenberg | COO

If you go back and read The Loyalty Effect there’s a lot of reference to the referral value of customers as one of the 4 incremental sources of value from customer loyalty. Referral value has been very tough to measure in the 13 years since the book was published…until now. Social media provides an excellent view of the influence of a customer, plus new value from content contribution.

Connecting relevant social media to your customer data is increasingly possible and provides many benefits. We’ll be covering this topic from many directions over the coming months. Learn much more from our white paper, available for download here.

by Joshua Tretakoff | VP, Account Management

In the “I wish it were here, but it’s only in Japan” front, NTT, Japan’s dominant cellphone service provider, has announced a service that puts over 100 different retailer’s loyalty cards on the cell phone. No more wallet problems; instead, the cell phone has an application that stores all of the key loyalty card info, and communicates via a contactless system:

“Key-Shuttle (for which Japanese and international patents are currently pending) is the NTT Com-developed technology that integrates the information in the phone. Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, Key-Shuttle enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform.

The system includes features for security and privacy, such as unauthorised access detection and user-required permission before a retailer can share membership information with other retailers. Reward cards registered in Gyazapo are more difficult to duplicate or falsify than traditional plastic cards, making this a more secure system for loyalty programmes.”

by Joshua Tretakoff | VP, Account Management

Today’s Multichannel Merchant has a good article on a case study as to how marketers can use the various Web 2.0 and social media elements that are getting such press to tangibly build loyalty around specific products. In this case, they focus on the launch of last year’s Xmas hit, the Pleo toy dinosaur. By using a combination of online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and other tools, they created a constant buzz in advance of the product launch that has continued well after, and translated into multiple referral and upsell opportunities.

Retail marketers are often jokingly referred to as “dinosaurs,” but it looks like we can all learn to leverage these exciting new tools to avoid extinction.