Loyalty marketing programs are a great way of retaining customers and getting them to spend more money with you. The traditional method of a plastic card, however, may be going the way of the dinosaur given the more effective experience afforded by a mobile device. Today in thewisemarketer.com email newsletter is an excerpt from The Loyalty Guide III, The Wise Marketer’s guide to loyalty marketing, all about how mobile will replace cards as the way consumers interact with loyalty programs. The key word appears to be “engagement” – after all, a card does nothing to engage a consumer, it simply connects a customer’s data to a POS system to redeem and/or receive loyalty rewards.
Another term I would add is “involvement.” Creating mobile experiences that involve consumers in the buyer/seller relationship in a value added way itself has the ability to render cards worthless, static and forgotten – as the article points out is happening already:
“The use of many loyalty cards has become almost automatic and mundane, and that there is little consumer engagement with many of their offers. One study found that over 30% of consumers never remember to carry their loyalty cards, or have lost them, and almost 20% of active loyalty point collectors never actually redeem them.”
The fact mobile devices are always on hand instantly creates a much larger base of potentially more loyal customers. The key is implementation and target audience; broad reach using an SMS text messaging approach, or potentially less reach but a targeted demographic via Smartphone application? The answer is probably some blend of the two, raising again the importance of the Mobile Customer Experience in leveraging mobile most effectively. As marketers discover every day, the mobile channel’s high engagement factor transforms traditional static marketing methods like loyalty cards into high-po strategic relationship enablers:
“Already, test campaigns and live promotions in the field have shown that mobile voucher redemption is dramatically different to paper-based promotions (for example, Heineken achieved a redemption rate of over 80% in one campaign).”
