I once worked for a company that created the technology behind Coca Cola’s “My Coke Rewards,” a loyalty program covered in the press too many times to count. Coke is a category leader because it’s a great brand but also because it embraces innovative marketing approaches to maintain it’s pre-eminent brand status — and of course it has the funds to do so.
My Coke Rewards only recently added a mobile component, but was initially designed around a website whereby consumers registered and submitted codes on bottle caps and cans as a means of collecting points that could be redeemed for merchandise — and not just Coke-branded hats and pens, but lifestyle products such as concert tickets.
At first glance, this sounds like very standard stuff. The secret sauce which made this program so successful were a complex mix of business rules and predictive analytics that, when applied to customer profile data, customer preferences, and rewards redemption history, would suggest a reward the customer would actually want. Essentially offer optimization, or as we called it “predicting passions.”
Assembling this solution was expensive so why bother? Coke could correlate lift in sales by region, city or household with patterns observed in the frequency and quantity of codes submitted by consumers through the website. They called it “consumption” and although indirect, the closed loop insight was very real to Coke such that the program continues. Having access to POS sales data for its products was key.
You could imagine that with the advent of smartphones and widespread adoption of text messaging, the mobile channel probably trumps the online experience here, especially for registering codes. In that manner consumers can simply log points and discard the trash rather than carrying a plastic cap or can with them until they sit down in front of a PC.
Mobile marketers who don’t see the value in providing a similar program to their customers need not be put off by the cost and complexity of what Coke has done. The Advanced Edition of our Customer Engagement Platform has been built from the ground-up to make these types of interactions extremely easy to manage with limited staff and resources.
To make this possible, we extended the core mobile campaigns of the Platform with features more commonly found in traditional CRM software — profiling, segmentation, personalization, event triggers, and of course data collection to include any attribute capturable during a text or online interaction, not just the mobile number. Note I said online interaction, as the Platform now includes the ability to power engagement strategies rendered on the web for times when that medium makes more sense (such as registration forms to capture detailed consumer information that may underpin targeted and more brief text messages around offers).
With retailers having access to their POS sales data by location, you can see how simple it would be to correlate increases in sales with the implementation, monitoring and ongoing improvement of offers delivered using a system such as our Engagement Platform.
This short story comes courtesy of observations made during last week’s Mobile University 101 event here in Chicago, where the blanketing theme was: mobile needs to be thought of strategically, not the basis of a “one and done” program like a sweepstakes to be conducted for the sake of novelty. You can be assured Coke does not view the mobile channel in that manner. Our mission at Interactive Mediums is to help every other business embrace the same viewpoint.
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