The expansion of loyalty programmes both internationally and locally has made the loyalty playground a very cluttered and competitive one. Whilst customers are overwhelmed by choice in the market place, companies are grasping for share of wallet. Loyalty marketers can no longer ignore the loyalty clutter and promiscuity out there and The Colloquy awards, therefore, remind us that there is no reason why companies wanting loyalty from their customers should settle for a one size fits all strategy. Innovation is the key to inventing a unique, appealing, sustainable business wide strategy.
Let’s take a snapshot of this year’s winners:
Master of Enterprise Loyalty: Caesars Entertainment
“The Master of Enterprise Loyalty Award is presented to the company that executes an
organization-wide strategy that shifts its focus from the product or channel to the customer.”
Caesar’s Entertainment unlocked the power of its loyalty programme by enhancing its data capabilities to better segment its customer base and enhance its online presence and tier management strategies. This led to personalising not only the online experience but spread this new strategy across all customer touch points.
The business wide strategy incorporated 5 key pillars which led to a combination of results such as a 30 % increase in customer value, 20% faster redemption, increased revenue of 18% to mention a few.
The 5 pillars included:
- A completely revamped online presence to better anticipate and deliver on guest needs
- An attitudinal segmentation model – to identify guests by their entertainment motivations
- Tier recalibration – educated & encourage guests to move up the various tiers
- Real-time casino marketing - developing exclusive technology (proprietary of Caesars) that triggers messages to the guest as they visit various parts of casino and do certain activities in real time
- Choice hospitality – recognizing those members who reach elite status
Loyalty Innovation in Financial Services (North America): CitiBank
Citibank needed to revamp its loyalty programme’s online offering, Citi Thank You, as research showed that visitors to their website found it cluttered and difficult to navigate. A decision was made to move from a mass information style “the more we advertise the better” approach to a “less is more” web presence.
The most fundamental part of the puzzle was missing – the ability for members to redeem their points online and use those points towards their online shopping purchases.
The approach involved creating an online retail experience second to none, tailoring marketing communications and adverts to suit their customers’ individual needs and relooking their partner strategy to further add value to their rewards strategy.
By fine tuning their online presence, enhancing their customer experience and completing the Thank You lifecycle by allowing for online redemption, CitiBank Thank You saw a rise in the time spent by visitors to the website by 17%. Online orders rose by 32%, year on year, and they saw an astounding 47% increase in merchandise redemptions.
Loyalty Innovation in Financial Services (International): ANZ Banking Group
ANZ Banking Group (Australia) had come to realise that it needed to revitalise its loyalty programme, ANZ Rewards. The first port of call was to devise a retention and engagement strategy through relooking its overall value offering. This meant reminding their members of the overall value of their membership and how they can utilise it better. They also wanted to increase the participation in the programme among its members.
The plan included splitting their customer base into 4 segments based on profitability, using point expiration as the opportunity to start the conversation with their members. The campaign included re-engaging with their inactive members to make them aware of their point’s balances, when they were due to expire and what they could do to with their points.
It also included giving the members a gift card to the total of their total points balance or expiring points balance.
“It helped ANZ determine if customers were open to redeeming all their points at once and it showed which value best increased engagement."
This campaign saw a 45% response rate,which was 225% above their target.
Innovation in Loyalty Marketing (North America): Walgreens
Walgreens launched their loyalty programme, Balance Rewards, in September 2012. By May 2013, they had a membership base of over 72 million. The foundation of the loyalty programme was built on 3 key pillars: ease, value and wellness. Through determination to be not only be constantly innovative but also highly relevant to their customers, Walgreens successfully created a loyalty programme that features easy enrolment, instant points & rewards for online and offline purchases and wellness services as well as points for improving your lifestyle through healthy behaviour.
In a short span on 7 months, Walgreens saw their members making repeat purchases and increased engagement. They saw and increase of 4.3% over the same period the previous year. In addition, the average basket size increased by 4.7% over the previous year.
Innovation in Loyalty Marketing (International): Air Miles Rewards Management
Air Miles took advantage of the post-holiday period in the United Arab Emirates where consumers start to feel the pinch financially. They did this by multiplying the rate at which members earn miles. The plan here was to encourage spending with partners. Their key message for this strategy was “By spending money now, you could save in the coming year.”
However, not only did they offer to multiply the amount of points that could be earned, they attached 2 competitions to this campaign where members get entered into a lucky draw to earn one year’s worth of shopping vouchers (worth $ 7600) or stand a chance to win 5 million Air Miles through a radio competition.
The results speak for themselves. Air Miles saw a 360% return on investment which ended up being 36 times its expected target. In total consumers spent $110 million across the Air Miles partners, a 49% increase from the previous year.
Loyalty Innovation in Retail (Global): Coles
Coles retail chain, the National Australia Bank and Shell formed the Flybuys rewards programme in 1994. However, over the last few years, Flybuys saw a drop in retention and a low investment which led to Coles buying full ownership of the programme which led to its re-launch in 2011.
The new approach for Flybuys was to simplify the programme and offer more compelling rewards based on the data they collected about their customers.
Some key changes were made which included:
- Simplifying the programme meant that the average person on the street should be able to understand the earning and burning process with limited grey areas of understanding
- Providing more points, partners and rewards
- Enhance the Flybuys card by allowing members to load cash onto the card and let it serve as a gift card
“In 2012, Coles sent out 17.3 million new Flybuys cards, enough to stretch from Melbourne to Brisbane, to virtually every household in Australia.”
Results showed a 12 fold return on its marketing investment and an increase of active cardholders of 47% (6.9 million).
Loyalty Innovation in Travel/Hospitality (Global): The Hertz Corporation
Hertz, one of the leading car rental agencies in the world, used to offer 2 distinct loyalty programmes. One was focused on service based opertations, the other, points based. Participation in the service based programme was higher than that of the points based programme.
With little to no clear differentiation between the two, Hertz decided to create a new loyalty programme called Gold Plus Rewards where they migrated their existing members from the original two programmes all into one. The aim: to improve customer rental service and serve members with one streamlined loyalty programme.
Benefits of the new programme include:
- mobile alerts “called Carfirmation” – confirming all bookings in real time via mobile devices
- eReceipts e-Return services Hertz Gold Choice, a service that allows customers to change their vehicles on the spot
Hertz spread the launch campaign through multichannel approach, ensuring that the news and education of the new programme would reach all customers where they were.
Hertz saw incredible results such as a 99% increase in enrolment over the previous year. A 178% increase in members using points on their rental transactions.
Loyalty Innovation in Other Industries (Global): St. John’s Transportation Commission
Canada’s Metrobus’s m-Points loyalty programme was the first of its kind and proved that a loyalty programme works for the industry of mass transit. After many years, the programme began to lose its spark. Metrobus therefore felt that a compelling approach to reignite the programme was to re-launch with a joint partnership with Canada’s Air Miles Reward programme.
The combined offer included one reward mile for every two taps of a passenger’s m-card on Metrobus. An integrated communications strategy was delivered via each partner’s communication channels.
Air Miles helped boost Metrobus ridership with an increase of 6% and saw an increase of 54% in the online purchases of the m-card.
According to their latest findings, 44% of Metrobus riders opted into earning Air Miles instead of m-points.
Ros Siddle, Marketing & Loyalty Research Manager, Truth
