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To Keep Users Happy, Loyalty Programs Must Walk a Fine Line

Users become wary when privacy is called into question

Loyalty programs, especially those delivered via digital channels, provide benefits to consumers and brands alike. Consumers get access to codes and purchases that can boost rewards, while brands are better able to target participating consumers. And since online shoppers tend to favor discounts and deals over brand affinity, brands have even more reason to use loyalty programs to cultivate repeat customers.

According to Maritz Loyalty Marketing’s December 2012 survey, US internet users on average participated in 7.4 loyalty programs last year. And among respondents who’d enrolled in at least one loyalty program during the previous year, retail programs saw the highest participation levels, with the average consumer using 1.7 retail programs. Credit cards and airlines ranked as the second and third most popular industries for loyalty programs, respectively, with consumers participating in slightly more than one of these programs in each category on average.

Eight in 10 consumers overall said they thought loyalty programs were worth participating in. And in a sign that brand loyalty itself isn’t totally dead, 70% of consumers said these programs were part of their relationship to the company. Another 57% acknowledged that loyalty programs actually affected where and how they made their purchases, modifying shopping to maximize rewards.

But there is still a high incidence of consumers turning away from loyalty programs, whether actively or passively. According to the Maritz study, 53% of those enrolled in loyalty programs stopped participating in at least one program in the past year, but only 7% formally requested to leave the program.

And while loyalty programs today may benefit from the ability to target offers based on behavioral and personal details, this also can backfire on brands. Just less than three in 10 respondents said that loyalty programs required too much personal information, and 24% cited privacy concerns as a reason they did not enroll.

Asked about the leading “creepy” ways brands used personal information in administering loyalty programs, the No. 1 cited action was using programs to see details of friends’ behavior, mentioned by more than half of respondents. Offering rewards based on the sharing of personal details such as income was another tactic that many consumers did not appreciate, cited as creepy by 44% of respondents; and another 43% said the same of being asked to provide a credit card number to receive cash back on spending. Two out of five even found the request of personal information to target the consumer based on demographic to be creepy.

The findings suggest that participation in loyalty programs should not be mistaken for total trust in the brand. These are transactional relationships at the core, and brands must be sensitive to how they can provide mutually beneficial rewards that don’t tread too far on consumers’ private lives.

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Neuromarketing in Webdesign

Here are a few tips on how to optimize your site to engage customers according to NeuroMarketing:

  • Leverage emotion in the copy and images. The brain likes to have multiple sensory inputs to process the highly complex realm of emotions
  • Don’t use more than 4 visual clusters. It makes it harder for the brain to process the message.
  • Use pictures with faces. We are hard wired to look at faces.
  • Place images on the left, text on the right. The image will be perceived by the right side of the  brain and the text will be decoded by the left side of the brain.
  • Women engage faster with faces and respond to direct eye contact- (choose your pictures carefully).
  • Show images of people experiencing your product or service- Specially important for the food and beverage industry.
  • Copy and images need to be emotionally relevant

 

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Why allow employees to kill your business?

I do ask myself that question quite often. All it take is to go out to buy something and I’ll ask again, why do entrepreneurs allow employees to kill their businesses?
This week there was the bad PR case with Taco Bell. An employee posted a picture on social media of him licking some taco shells.

Guess what? It went viral really fast. On the same day that Mashable posted the story, it had over 6,000 shares. On Taco Bell’s Facebook page, 3,000 shares. That is just two places. The damage can be huge to the company. Even though I’m not a big fan of fast food, I for sure plan not to get anywhere near a Taco Bell in the future. One guy, one picture and a huge nightmare.

Taco Bell Bad PR case

Now you might be saying that no one could really avoid this type of thing. Well, maybe with some very specific training you could. Not just training on how to handle food and customers but training about the company’s values, level of engagement they expect from employees. Also public stand on what you believe in. At Taco Bell’s Facebook page there is only a small comment from the company saying that they take this type of stuff very seriously. Well, we all hope you do.

Two days ago I went to a Petsmart near my home to gt some things for my dog Apple and my cat banana. One of the things I wanted was a new mat to put under my cat’s food tray. I saw some in clearance but they all had issues. On the proper isle I saw other mats and picked one and was looking at the prices. An employee comes and asks if I need any help. I said “I’m thinking of buying a mat for my cat but think these prices are really high”. She replies “They are. They are really expensive. I would never get one here, I’d go to Walmart”.

She was very nice but I felt guilty that I was even holding the mat and I did put it back.

Now, how can someone that works for you, tell customers to go buy some place else. Because of price?

I bet she is well trained on how to deal with customers but how much does she really know about the company, how much of the company’s culture is presented to her on a daily basis?

Unbelievable!

One of my clients has a restaurant. Every time there is a new promotion, survey or flyer he tells his employees what they have to do. They never do. They decide what is important or not. Not the owner.
Now, why are they making decisions? Why no one demands that orders be followed?

What is going on in business today?

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All Things Possible

New episode of Spill the Beans Tv. This time with Kris Barney.
Talk about having challenges in life and how to overcome them. Kris Barney shares her story with us and show how entrepreneurs can overcome difficult times.

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Retailers Use Attribution Modeling to Measure the Touchpoints Driving Sales

Modeling helps assign value to touchpoints

Today’s digital consumer is exposed to a huge number of marketing messages via display ads, search, email, mobile, social media and other sources along the path to purchase. But until recently, many retailers mainly paid attention only to customers’ “last click”—an approach that ignores all other marketing touchpoints that lead to a transaction, according to a new eMarketer report, “Multichannel Attribution: What Retailers Need to Know.”

Now, however, some retailers are deploying complex multichannel attribution solutions, with Big Data power, to measure the performance of their marketing efforts. But the numbers are still small. According to an October 2012 survey conducted by Econsultancy and Adobe, only 26% of companies worldwide used advanced forms of marketing attribution—ones that go beyond simple last-click analysis.

However, retailers are under extreme pressure to better understand which marketing tactics are driving sales, so it is not surprising that more companies consider attribution modeling to be a priority.

A January 2013 survey by MarketingSherpa found that some 28% of marketers worldwide indicated that measuring attribution across channels is an important analytic objective in 2013.
Modeling helps assign value to touchpoints

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Social Followers of Local Media Exhibit Different Patterns of Engagement

What kind of social behaviors do local media fans exhibit on Facebook and Twitter? It depends on the medium, says TVB [pdf] in a study conducted in conjunction with Colligent, that combines Nielsen Media Research and Kantar Media data with social media behaviors. The “Cultural Currency” study analyzes the social media behaviors of 167 million Facebook and Twitter users across a range of legacy media, finding that overall, local broadcast TV viewers tend to be most heavily engaged socially with their stations. For advertisers, understanding how social behaviors vary among fans of various local media is an important consideration when crafting social calls to action to accompany their local media buys.
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The study identifies 9 types of social media behaviors on Facebook and Twitter.

In each case, “fans” refers to Facebook fans of the local media outlet (such as a local radio channel), and “brand” refers to that same outlet. (The 4 media types available in local markets tracked in the study are: local TV; local newspapers; local radio; and cable TV. The study also notes that “due to various sources of programming on local TV stations, local TV is a combination of scores from fans of TV stations, fans of broadcast networks, and fans of broadcast programming.”)

Local media
Overall, local TV was above-average in social behaviors in each of the 9 categories save for 1 (retweeting). While radio listeners exhibited strong tendencies to perform a range of Facebook behaviors, listeners were less likely than average to engage in each of the activities on Twitter. Conversely, while local newspaper garnered above-average Twitter talk and retweets, they fell below-average in Facebook behaviors.
Other Findings:

Social media behaviors also differed greatly across primetime content genres. For example, viewers of mainstream genres, such as reality competition, comedy, and dramas, were more active on Twitter than on Facebook. By contrast, viewers of game shows, travel shows, and action suspense shows were more engaged on Facebook.
Defining “Cultural Currency” as “having achieved both broad audiences and having effected significant social media behaviors,” the study demonstrates that traditional hits (such as specials and primetime dramas) also had the highest levels of Cultural Currency. Advertisers spending almost exclusively on the top quadrant of “Cultural Currency” programs saw 15 times more new brand fans than those advertising in the lowest quadrant over the measured period.

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Moms with smartphones: Clothing and beauty were top mobile shopping categories

There is no question that mobile is becoming an essential shopping tool for many US moms. According to a March 2013 survey from retail solutions company Alliance Data, more than half of surveyed mom internet users reported using their smartphone or tablet at least weekly for some aspect of shopping, whether it be research or buying. And 35% of respondents said they used their device daily for shopping purposes.

Mobile’s usefulness for shopping is easy to see. Convenience and a better ability to price compare were the top reasons moms’ reported using their device as they moved through the purchase funnel.

Moms with smartphones

Clothing and beauty ranked as the top product categories for which moms shopped on their smartphones and tablets, at 56% and 47%, respectively. Households products ranked third, researched by 42% of respondents, a significant figure for CPG brands, which have already moved quickly into the mobile advertising space.
Showrooming—the practice of going into stores to compare products and prices, often using mobile to shop around—is common among moms, as well. At both electronics and big-box retailers, half of mom mobile shoppers surveyed said they used their smartphone or tablet to look up product and price info. This was slightly less common at clothing, grocery and shoe stores, but more than one-third of respondents still had shopped at each of these locations using mobile devices.

However, mobile is not the primary method US moms prefer for shopping. Only 11% of respondents said this was the shopping method they would choose, if given only one option. And according to December 2012 research from parenting app company Alt12, about two-thirds of moms said they did less than half of their shopping on mobile.

But as mobile browsing becomes more common, and retailers improve their multichannel efforts, there is no question that more moms will favor smartphones and tablets for their shopping and buying.

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New Issue of Engage Marketing Magazine

Here is a gift for you:

The newest issue of our Engage Magazine. This magazine is in printed format but here is the digital format for you.

Engage Magazine covers the latest in NeuroMarketing and NeuroMagnetism, Small business marketing and online marketing.
Click below to read.

 

Engage Marketing Magazine