Loyalty Marketing and More…

Happy 4th of July. The Loyalty Marketers Blog will be on vacation for the next week. Check back soon for more on the world of Loyalty.

It’s nice to see that what we stand for here at Loyalty Marketers being validated by other successful Loyalty companies and in the media. Two recent articles in Promo Magazine: Best Customer and Top of Wallet discuss the current state of Loyalty programs and make some observations about what’s working. These suggestions sound very familiar to what I’ve been saying in this Blog for the past two months (and in actuality, what I’ve been saying for the past few years). A Loyalty program can be a valuable addition to a company’s sales and marketing efforts. The key is setting it up right from the beginning with clearly defined goals, objectives and measurement criteria.

(more…)

The issue of online interactions between companies and their customers has been a hot topic for years – ever since people started posting messages in forums that were critical of the companies and those companies wanted the messages removed. It still amazes me that after all these years there are companies that think they can control what is said about the company online. If they truly think they can control or even limit what is said, they are truly deluding themselves.

(more…)

As I’ve tried to demonstrate in these pages, Loyalty comes in many shapes and sizes. I recently came across the following academic study involved loyalty in the workplace – Rethinking Company Loyalty by Lauren Keller Johnson. In the paper, the author describes the fact that employees are now more Loyal to their careers than they are to their companies. It is an interesting article that every employer should read so as to better understand the psyche of their employees. Many of the observations and suggestions seem like common sense though it is surprising how infrequently companies do what they know they should.

While the author does a fairly good job describing how to deal with employee Loyalty, the author skips over the root causes for employee turnover. I’ve never seen any research around why employee turnover has increased in the past 30 years but I have some theories. I think understanding the causes can be an important factor in improving retention for companies. (more…)

Last night brought the conclusion to a cultural icon of a television show – The Sopranos. There are lots of people writing about the show in the newspaper and on Blogs about how disappointed they were with the ending, or how great they thought it was that it was so vague.

First let me say that I don’t have HBO so am not a huge Sopranos fan. I’ve seen it a few times when traveling and staying at a hotel and appreciate the quality of the show but I didn’t get into it like a lot of people did. The show was very popular - it won 18 Emmy awards and countless accolades. But what happened with last night’s finale reminds me of problems that exist when a group of people are Loyal to something and the experience doesn’t live up to their expectations. You end up with frustration, disappointment and even resentment. I heard one radio personality today say that he was planning to destroy the DVD sets he has of back seasons of The Sopranos.

(more…)

I attended a presentation recently for the launch of a new loyalty initiative for Schoolpop, the school fundraising group that is part of CauseLoyalty. Their new initiative is called the Bonus Merchant Network and is being launched in partnership with NPC (National Processing Company), a large credit and debit card transaction processor.

The significance of this launch, in my opinion, is their attempt to build a national network of local merchants where members of an affinity group can shop and save in an automated and seamless way using the consumers existing credit or debit card. This kind of program is commonly referred to as a registered card model (RCM). There have been other programs that have relied upon an RCM platform (i.e. Upromise) but most have been built with large national merchants. Local merchants have been difficult to add to these programs due to the sheer numbers and the challenge in tracking the data from the purchase at a small retail location back to the consumer so they receive their appropriate credit (points, miles, etc.).

(more…)

I was approached recently by someone who is starting a new Coalition Loyalty program. In fact, the idea could be expanded to a few different “sites” all using the same back-end technology. It is very exciting and I look forward to sharing the details with you when the time is right.

For those of you familiar with the world of Loyalty, you might be asking yourself why someone would go to the effort of creating another Loyalty program. It’s a question I think about quite often. Does the world need yet another Coalition Loyalty program?

In my opinion, the answer is No and Yes. No because there are already so many programs out there that consumers don’t need another choice. But in reality, so many of the programs out there do such a poor job with their programs that the opportunity does exist for someone to come in and do things “the right way” from the beginning. So yes, I do think there is room for a new program if it is done well.

(more…)