7. Loyalty Programs & Mobile

 
To-date, most loyalty programs are supported by magnetic or smart cards 
A loyalty plan allows your company to
  • Individually identify your customers and purchases by billing amount, products, dates, etc ... 
  • Give your customers a feeling of exclusivity and preferential treatment
  • Usually grants some kind of discount or gifts depending on customer purchases 
  • Sometimes the cards are also used as a payment method, or as a private credit vehicle
     
People don’t like to fill their wallet with loyalty cards
  • Mobile customer loyalty programs allow you to treat your customer´s mobile phone as a mobile loyalty card 
  • Loyalty plans are moving from the wallet of the customer to the mobile device through mobile apps 
  • The smartphone-based loyalty apps allow you to analyse consumer’s behavior 
  • Using geolocation, you can send to your customers personalised offers based on the data captured by your loyalty plan

There are mobile loyalty companies that offer mobile apps to be used by many companies, so the user just installs one app and uses it for all the merchants that belong to that loyalty network
  • Your cost will be lower, because all the infrastructure is developed by the provider ... but ... a network scheme doesn’t feel exclusive
 
Some loyalty solutions award the customer with points or gifts if they simply visit a store (known as “walk-ins”)
  •  The customer is notified that the store has a “walk-in” program, and then has to manually open the app to get the points or gifts for that store
  •  Some other solutions require the use of base devices installed in- store to be detected by the loyalty application

Passbook enabled loyalty programs
  • You can simply send to your customers their digital card in passbook format 
  • Your loyalty card will be then added to the passbook virtual wallet in iOS devices and passwallet in Android 
  • There is no need to have an app installed on the device of the customer
  • Can use the location alerts via passbook, to remind the customer to visit your store when he is nearby • Specially useful in anonymous loyalty plans

You can’t just copy your traditional point-based loyalty strategies used on physical cards and translate it to a mobile architecture
 - this just DOESN’T WORK
  • At least a 30% of the loyalty rewards are never redeemed “Most mobile-reward programs haven’t yet proven to be as consistent or effective” Julie Mossler (Groupon)

In conclusion, you can create a loyalty plan based on mobile if
  •  It is used along with other mobile marketing techniques
  •  You create, if possible, your own mobile plan instead of using shared loyalty plans