While consumer membership in loyalty programs has grown, active participation in such programs is slack, according to Colloquy's 2009 Loyalty Census.
Membership in loyalty rewards programs in the US has reached a high of 1.808 billion — a 24% jump since Colloquy's last census in 2007. There are 14.1 loyalty program memberships per household, however, only 6.2 are actively used. Active participation is relatively flat compared to 2007. Colloquy researchers say that this consumer non-engagement with loyalty programs is a call for marketers to increase the value of their programs, rather than the size.
“It seems that, in terms of membership growth, loyalty programs have gotten as big as they need and arguably too big,” said Rick Ferguson, editorial director for Colloquy, which released the census Tuesday. “A lot of these numbers are just names in the database and are inert, so I think it's time to stop thinking about program size and thinking about loyalty programs as backdoor acquisition vehicles. Instead, marketers should look at the customers that are active and contributing most to their bottom line and really use loyalty programs to connect and communicate with those people.”
Loyalty marketers must look more closely at their consumer data and use it more wisely than they have done in the past, Ferguson added. This advice rings particularly true in a rapidly changing economy, where it's difficult to foresee how consumers will be spending their money next year or even next month.
Although its membership numbers are lower than the bloated financial, travel and hospitality and retail sectors, the gaming industry boasts some of the highest activity rates. Ferguson credits the gaming industry's emphasis on experiential rewards — better in-house service, room upgrades and rewards based on preferred activities —with driving customers' engagement in such programs.
“The gaming industry overall is really a lot farther ahead in terms of using data to influence the customer experience,” he said. “I think that provides an eye-check lesson to others to really take this data and start to leverage it because they're all sitting on big piles of customer data. It's a challenge to sort through it and find insights you can exploit, but they're going to have to increase activity rates. They need to shift from short-term thinking to using programs that develop sticky relationships.”
The DIY retailer has been analysing customer data using things like its Trade Discount Card, to work out how different customer segments behave, and to identify the type of DIY projects they are likely to embark on.
It has been able to analyse this data and create predictive models of customer behaviour since investing in a data mining tool from SPSS last year.
Cool interactive idea (although not original).
To promote the upcoming Terminator movie this site allows you to upload a photo (or use your webcam) then lets you terminate yourself. Alternatively you can upset Christian Bale and he can actually rip your face off.
The .new feature shows outfits being modelled on a virtual catwalk and lets customers select and view outfits, 'try them on' in the retailer's virtual dressing room and comment on them in Facebook. H&M has launched its Spring 2009 collection with an innovative interactive catwalk. Customers can choose to see any of a wide range of outfits being modelled on the virtual catwalk and can then use the 'try it on' feature to see how they could look in real life, using H&M's virtual dressing room feature. Customers can also add outfits to Facebook so that their friends can comment on them.
Wired has an article that says tea is the new coffee and reports that today's web 2.0 crowd is on a tea drinking binge. The article also says that today's influential young Web 2.0 millionaires are drinking expensive imported teas. The article says Digg founder Kevin Rose imports $1,000 a month worth of specialty tea for Digg employees.
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