Category: Customer Loyalty

Loyalty Mobile Apps

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With Verizon finally carrying iPhone and iPad and mass merchandisers such as Walmart selling smartphones on the cheap, the number of smart phones and mobile devices is bound to soar. This presents loyalty marketers a great additional touch point with their customers through mobile apps. What functionality should a marketer pack in a mobile app? To answer this question, in this blog, I’d like to take a look at different uses of mobile apps that have appeared in the marketplace.

Mobile Transaction Platform

Major retailers such as Amazon.com and eBay have developed their mobile apps that allow consumers to buy products directly from within the app. Compared with a mobile commerce website, these apps tend to be more user-friendly and incorporate the touch and swipe capabilities of smartphones for easier manipulation of product pictures, smoother transition between pages, and overall faster shopping experience.

Point-of-Sales Integration

Starbucks Card App

Short of offering full mobile transaction capabilities, another type of app tries to mesh the mobile device with POS transactions in the physical world. A great example is the Starbucks Card Mobile app. Having registered a card in the app, a Starbucks card holder can use the app to pay for purchases at 6800 Starbucks stores in the US and additional locations in the Target store. The store POS system scans a barcode displayed in the app instead of a physical Starbucks card. Of course, this type of app requires equipment compatibility at offline locations, which can require costly investment. Continue reading “Loyalty Mobile Apps”

When Your Business Talks Too Much

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Lured by Cyber Monday deals, I bought something from ToysRUs.com for the first time this past weekend. Besides the order confirmation email, I received six additional promotional emails from the company, in just three day. That averages about two a day. Annoying? Sure! But ToysRUs is not alone. In the last one to two years, I have seen major retailers dramatically increase their email promotion frequency. Just a few weeks ago, I had removed myself from the email lists of well-known retailers such as New York & Company, Victoria’s Secret, to name just a few. Some of these companies were sending me daily if not more email messages about something on sale. It appears that either the recent economic recession has turned these retailers desperate, or a new marketing bible is out there somewhere teaching these retailers to bombard consumers with emails.

Is this strategy effective? Business aside, let me ask you this: have you ever met someone who can talk your head off and don’t know when or how to shut up? If you can’t picture that, think about Adrian Monk’s upstairs neighbor in the hit TV show Monk. What do we do when we meet people like that? We usually try to avoid them like the plague. I did with those retailers. When I asked my students what they do, they said they simply deleted the emails. I am sure this is not what the retailers intended.

Cover Ears
Photo by Flickr user oddharmonic | CC2.0

Now, I am not discounting the effectiveness of email marketing. When used appropriately, emails can be an effective and low-cost way of communicating with customers and keeping a business in consumers’ mind. But just like most things in this world, too much is not a good thing. Let me present a few reasons why daily or too frequent promotional emails are neither necessary nor effective: Continue reading “When Your Business Talks Too Much”

Check-ins and Places

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Launched in March 2009, Foursquare has established itself as a top player in location-based services. It allows users to “check in” to a business when they are at (or technically in the vincinity of) a business. In exchange, users earn fancy badges and mayorships, plus social benefits with their friends and other users located nearby. In the short one and a half years of its life, Foursquare has quickly signed up close to 3 million users. Following this surprising enthusiasm from consumers toward such location-based services, Twitter introduced its own location service earlier this year, where Twitter users can attach a location to their tweets. More recently, Facebook also introduced its own location-based service called “Facebook Places”. Through the Facebook iPhone app or mobile web interface (touch.facebook.com), users can check themselves and their friends into locations, and share that information with other Facebook friends.

Facebook Places

Photo by Flickr user Anthony Quintano | CC 2.0

Mobile Check-Ins and Loyalty

The fast growth of mobile check-in services has sprung other services that target more specifically at customer loyalty. Some of these services are built on existing mobile platforms such as Foursquare, and others use their own proprietary system. Here I would like to briefly mention three such services as examples of what is taking shape in the field of location-sensitive loyalty. Continue reading “Check-ins and Places”