Monday 18 July 2016

Do Your Loyalty Programs Deserve Your Loyalty?


Do Your Loyalty Programs Deserve Your Loyalty?


The way to a customer’s heart is much more than a loyalty program. Making customer evangelists is about creating experiences worth talking about.
Valeria Maltoni


How many loyalty programs do you belong to? The average person belongs to 13.3 loyalty programs but only participates in 6.7 (Bond Brand Loyalty). If you’re like me you belong to loyalty programs that you never think about and rarely or never use.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about digital wallets that store your loyalty cards and I decided to download a free app called Key Ring. I took all of the loyalty cards out of my wallet and discovered that I was a member of several programs that I never use, so I tossed those. I still belong to 10 loyalty programs and to be quite honest I only see a benefit to belonging to 5 of the programs. 

  1. PC Plus: groceries
  2. HBC Rewards: Hudson’s Bay store
  3. Shoppers Optimum: Shoppers Drug Mart
  4. Scene: Cineplex movies
  5. Boyne Rewards: Boyne resorts

For the most part with the others, I’d have to live to be well over 100 before deriving any reward (which is the only benefit). But as consumers, we get sucked into signing up. After all, it’s free, so what do we have to lose? In reality what we end up with is a wallet full of useless plastic and more spam than we know what to do with. We’ve given these companies permission to email us with specials and promotions and the reality is that they’ve most likely sold their lists to other companies who will be sending us specials and promotions, clogging up our inboxes or spam folders.

Do your loyalty programs deserve your loyalty? Most of mine don’t and I bet yours don’t either.


Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer


Make someone smile today.

Geri


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