Two of the characteristics of successful customer offers that help acceptance are relevancy and timeliness. Integration of payment data, especially around what is bought, and loyalty data, around frequency and locale, work together to create more granular customer profiles.
That’s why loyalty programs that are mobile-based and targeted to consumers’ preferences are good bets for this demographic. For a restaurant chain, this may take the form of an automatically mobile-delivered digital coupon for frequently purchased items to prompt a return visit.
In fact, some restaurant operators are having success with loyalty programs that deliver digital coupons to consumers’ phones when they enter the restaurant, or even the restaurant’s vicinity. Consumers who pass a coffee shop and simultaneously get a discount offer on something they often buy are much more likely to end up visiting the store and buying the item.
The ability to make the personalized offer is seen as having special resonance with all digital natives, not just those born to it. In many cases they know it is indeed a rules based automated offer being made, but those same folks also know it’s possible to make these personalized efforts, and are coming to expect them. Retailers and Service Providers alike will learn to love the contextual offer methodologies that are enabled through mobile payments and loyalty programs residing on smartphone devices. If they don’t, driving incremental sales expansion will be more difficult.
Overview by Joseph Walent, Associate Director, Customer Interaction Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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