It’s that time of year again when millions of us will be shopping online looking for that ideal gift for family or friends in the run up to the holiday season. The giving of gifts to loved ones is of huge emotional significance, and so it’s an ideal opportunity for your loyalty program to strengthen the bond with your members and play a critical supportive role in this process. The majority of programs will have online reward shops, and the most organised of programs will have updated the messaging and the catalogues within these to reflect the holiday season. This is not a trivial task – anticipating festive shopping trends to maintain the relevance of the catalogue during this critical time, and, for global programs, trying to ensure that members around the world are catered for on time for the celebration. In addition, perhaps most challenging of all, in an era of heavy discounting by online retailers to drive sales, there is the near-impossible task of keeping your reward shop price-competitive in an extremely dynamic ecommerce environment.
Imagine instead a scenario where your members don’t necessarily need to visit your reward shop in order to engage with your program. Imagine being able to leave the myriad headaches of ecommerce – pricing, inventory, shipping during the busiest time of the year for all commerce– to the real experts, namely the online retailers themselves. Imagine your members being able to shop online, and to redeem your points at a range of global and regional online retailers of relevance to them. Your members would be able to choose from the full range of products on offer, at the best possible prices. And finally, imagine your members also being able to earn your points when shopping online during the holiday season. You cannot overestimate the positive sentiment that would be generated if your program played a critical role in enabling a member to spend points to buy that perfect festive gift for a loved one, or if your member had the unexpected bonus of earning your points whilst doing their festive shopping.
Fortunately, such a scenario does not need to remain just a figment of your imagination or an item on your wish list for Santa. Loylogic’s PointsPay solution does exactly this. A global network of merchants with the PointsPay button on their checkout pages. A global network of participating loyalty programs. Members simply choose PointsPay as their payment method when shopping online. They can choose to spend just points, or choose to pay with just their credit/debit card and earn points instead. Alternatively, they can pay with a combination of points and card and still earn points on that cash component.
For members, PointsPay offers flexibility and choice – allowing them to engage with your program on their terms, when they’re shopping online where they love to shop, rather than just in your reward shop. For online retailers, PointsPay drives volume and brings new customer acquisition. For you as the loyalty program, the benefits are multi-faceted. You get a revenue stream from selling more points. You get shopping insights to improve personalisation. You are able to offer new reward categories. Ultimately, you get happier and more engaged members.
For programs not used to this way of working, there are things to consider and natural concerns to address. Firstly, PointsPay doesn’t lead to a flood of uncontrolled redemption. You are always in full control – you curate which participating merchants are enabled for your members, the cost-per-point, spending thresholds, and segmentation. Secondly, PointsPay does not negatively compete with your existing reward shop. Think of all of the categories that you struggle with today on your reward shop – fashion, ticketing, personalised gifts, grocery and more. By intelligently curating which PointsPay retailers are available to your members, PointsPay becomes complementary to your reward shop. Finally, PointsPay can save you money. Smart programs use PointsPay as a lower cost redemption channel. In a survey carried out by Loylogic of 10,000 loyalty program members, over 60% responded that they would be happy to lower the value of their points in exchange for more flexibility regarding where they could use them.
PointsPay gives that flexibility, and by implementing a lower cost-per-point on this channel, redemptions via PointsPay save you money compared to other channels. This is a bonus on top of the income generated for your program from points earned with PointsPay.
Today, nearly a dozen programs globally are using PointsPay. Members of Etihad Guest are benefitting from being able to spend their miles at leading regional online retailer Mumzworld, the Middle East’s #1 baby and mother store – ideal for buying gifts for the youngest members of any family. Members of the Miles & More program are able to choose from hundreds of thousands of books at leading Swiss bookstore Buchhaus – an inventory that would be impossible to have on any reward shop, and books are one of the most common categories of gifts. Members of the global Qatar Airways program can earn points when booking any of 50,000 activities and experiences in over 160 countries from global provider TripXOXO, making it easier to give the experience of a lifetime as a truly special gift. These programs and others are smartly leveraging PointsPay to increase the breadth and depth of their reward experience, whilst driving member engagement and satisfaction.
Festive seasons, wherever and whenever they take place around the world, are the perfect chance for your program to build deep and meaningful bonds with your members – which ultimately becomes a gift to your bottom line. Make sure not to miss out on this great opportunity but especially not to miss out on a solution that will give you more program success and peace of mind, no matter how busy the season may be.
