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Understanding Loyalty Behaviors in the UK

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By: Wise Marketer Staff |

Posted on June 20, 2019

What are the key differences between those who collect and save their points, and those who spend them as quickly as possible in the UK?

Whilst we believe that it’s important to understand your programme members as individuals, we also recognise that macro insights are very useful for loyalty marketers. We think of these macro insights as high level “rules of thumb” which help us, and our clients run our programmes on a day to day basis. We have conducted some new research with our YouGov dataset to understand more about these behaviours.

Our research identified 3 key points based behavioural segments in the UK:

We wanted to understand the differences between the 2 extremes of behaviour. What differentiates an Early Redeemer (someone who uses up their points at the earliest opportunity to claim lower value rewards) from a Collector (someone who saves up their points, aiming for higher value rewards)? We looked at our database of 9,326 Early Redeemers and 25,439 Collectors to find out more.

Profiling UK Collectors and Early Redeemers.

UK Collectors are older, more likely to be female and wealthier:

Both sets are big fans of loyalty programmes:

  • 67% of Early Redeemers think all brands should offer a loyalty programme
  • 62% of Collectors agree

We wonder if Early Redeemers are bigger fans because they are claiming rewards more often?

Attitudinally the Early Redeemers in the UK are very interesting:

We found the information on the Early Redeemers so insightful that we decided to also look at the attitudes of UK Collectors:

Conclusion:

What a UK loyalty programme could do to appeal to an Early Redeemer should be very different to what it might do to appeal to a Collector.

Also Read: How Data Analytics is transforming Loyalty Rewards Programs

What is important is to understand your own membership profile; it’s not always what you expect it to be – using our current YouGov dataset, here’s snapshot of the breakdown for some of the UK’s retail loyalty programmes.

For example, a programme might offer a cool technology focused to reward its Early Redeemers but focus its Collectors’ rewards on local communities and businesses. Or a programme might introduce a mechanic which puts the member in control of what benefits they receive and how they receive them for our independent-minded Early Redeemers but offer safe and extra secure benefits or mechanics for its risk averse Collectors.

In the UK, there are twice as many Collectors (41%) as Early Redeemers (20%) and the differences between the 2 groups in terms of profile, behaviour and attitude are significant. It is critical that each programme understands its member portfolio and adapts and tailors its approach to meet their needs.

Charlie Hills is Managing Director and Head of Strategy at Mando-Connect part of Mando.