46 | STOPPRESS.CO.NZ | JULY− AUGUST 2015 JULY− AUGUST 2015 STOPPRESS.CO.NZ | 47

IN ASSOCIATION WITH AIMIA

How many ‘loyalty schemes’ do you see nowadays where you’re given a generic discount voucher in exchange for your email contact details? Did this exchange actually change your feelings

or behaviour with that business? For many marketers today, the loyalty programme remains a trusted tool to encourage customer behavioural change. Yet the rise of email marketing and new technologies, leveraged in an untargeted manner, increasingly obscure the core value that loyalty programmes can offer to brands. Businesses today can capture huge amounts of data on their customers and have more channels than ever before at their disposal to reach them. All too often, however, permission to use this data and send blanket mass messages to consumers is assumed rather than earned. Marketers adopting this approach today are missing out on gaining a deeper understanding of their customers, making it more difficult to deliver a

YOUR LOYALTY PROGRAMME MAY BE HOLDING YOU BACK It’s no longer enough to blast out messages to an amorphous mass of customers indistinguishable from each other. Loyalty marketing should provide specific information to a specific person at a specific time and Simon Rowles from Aimia believes that their Loyalty Healthcheck framework can help companies achieve this.

“USING OUR GLOBAL EXPERTISE FROM RUNNING OVER 1,250 LARGE LOYALTY PROGRAMMES ACROSS AIRLINES, RETAIL, BANKING AND OWNING OUR OWN COALITIONS IN THE UK, ITALY AND SOUTH AMERICA, WE HAVE DEVELOPED A WELL-TESTED LOYALTY HEALTHCHECK FRAMEWORK.” Simon Rowles

better return on investment on overall marketing spend. Beyond this, they’re missing the opportunity to build a stronger, longer lasting relationship with their consumers through this bland, untargeted approach.

Recent multi-market consumer research by the Aimia Institute has found a growth in ‘deletist consumers’. These are shoppers that in a bid to cope with the deluge of mass, untargeted

digital messaging from today’s brands simply hit the delete button. This research found that irrelevant blast messaging is doing more damage to customer relationships over time than you might realise. These coping mechanisms mean that 71 percent of consumers will now unfollow brands on social media, 73 percent will close accounts and 60 percent will delete apps thanks to poorly targeted brand communications.

For more information contact Simon Rowles at simon.rowles@aimia.com or on 09 524 1122.

Perhaps, it’s time then to reassess the effectiveness of your weekly email blasts and instead start to take a longer-term view of your customer relationships with a more personalised loyalty programme.

At Aimia, we view loyalty programmes as the foundation for growing real relationships with customers. We aim to build sustainable, symbiotic relationships and brand trust with

your most valuable customers through a fair and transparent data-value exchange and highly personalised communications. Beyond this, loyalty programmes also offer a wealth of data insights that can revolutionise decision-making on your marketing investments. These could include understanding more about the incremental shoppers that a particular SKU brings to a category or being able to make more

informed and targeted decisions on customer communications to maximise penetration.

“Globally we see many clients with large high-profile loyalty programmes that just aren’t getting the traction they should in the market or within their organisation”, says Aimia New Zealand’s managing director Simon Rowles. “Using our global expertise from running over 1,250 large loyalty programmes across airlines, retail, banking and owning our own coalitions in the UK, Italy and South America, we have developed a well-tested Loyalty Healthcheck framework. This tool ensures you understand the real value your scheme is producing, and what’s missing. It also helps assess whether the programme is fit for purpose and on the right path for the next stage in its evolution.”

Rowles adds: “We are excited to bring this Loyalty Healthcheck to the New Zealand market and for New Zealand companies to see how they can maximise the profitability of their loyalty programme and communications, as well as having access to our global expertise and experience across several industries.”

At Aimia, we realise having a robust strategy is just the first part of the journey of getting the most out of your loyalty programme. Our range of loyalty and communications platforms, when combined with our basic to advanced analytics capabilities, mean we’re well placed to answer your business questions quickly with a dedicated team that will help you build even closer relationships with your customers.