Toronto Star : Loyalty program customer questions fuel charge

Source Toronto Star, Ellen Roseman

Last week's column on Aeroplan's policy of charging one cent a mile to spouses of deceased members drew a spirited response.

Readers had questions about both Aeroplan and Air Miles, Canada's biggest travel reward programs.

Q: What happens to Air Miles points after the member dies?

A: You can merge your account with the account of a family member who has died with no fee required.

Shawna Rossi, a spokesperson for LoyaltyOne, which runs Air Miles, says you must complete a "merge account form" and send it with supporting documents to Air Miles.

Q: My husband and I recently redeemed Air Miles points for two WestJet return flights to Florida.

There were extra fees of $374 for the two reward flights, including a $20 administration fee per ticket and a $75 fuel surcharge per ticket.

Air Miles told me it doesn't keep the fuel surcharge, but passes it on to the airline. But when I checked WestJet's website, I found there are no fuel surcharges any more. Is this just a money grab?

A: Air Miles has a fuel surcharge for reward tickets and so does Aeroplan – even though WestJet has dropped the surcharges and Air Canada has eliminated the fuel surcharge for North American flights.

I asked both loyalty programs for an explanation.

Shawna Rossi, Air Miles: WestJet has not removed this charge from the redemption class of tickets it sells to us.

The reward miles required for an Air Miles redemption has not increased since 2005 and we have no plans to increase the number of miles required at this time.

Unfortunately, this fuel charge is something we must pass on to collectors. It is part of the taxes and service charges the airline requires us to collect on their behalf for all redemption tickets.

As for the $20 per ticket booking fee, it covers services such as issuing the itinerary, e-ticket, paper ticket, etc.

Christa Poole, Aeroplan: Air Canada requires Aeroplan to collect fuel surcharges on all Classic flight rewards.

For international destinations, the fuel surcharge amounts are equivalent to those charged by Air Canada when customers purchase a regular ticket.

The North American fuel surcharge for Classic flight rewards is $27 per one way, while those for international flights vary by market and are the same as for Air Canada tickets.

Air Canada reflects the cost of fuel for North America in its ticket prices, which may increase or decrease accordingly.

However, Aeroplan does not vary its mileage levels for Classic flight rewards and is required to collect a separate surcharge, reflecting Air Canada's cost to purchase fuel.

Q: As an Air Miles member, I tried to redeem points for a Canon FS20 camcorder shown in its magazine.

I was told that model wasn't available because Canon had supplied the wrong image.

I think Air Miles should take responsibility for the error. Do I have a valid case?

A: Air Miles refused his request at first, saying Canon decided not to offer that camcorder in Canada after the magazine had gone to print.

"Rewards are subject to availability and restrictions imposed by suppliers," he was told.

Manvinder Pabla, the member, felt there was a principle involved.

"If it was too late to retract the offer, then why didn't they insert a flyer to correct it?"

Air Miles changed its stand after the Toronto Star got involved. It agreed that Pabla, a long-time collector, deserved to get the camcorder shown in the magazine at the 4,200-point level.

Starbucks runs mobile coupon loyalty program

Starbucks Coffee Co. is running a loyalty program based on 2D bar-code coupons deployed via SMS.

The coffee giant tapped digital technology provider Codilink, which specializes in mobile services helping companies to offer loyalty programs to their clients. The campaign is currently running in Guadalajara and San Luis Potosi, Mexico, but based on the 60 percent mobile coupon redemption rate, it is likely to be expanded.

Source : MobileMarketing

Frequent Flier Mile Controversy

Frequent flier miles - many people get excited when they heard those words. How many of you have signed up for credit cards or shopped in certain places just to get an extra 500 to 1,000 points? A lot of you, right? But, did you know that even though you have bought and paid for these frequent flier miles, you cannot sell these miles.

Surprising isn’t it? Well, it’s even more surprising to find out that, while you can’t sell your miles, your favorite airline has been doing just that. Sites like Points.com can purchase miles from you at significantly less than what you would be getting in a free market. And, a lot less
than the amount of money that the airlines are making off of their frequent flier mile programs.

Confused? Then, let’s get you some background on the subject. The frequent flier mile programs were first created as rewards for customer loyalty. These miles could be turned into discounts or credits for airplane tickets. But, soon this changed from just a customer loyalty program into a commodity that could be earned in different ways, including buying from a certain store or using a certain credit card.

Basically, you began to pay to get those loyalty miles. And, in turn, airlines began to make a profit off of these sales because of their relationships with the vendors. As the profits grew bigger from these sales, the airlines began to put more and more restrictions on how you could use your miles and when. The rise of the blackout periods took over.

So, consumers had a ton of miles that they couldn’t use or were getting ready to expire. Now, with panic setting in, they decided to do the next best thing. Sell those miles, get some cash and finally get some benefit out of their miles. Frequent flier brokers began popping up to service this segment of the market and help out the frequent flier in need.

Yet, the airline industry couldn’t just leave this well enough alone. Fearing that this simple exchange of goods would threaten them, they began intimidating their most precious commodity: the consumer. They would disable accounts or take away miles from anyone who dared to sell what was rightfully theirs.

The right to buy and sell frequent flier miles continues to be fought on many grounds, including the courtroom (check out the Delta SkyMiles case from a few years back). There are proponents and opponents on both ends of the spectrum. But, Web sites like www.Flyhub.com have been popping up on the side of consumers to help them buy and sell their frequent flier miles.
And, the fight will continue for many years to come.

Source : www.articledashboard.com

Teams, fans rally around Twitter

While some sports marketers have gotten to first base with Twit­ter, no one has been able to drive it home yet. Still, Twitter is a hit in the sports community thanks to the microblogging site's ability to engage and inform in real-time.

While it has yet to be used widely to drive sales conver­sions, Twitter's potential to pro­vide brand and product insights and its ability to add interactivity to other media channels, such as television, print and e-mail, makes it increasingly difficult for direct marketers to ignore it when launching a campaign.

Because Twitter is an open appli­cation programming interface (API), marketers can scrape Twit­ter feeds for data, said Jason Inasi, president at Miami-based The Fac­tory Interactive. “Twitter as a data mining, predictive trending tool is amazing because you can do stuff in real-time,” Inasi said.

The social media site has amassed a large crowd — a total of 9.3 mil­lion members as of March — but for sports marketing, the real appeal is the synergy in purpose.

“Sports is fun. Twitter is fun,” said David Smith, president at Steiner Sports Direct. The ques­tion is how to leverage Twitter to make it fun for fans, he added.

Last week, the NBA's Phoenix Suns franchise ran a TV broadcast ad during the last game of the regu­lar season soliciting for Facebook and Twitter followers, promising 500 prize giveaways to new users. The trend began last year when several well-known athletes led the way into this emerging media, and quickly discovered loyal fans were thrilled to connect with the some­times hard-to-reach celebrities.

Source : DMNews

CEOs building stronger relationships with customer & employee

National CEO Survey Highlights the Power of People.

Company leaders focus on the strength of internal and external relationship-building.

While CEOs ante up to the challenges of today’s competitive pressures and the current economic conditions, they’re recognizing the power of people. Whether better managing their company’s clients, employees or both, today’s CEOs are strengthening business by building stronger relationships with these individuals, according to the 2009 Management Action Programs Inc. (MAP) Quarterly CEO Survey conducted by Vantage Research. Surprisingly, these CEOs aren’t as concerned with lowering product prices to steer their companies through the recession right now. Instead, over 50 percent are now turning their attention to stabilizing or growing revenues through customer/client retention, using softer tactics, like beefing up services, interactions and communications, the survey indicates. As well, nearly 70 percent of these company leaders are motivating staff with simple, yet effective non-financial rewards, such as verbal and written recognition.

“The results from MAP’s latest survey demonstrate that in the face of today’s economic crisis, CEOs are going back to basics,” says Lee Froschheiser, president/CEO of MAP (www.mapconsulting.com), a veteran business-consulting firm that has accelerated sustained growth for over 13,000 companies and 160,000 executives since 1960. “There is renewed focus on treating both employees and customers right, which is a key driver in maintaining a sustainable business. If CEOs can rise to the challenge, they create a win-win situation: They retain their best employees and their best customers.”

Source : www.mapconsulting.com

Building Your Brand by Creating Community

What are the most important goals when building your brand online? No matter the product, service or industry, those goals likely include:

1. Starting a relationship with your customers that can't be duplicated by the competition, encouraging loyalty and providing value.
2. Maximizing customer interaction time with your brand, as well as building mindshare and influence.
3. Building an e-mail list for targeted follow-up and communication.

Source and complet article : Chief Marketer

I have just read Reality Check and it exceeded my expectations

Reality Check

Reality Check from Guy Kawasaki provides "hardcore information" for "hardcore people who want to kick ass.

I have just read Reality Check and it exceeded my expectations.

FanBox MS2, the Ultimate Tool in Relational Technology

MS2 is a unique platform that offers unparalleled performance. Through exhaustive research and major investments, it brings together state-of-the-art relational marketing technologies. It also offers two innovative concepts which, once combined, can be represented by a mathematical formula: MS2=DMA*+CCC*.

DMA* or Discreet Member Analysis consists of a detailed, real-time analysis of the consumer habits and preferences of each of your clients. This analysis allows you, for example, to make a specific offer to customers at the very moment they arrive at a cash register or an interactive terminal.

CCC* or Consumer Constant Connection represents the multiplication of targeted communication possibilities and opportunities with each of your clients, thanks to the acute knowledge you acquire of their needs and preferences. You are kept up-to-date, step by step, of what they consume, allowing you to monitor trends in their needs and habits.

For more info about MS2: dguay (at) fanbox.net

* All rights reserves, MS2, DMA and CCC

New Loyalty Program Offers Patent Lawyers Value in Challenging Economic Climate

At a time when law firms and in-house legal departments are tightening their belts, Patent Resources Group (PRG) has introduced a new Loyalty Program to provide patent legal professionals the valuable Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit they need to continue practicing.

The new program offers exclusive pricing on any 2009 Advanced Courses for attendees of any one of Patent Resource Group’s 2008 Advanced Courses, Workshops, Seminars or Patent Bar Review courses. Additionally, attendees of any 2009 course will receive Loyalty Program pricing for any subsequent Advanced Courses in 2009, as well as in 2010.

Source : Patent Resources Groupe Newsroom

You Liked This Product. Now What?

Product recommendation is one of the most elusive--and potentially profitable--forms of merchandising online, where consumer behavior can bring in reams of data about the way people shop. But figuring out what to do with that data, and how to present what you learn, is a psychological challenge all its own.

No company has tackled personalized recommendations on a larger scale than Amazon, which has a 100-person team devoted solely to suggesting other products its customers might like. So the small-but-influential world of personalization paid attention when Amazon's head of personalization from 2003-2004, David Selinger, left for Overstock, and learned to leverage impulse deal-buying as well as a big back catalog of products. After over a year at Overstock, Selinger left to co-found a company called RichRelevance in 2006, which would take what he had learned and turn it into an algorithmic tool he could sell.

The problem is that online customers are a particular and fickle bunch: even if you serve them up interesting product suggestions, you can still fail to get a good conversion rate if you don't present the suggestions in a palatable but unobtrusive way. Do it right, and you can increase sales by 25%, as Amazon did under Selinger. Do it wrong, and you can alienate people or even piss them off.

Source : FastCompany

La problématique du lancement des campagnes de fidélisation

Lancer une nouvelle campagne de fidélisation est souvent une gageure et une prise de risque importante. Deux points sont pourtant à retenir pour minimiser les risques et tendre vers le succès.

Liens vers un très bon article sur le sujet

How to use Bluetooth successfully in mobile marketing campaigns

Most mobiles come with Bluetooth as standard but there is still some confusion over how it can be used for marketing - so the DMA Mobile Marketing Council's Mark Brill explains how to implement innovative proximity campaigns, without falling foul of the law.

Source : MyCustomer.com and DMA

RFID-enabled loyalty program

TOP Food and Drug, a Washington State grocery chain operated by Haggen Inc., has deployed an RFID-enabled customer relationship program in its stores. The program, TOP Connection, uses RFID-enabled key tags (or adhesive tags for cellphones) to target customers with tailored marketing promotions and value-added services.

The TOP Connection system uses a software platform from Accelitec Inc. This system, which is interfaced with RFID readers placed at checkout terminals and the key tags issued to customers, functions as an on-demand customer acquisition and retention platform, and holds encrypted customer information on secure servers. The software platform is compatible with legacy hardware and software used by most retailers.

To participate in the program, customers enroll and set up an online profile, including personal information and product, communication and payment preferences. The amount of information provided by customers guides the level of participation in the program, with more detailed data accessing highly customized offers and marketing. Key tags, which are designed by Vanguard ID Systems and use UPM Raflatac HF RFID inlays, are issued after enrollment and scanned automatically at checkout.

Source RFID News

Consumers who pay their bills online are more profitable and loyal to their financial institution

Aspen Marketing Services, working with CheckFree, now part of Fiserv, and a top 10 financial institution, performed a comprehensive analysis of offline and online banking customers to understand how online bill usage impacts both profitability and customer churn.

They found households that use online bill pay are up to 271 percent more profitable and 76 percent less likely to churn than households that do not. They also found that new online bill payers show a dramatic increase in profitability after adoption, delivering 15-20 percent more profit after adopting bill pay.

Further, they discovered that bill pay data is a unique and incremental source of data that can be leveraged to predict a range of important outcomes, including churn, cross sell and future profitability. This paper demonstrates that, rather than just being a simple cost center, online bill pay can be a valuable tool to drive profit, reduce churn and predict future customer behavior.

Source : Fiserv

Le Club Med lance son programme de fidélisation mondial

Club Med vient d'annoncer le lancement de son tout premier programme de fidélisation "Club Med Great Members". La création de ce programme s'inscrit dans la stratégie de montée en gamme du voyagiste et répond aux attentes de ses clients en quête de reconnaissance. Il remplit trois objectifs : montrer au client qu'il est une priorité, avoir un programme relais de la stratégie (haut de gamme, convival et multiculturel) et s'appuyer sur l'histoire du Club et de ses clients en transformant les "gentils membres" en "great members".

Concrètement, le programme permet aux clients d'accéder à trois statuts : "turquoise", "silver" ou "gold"' selon leur niveau de fidélité. Pour obtenir le statut "silver", une famille de quatre personnes doit avoir passé plus de quatre semaines en trois ans au Club Med et plus de huit semaines pour passer au statut "gold". Une fois détenteur de son statut "silver", le client fidèle bénéficie de la priorité d'offres en avant-première ou dédiées, de la garantie du meilleurs prix pour les "early bookers" et à des ventes privées du Club Med et de ses partenaires. Il peut également profiter de réductions en boutiques et sur les excursions. Quant aux membres "gold", ils ont accès à une série de "privilèges" dédiés. Ils peuvent, par exemple, être surclassés en chambre de catégorie supérieure, obtenir un transfert privilégié pour tout séjour dans un village de quatre ou cinq tridents, bénéficier du check-in prioritaire, etc.

Le programme "great members" a également été pensé comme un complément à la carte Club Med - American Express. Ainsi, chaque utilisation de la carte pour régler des achats effectués en France ou à l'étranger, chez les commerçant du réseau American Express, permettent de cumuler des points transformables par la suite en réductions pour des séjours au Club Med.

Source : e-marketing.fr

Building brand loyalty through social brand action

Consumers are seeing the financial services industry reflect a past of greed and lack of governance to the point of public money bail outs, thousands of people losing their homes and jobs and a global credit crisis. Link this to the growth of the internet and explosive growth in people's access to 'knowledge' and you have a backdrop of change in how organisations are integrating social value propositions into their brand values.

The link goes even further. The public is also more aware of the environment and going green. Green products or services, although considered with a touch of cynicism by consumers, do not take away the fact that people want to do something to help our neglected planet.

Social brand capital is not a new idea, in fact companies like clothing firm Patagonia and Body Shop embraced CSR in their products and communication 20 years ago, with most companies today focused on issues that effect our social and cultural well being. Corporations are much more aware of their carbon footprint and the need to use responsible ingredients and packaging. In fact, many companies in their annual reports and websites identify their activity on social brand responsibility.

"Branding today is about creating and building value–centric brands to show leadership in social responsibility well beyond how brands define themselves in terms of their functionality and image."

This phenomena of social consciousness is now expanding as customers seek out products and services that make them feel they are "doing their bit" for the environment and being socially good citizens. The change is fuelling a new greener approach in brand marketing and the developing a greener feel and look for a brand purchase beyond price.

Source : MyCustomer.com

E-Mail Marketers Sending in the Dark

Ignorance, budget constraints among reasons why not

The proposition for e-mail marketing in the Web 2.0 world is simple—a low-cost medium with a good return on investment that can be easily tracked.

But for many e-mail marketers, tracking is proving tricky.

According to eROI, 18% of US e-mail marketers are not tracking the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Reasons for not tracking varied. Most marketers not tracking site conversions did not know how. Lack of time and budget were also concerns.

Similarly, the biggest reasons for not tracking e-commerce conversions were lack of knowledge and budget.

Source: eMarketer

New iPhone Apps Providing Retailers With New Ways To Connect with Consumers

Dating back to the days of its first release in July 2007—when it sold one million units in just the three days—the Apple iPhone has been a hot commodity. Now less than two years from its debut, the iPhone is poised to be a game changer in retailing and mobile commerce.

With this summer’s introduction of the iPhone OS 3.0 beta software, industry insiders predict Apple will integrate micro transaction technology allowing consumers to pay for products directly through their iTunes account without ever having to use a credit card.

From Retail Touch Point

The soft drink launches a new flavor with a loyalty program that targets users in their digital comfort zone

The soft drink launches a new flavor with a loyalty program that targets users in their digital comfort zone -- Facebook, blogs, and online games. But will design flaws short circuit the whole campaign?

Source : iMedia Connection