Shoppers Loyalty Programs seem to be springing up almost on a daily basis, as more and more on and off-line stores jump on this quite crowded bandwagon for creating loyal customers. But the majority are very limited, as very few of them are universally accepted in many retail outlets. You can only use a Tesco's ClubCard usually in one of the thousands of Tesco's Stores across the UK. Boots have their own; Marks and Spencer have theirs, as do Morrisons, Waitrose, Iceland, and hundreds of other well-known retailers.

Sainsbury's have adopted the Nectar Card as their Loyalty program, and the beauty of the Nectar card is that you can use it in many other retailers, as well as Sainsbury's, so building up reward points can happen quite fast. (Sainsbury's do not own Nectar. The owners are Canadian company, AIMIA)

But probably 99% or more of Loyalty programs are missing two vital ingredients:

  1. They fail to encourage members to recruit new people, but if they do they fail to properly reward them. Loyalty is at its most powerful when combined with the world's most successful marketing system – Network, or ‘word-of-mouth' marketing.
  2. They fail to introduce new customers to the business. This is still a task for expensive, unreliable and up-front expensive ‘Pay and Pray' advertising.

Recruiting new members. Let's take the issue of getting a member to recruit new members. If you join a Loyalty program, and you find that without spending any money, or having to buy some item or service like a specific Utility company you don't really want, apart from your ‘already spend' money, you find that you are starting to build up a lot of Shopping Rewards Points (SRPs). How easy would it be for you to introduce your friends to join you? And if you were rewarded by getting a small piece of all of their spending within your group of Loyalty Merchants, then surely that must make you highly incentivized to do just that. But if this small reward was just say 10 or 20 pence, most people wouldn't cross the road to pick up a 10p coin, but millions of us regularly present a Loyalty Card every time we shop, in the hope of getting a few pennies in reward points. Is it worth the hassle?

Consider this. Many older folk (perhaps in their mid-eighties), will save all their 10 and 20 pence coins in a tin, ready for the Christmas shopping bonanza. They find it really exciting when the tin was nearly full, and they had the pleasure of counting out around £200 worth of shrapnel!

But this is the idea behind a Loyalty Program that also encourages and rewards their members continuously when they get more people to join their programs – lots of ‘just 10 pence's' as your team grows is equally as exciting.

So let's now compare two Loyalty systems: the long-established Nectar Card system with over 20 million members, and the Idea Rewards Card, still in its first year, but who fully embraces the concept of network or word-of-mouth marketing. In the following comparison, both shoppers have a Nectar Card; both spend £100 in store but only one is also a member of one of these network marketing-based companies. Here, we are going to use the Idea Rewards Card for comparison.

Nectar only. 05% shopper's rewards points. 100 Nectar Points (value £0.005 each) = 50 Pence.

Idea Rewards. 2.5% Shopper reward points. 2.5 SRPs, valued at £1 each = £2.50 (5 times more)

PLUS 1.25% Loyalty Program Points from every Member in your downline. Value = £1.25 * Team member numbers.

PLUS any Nectar card points if they are a member of both.

AND this bonus is paid up to 7 levels deep.

So if you introduce 5 members and they introduce 5 each, and they introduce 5 each…

  • Is there a limit on the number of 10p's to be earned? No!
  • Can you benefit from introducing a small business, with dozens of loyal customers? Yes!
  • Can you build a team of thousands of members in a year? Yes!
  • Can you benefit from up to SEVEN LEVELS of recommenders? Yes!

Community High Street support.

This is where Nectar gets left behind in the dust, along with most other Loyalty programs. With Loyalty programs such as Ideas, having a network marketing, or ‘word-of-mouth' facility associated, mean that for many independent retailers, in High Streets all over the UK, where whole communities are in danger of collapse, there is now a proven solution that can not only assist these independent businesses to increase their turnover and profitability, improve the loyalty of their existing customers, and also have the ability to recruit new loyal customers as well. And this can be done without the massive cost of direct marketing (Pay and Pray) advertising. By having the facility for these old and new customers to become members of the local businesses' loyalty program, the business can then also benefit from the shopping habits of these members.

When members spend elsewhere within the same Loyalty program, such as in big stores like Sainsbury's, Boots, B&Q and so forth, and even when shopping on-line, the small business will find a new and independent passive income is created as these shopping members spend elsewhere. (even in competitive stores).

On top of all that, as the network of small independent businesses expands, so will the ability of every Loyalty member to shop in any of these outlets, and get INSTANT GRATIFICATION, as any of these small businesses who are also Loyalty merchants, will have the ability to enable shoppers to have the choice of money or Reward Points (or a combination) to pay for their shopping.

So, by identifying a Loyalty Program ‘ON STEROIDS' as defined above, even if each transaction only generates a few pence in loyalty rewards, the overall benefit will probably be substantial, not just to the shoppers, but to the small, independent business, and communities as a whole across the whole UK.

You may have to slightly change your shopping habits here, but just remember, shopping for convenience will give you short-term gratification, but shopping for opportunity even though you may have to change your shopping habits slightly, will massively improve your quality of lifestyle.



Source by Geoff Morris