Group items tagged

Multi-channel marketing has been the talk for quite some time, but it seems many loyalty marketing professionals still struggle with creating a consistently seamless experience for multi-channel loyalty. Your customers can now shop online or in-store, may contribute to your social media spaces via mobile, and engage with your brand on Facebook. Does your loyalty marketing program track and reward all the different types of engagement and brand love that your fans are displaying? Or are you stuck in a one-track mode, dishing out rewards for only one, narrowly defined type of action? Look ahead and keep watch as the technology avail

able shifts to accommodate rewarding ALL the little ways your customers demonstrate their loyalty -- and get on board!

Each player is a node in our high street, but at the moment they are operating independently, rather than as a network. They may be using a web page to hold information in an archive-like manner, but they are not responding in real-time to their consumers and other nodes.

To strengthen the high street, we need to increase the number of mutual connections between the nodes or network participants (retail, services, local government, job centres and all others). The more mutual connections, the more adaptive the high street network becomes in response to changes in the success of individuals shops and services.

Establish a ‘Digital Maturity Demographic Profile’ for each town to prepare for ‘networked high streets’ and tailor connection and communicationstrategies accordingly.

But spare a thought for the poor admen. Their industry is going through a particularly difficult time. Not only are they confronting a proliferation of new “channels” through which to pump their messages; they are also having to puzzle out how to craft them in an age of mass scepticism. Consumers are bombarded with brands wherever they look—the average Westerner sees a logo (sometimes the same one repeatedly) perhaps 3,000 times each day—and thus are becoming jaded. They are also increasingly familiar with the tricks of the marketing trade and determined to cut through the clutter to get a bargain. Scepticism and sophistication are especially pronounced among those born since the early 1980s.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that 46% of American “millennials” use their smartphones to check prices and online comments when they visit a shop.

Many companies want to go further and bypass conventional ad campaigns altogether. It has long been known that “earned media”—word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family and news articles—are highly trusted. Nielsen’s studies show that strangers’ comments on social media and online forums are also now seen as credible sources, rivalling traditional “paid media”.

Offer excellent customer service  As the online channel matures, and growth slows, customer service (and customer experience) will be the key differentiator. It can also trump price in some circumstances.  For some purchases, price online will be the deciding factor once customers decide to buy a certain product, but they will also appreciate great service and the personal touch.