Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Only 131 kilometres to my "local" reward

As much as information collected by loyalty programs provides a great opportunity for relevant, personalised communications to, or indeed in these enlightened days, conversations with its members, it's something that occasionally gets lost in translation. With email marketing providing a low cost form of communication, I know from the program I work with, there's often the temptation to batch and blast a message to all and sundry.

But if that's a sin in loyalty land, I reckon an even greater one is attempting to provide a personalised, targeted communication and failing miserably in the execution. And without naming names, one of Australia's most prominent loyalty programs has managed to do that with an email stream in recent months.

A couple of days back I received my "exclusive January offers" promoting the program's affiliates. (Never mind it was received on the last day of January, I'm assuming the offers didn't expire that day). But tellingly the email is headed up "my range of local rewards". And that's where the problem really begins, since each time I have received these emails over the past ten months, they are full of retailers that are anywhere but "local" to me. Some examples:
  • Hair salon in Wantirna, 24 kilometres away
  • Coffee in Doncaster, 12 kilometres away
  • Liquor from Fitzroy North, 16 kilometres away
  • Jewellery in Frankston, 50 kilometres away
  • Travel agent in Ringwood, 22 kilometres away
  • Fruit from Cheltenham, 12 kilometres away
The pièce de resistance came on Monday, with an invitation to pop in for a spot of Japanese at Ballarat Tokyo Grill, a mere 131 kilometres away. About as useful an option for local casual eating as heading to Tokyo itself!

A couple of extra pointers here - it's not as if the above examples are the exceptions among a range of other truly local shopping options; these anything-but-local offerings form the majority. Also, you'll note that none of them are for specialised goods or services that warrant long travel to hunt down. A hairdresser can be found in suburban Melbourne without necessitating a 24 km trip. Fruit can also be quite handy.

However, the most disappointing aspect is this - they know from my purchase behaviour where I DO shop - and it's not in any of the suburbs listed above.

To be fair, the program in question often does a good job in using transaction data, even at a product level, to make relevant offers. In the particular case of the program affiliates, I suspect that there may be other commercial factors that get in the way. But despite ten months for them to get this right, targeting excellence, like these "offers", seems yet some distance away.

3 comments:

the vampire's dream said...

sounds to me like a proximity filter was forgotten... however, having said that, you don't come across the jewelery types... and they could have targeted the actual business types better too...

perhaps if transparency was the order of the day, and you were told why those were chosen for "you", and a feedback loop could e created to better the system for all, it would be a great start... otherwise, it's naught but more marketing lies... !

Phil Hawkins said...

Yes, a reasonable proximity filter would be a step forward, even without worrying about my spending patterns. I suspect that might result in a fairly sparse number of offers, so instead of that, they've used much too coarse a filter, resulting in a poor outcome.

the vampire's dream said...

it does beg the question of how many to target... with the mass hysteria about getting through to "as many as you can"... quality does indeed suffer...

i know a person here, who painstakingly crafts a 50-70 person list (eg. Infrastructure IT Managers of Medium Sized Pharmaceuticals)... writes content specifically for them, and then ends up getting a 15% response rate (as opposed to the typical 0.01%- for open spamming)...

likewise, if they just said, not *enough* offers to target you, and didn't send you offers at all, you would not end up treating their emails as regular spams, and might look at the odd one you get...

of course, another downside of open spamming is that even if one is subscribed but ends up getting flooded, they mark the email as spam (as opposed to bother unsubscribing) in mail clients like gmail etc, which if enough people do, gmail will treat all emails from that sender as spam [simplified]... which will make the sender get even lower response rates...