What’s the Point?

re:member group’s rewards programs keep customers coming back, and businesses in the black

MINNEAPOLIS (May 13, 2010) – Loyalty marketing, by which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives is nothing new.

The earliest medieval merchants were peddlers who sold goods to towns and villages and they probably had some type of system to reward recurring customers.  In 1929, Betty Crocker issued coupons that could be used to redeem for items like free flatware. And a little more recently, the nation’s airlines and financial services companies enrolled 700 million members in loyalty programs. But today’s tools are creating change for the industry.

“Companies have so much information about their customers, or potential customers, and we can use that behavioral, transactional and attitudinal data to devise programs that drive loyalty – and revenue,” states Paul Long, President, re:member group, whose first expsoruee to loyalty marketing came at Northwest Airlines, as he helped develop and implement the WorldPerks program there. “Our suite of products enables our clients to implement customized programs that fit their members’ profiles and interests, and will ultimately increase profits through customer acquisition and retention.”

How?

To use re:member group’s automotive clients as an example, when a customer purchases a vehicle from them, they become a member of an exclusive club that offers then discounts and benefits at over 200,000 merchants nationwide such as Best Buy and Home Depot. The customers also receive discounts at the dealership for services such as oil changes, and when they make those service visits, they also accrue points good toward discounts on their next vehicle purchase.

 The idea for that program actually came from Paul Walser, Dealer Principal at Minneapolis-based Walser Automotive Group, and entrepreneur Randy McPherson.

Two weeks after running the program in-house at Walser (see backgrounder for more), McPherson formed re:member group as a stand-alone company with Walser as the first client. Today, the Walser Rewards program has over 6,700 members.

“We wanted to help our customers not just sell a product, such as a car, but also be able to sell the opportunity to become a member of an exclusive ‘club,’ says re:member group founder and CEO McPherson. At the heart of it was helping small-to-mid-sized organizations develop turn-key, comprehensive customer loyalty and loyalty marketing solutions that increase the company’s overall profitability. That started in automotive but we’re in other verticals now.”

Those include Capstone Rewards program where school librarians can make their book buying dollars go further when they purchase from Capstone Publishers, a similar program for Heinemann-Raintree school booksellers in the U.K. and Mathews Rewards program for the highest grossing archery company in the world.

“We can help smaller companies perform and execute loyalty marketing programs just like the big companies such as the airlines,” stated McPherson. “Points accrued in rewards programs are becoming more powerful than cash, and more cost-effective than mere discounts.”

And in a quickly changing world, where communication channels are increasing, and traditional mainstream media audiences are decreasing, loyalty marketing can be a more effective, and cost-effective, way to create and keep customers.

“Our philosophy is to keep it simple,” explains Long. “Get new customers and keep the ones you have. Do it by re:membering them. It pays to re:member.”