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Survey Shows Millennials Willing To Pay For Loyalty Programs

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Build Customer Loyalty

Free shipping and special discounts were top reasons for joining.

A recent survey by LoyaltyOne has found that 62 percent of respondents overall – and 75 percent of Millennials between 18-24 and 77 percent aged 25-34 —  would join a fee-based rewards program if their favorite retailer offered one.  Almost half (47%) of all respondents said paid programs have better rewards, and 61% of those 18 to 24 and 54% of those 25 to 34 said so.

The survey also found that free shipping (69 percent) and special discounts (67 percent) made the loyalty programs valuable to respondents.

Consumers reported that they gave high marks to paid loyalty programs like Amazon Prime or even membership-based warehouse retailers like Costco. The explanation is obvious: when loyalty programs require an upfront fee, it means that customers have already invested in the retailer and therefore is more likely to make purchases from them to recoup their investment.

A recent study from Millward Brown Digital found that Amazon Prime members convert 74 percent of the time on Amazon.com, according to, compared to 13 percent for non-prime members.

The LoyaltyOne study also found:

  • Nearly half (47%) said that fee-based programs offer better rewards than free programs, with a significantly larger number of millennials – 61% of 18-24 year-olds and 54% of 25-34 year-olds – reporting that fee-based rewards are better.
  • Slight more women (67 percent) than men (64 percent) reported that rewards are worth paying for.
  • Ranked by category, respondents ranked Grocery and Mass merchandise highest (35 percent), followed by Credit Card rewards (26 percent), Specialty Retail (13 percent), Travel (18 percent) and Restaurants (9 percent).
  • Meanwhile, roughly one-third of 18-24 year-olds (32 percent) and of 25-34 year-olds (34 percent) reported that they have never been offered membership in a fee-based program, compared to one-quarter for the general population. This would suggest a ripe opportunity for brands and retailers to target their loyalty programs.

“These results should attract the attention of brands considering a shift to fee-based loyalty programs as marketers look for ways to create competitive differences and lock in customer spend against a backdrop of waning program effectiveness and engagement challenges,” LoyaltyOne Consulting associate partner Lance Du Chateau said. “The traditional spend-earn-redeem reward program doesn’t make sense for all companies and customers, and fee-based value propositions increasingly are a topic of conversation. More marketers should explore this approach.”

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Millennials Prefer Native Apps For Mobile Shopping

Christine Kerr

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Millennials Prefer Native Apps For Mobile Shopping

Native apps provided better experiences than companies’ mobile sites

A recent survey from Forbes and Stanford that polled more than 1,600 millennial consumers has found that native apps are the preferred tool for mobile shopping.

According to the results, almost half (47 percent) have downloaded at least one mobile shopping app to their smartphone, with Amazon, Etsy, Forever21, and Wanelo ranking as the most popular native app downloads. Millennials also favored apps from Forever 21, Starbucks, JackThreads, and Modcloth.

When asked why they downloaded native apps, 54 percent of the millennials said it was because they offer a better experience than the company’s mobile site, followed by discounts or lower prices (27 percent).  Just 2 percent said it was to shop while not on their computer, and 4 percent said using a native app was mandatory to purchase a particular product.  This seems counter to prevailing wisdom that states that native apps provide a more personalized shopping experience.

According to Retail Dive, native shopping apps are the latest tools to help retailers cash in as sales executed on mobile devices are expected to nearly double to $280 billion worldwide in 2015. This is particularly true in relation to attracting the millennial customers.

And as Integrated Solutions for Retailers reported, sales via mobile devices are driving revenue. For example,Amazon has announced that sellers on Amazon sold more than 2 billion items worldwide in 2014, setting a new record for sales.  In 2014, Amazon also introduced the Amazon Seller App to facilitate the management of sellers’ business on Amazon via their mobile devices.  And sellers from more than 100 different countries were able to fulfill orders on Amazon to customers in 185 countries by using Fulfillment by Amazon services.

Coming Soon: Innovative Retail Technologies

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5 Subtle But Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

5 Subtle But Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
Image credit: Entrepreneur Media Inc.
JUNE 29, 2015

The buzz phrase in digital marketing has been “content is king” over the past few years. As entrepreneurs, we all know the only constant in our world is change. And with that, content marketing is evolving. Most content is creating noise and assaulting our senses as consumers.  It is time to maximize our efforts, simplify and build content that engages, acquires and converts.

Welcome to the age of the “sales trailer,” the creative pieces of content that get you to go to the movie that took millions of dollars, teams of talented people and years to create. The same is happening to our businesses: We have the drive and ambition to build incredible products or services and we want to tell everyone everything about it. We need to realize that it’s not about us but about entertaining them — the customers that buy the tickets to our movies.

But it’s no longer how much. Below are the trends I see influencing less-is-more in digital marketing.

1. Precedent set: Apple’s minimalism movement wins

The standard has been set in terms of design, product and messaging. The marriage of boldness and simplicity has changed the digital marketing game forever. The most successful and iconic brands of the day — Apple, Uber, Nike, Google — all market using bold strategies that say very little. Their success is due to creating massive channels of advocates. As well as their ability to brand an instantly recognizable image or slogan that instills particular values and warrants a calculable response.

2. No one really reads,  they digitally skim

You are probably skimming this article. I was once told, paper is for the heart, the screen is for the head. The way people consume information has evolved – folks want information quick and easy; infographics, videos, pictures, you name it. Multimodality and omni-channel is the name of the game; people simply don’t have the time (or the desire) to consume information that requires a hefty time investment. Quick bursts that effectively summarize a topic get a message across far more effectively than a lengthy document.

3. Get to the info fast — like right now!

We want our information fast: a picture is worth a thousand words, a video could very well be worth a thousand sales. When I look at new client’s sites or marketing, 90 percent of what I see is endless noise. We fall into a habit of throwing so many words at the audience, very little of which make a genuine impact. Poorly marketed information nets minimal attention. Marketers must get to the point as soon as humanly possible through highly relevant and deliberate diction. Spread through the right channels, the right content is the difference maker and can create an astounding impact, even with just a few words.

4. Get advocates to spread your message.  

In the current world of shares, follows and likes, build content I want to send to my friends, post to my followers and connect with emotionally.

Say it quickly and say it well. Content has to be exciting and it has to stand on its own legs so it can essentially market itself. Remarkable content speaks for itself and creates peer-to-peer endorsements.

Make your message something meaningful so people feel the urge to spread it. From there, sit back and watch as the digital marketing ecosystem works itself.

5. Sales trailers, no more books

So many tell their story around a product feature, advantage or benefit. The core of your digital brand is in your story. Craft a message that resonates, engages and impacts your audience emotionally. Take that story and whiteboard a piece of creative with your team only about that message and belief. Let everything else follow from there. Your team will start sharing it and then others will follow. Eventually, you will sell tickets to your movie and consumers will get the whole story, but start with the trailer.

 

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App Install Addiction Shows No Signs of Stopping

By: Simon Khalaf

It has been just over four years since Apple was awarded a trademark for “There’s an App for That.” Since then, mobile apps have multiplied at an accelerated pace and have even surpassed the weband TV in total time spent. Lately, however, many industry analysts cautioned that in mature markets such as the US and South Korea the rate of app downloads is decelerating and the app market is reaching a saturation point. For example, in August of this year, CNN Money ran a segment on app overload and the slowdown of app downloads. This fall, Paul Adams of Intercom, wrote a thoughtful and provocative post on the future of apps, predicting that apps will become more of a service layer, replaced by enhanced notifications as the consumer interface. At Flurry, we were curious to see whether our Analytics data validated these theories, so we took a look. We found that consumers are still downloading apps at very nearly the same rate since 2011.

 

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Deceleration? What Deceleration?

For our research, we focused on the US, one of the most mature app markets. We found that in the US, consumers are downloading apps at the same rate over the past four years. The chart below shows the number of apps an average US consumer downloads per month from 2011 till now. On average, US consumers are downloading 8.8 apps per month in 2014, compared to 8.8 apps in 2013, 8.6 apps in 2012 and 8.9 apps in 2011. This is both iOS apps downloaded from the Apple AppStore and Android Apps downloaded from Google Play or any other Android App store operating in the US. That is a lot of apps downloaded by a single consumer.

This means that there is actually very little change in the rate of downloads since 2011. It doesn’t mean that consumers are continuously using all the apps they’ve downloaded over the years. In fact, they are not. You can look at previous research we’ve published where we shared the half life of apps and their rate of decay.

In our research, we also looked at the percentage of apps downloaded as a result of app marketing (or app install ads) by dividing the estimated yearly app install ads market in the US by the average Cost Per Install (CPI) in the same year. Despite the fascinating growth of app install ads, the vast majority of app downloads are still organic. In fact in 2014, 93% of all app downloads in the US were organic, compared to 95% in 2011. The only thing on a slight decline here is organic downloads. This is a very small change and a further validation of the growth opportunities in app marketing in general and app install ads in particular.

“Install Addicts” Are Keeping up the Pace

We dug a little deeper into our data to gain better insight into the US consumers responsible for these steady download numbers. The distribution is shown in the chart below. The majority of consumers (54%) are actually downloading less than eight apps per month. What is keeping the average up is a new segment of mobile consumers that we are calling “Install Addicts.” These are US consumers that download more than 17 apps a month. This includes apps downloaded on all smart devices such consumer owns. This segment represents 20% of the US mobile consumer base or an estimated 32 million people.

 

The Profile of “Install Addicts”

We were intrigued by the large number of Install Addicts, so we dug a little deeper in our data to better understand the audience behind these 32 million US consumers.

First we looked at gender. Install Addicts are 53% female and 47% male, compared to 48% female and 52% male for the average mobile consumer. That means that females over-index by 10% compared to the average mobile consumer.

We then looked at age groups. Install Addicts over-indexed in the 13-17 (Teens), 18-24 (College Students) and 35-54 (Middle Aged) age groups and under indexed in the 25-34 (Adults) and 55+ (Seniors) age groups.

The analysis gets a lot more interesting when we looked at the differences in Flurry Personas. On the female side, the following Personas over-indexed as Install Addicts: Gamers, Mothers and Social Enthusiasts. For males, the following Personas over-indexed as Install Addicts: Gamers, Social Enthusiasts and Parenting and Education.

The “over-index” is shown in the chart below. It refers to the division of the percentage reach of that Persona in the Install Addict segment compared to the percentage reach of that Persona for the average mobile consumer. For example, in the female Install Addicts segment, Mothers are 32% of the total, compared to 4% of the average female mobile consumers. In other words, female Install Addicts are much more likely to be Mothers than non-Addicts.

Looking at the three charts above and comparing this Install Addicts audience to the mobile addict audience we highlighted earlier this year, it is becoming clearer to us that what we call family devices (or shared devices, or hand-me-down devices) make up a good chunk of the Install Addicts audience. Such devices are for the mother or the father, but the children (teens) have access (and most likely passwords) to them and routinely visit the App Stores and download their new favorite app.

It is also hard for us to ignore the over-indexing of the Social Enthusiast persona. This is the Flurry Persona of consumers that heavily use social apps, including messaging apps and photo and video sharing apps. It could be a mere coincidence that Install Addicts are also messaging and social networking addicts, but it could also indicate that consumers are discovering apps through social and messaging applications. In the United States, both Facebook and Twitter have solid app install businesses. In Japan and China, LINE and Tencent, respectively, have bet big on game and app distribution, organic and paid, as lines of business. While it is still hard to measure the true impact of social discovery on app downloads, the chart above seems to indicate a big one.

We are a week away from the height of the holiday season, one that traditionally accelerates app downloads and brings app developers in general and game developers in particular more consumers to their apps. But as the data above suggests and as the past four years have demonstrated, app developers don’t need to wait for Saint Nick. They simply need to keep hoping for app install addiction to keep going strong.

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Canadian Small business, improve customer relationships by developing smartphone applications

Great Article in the Toronto Star as to how important Mobile Apps are for Business Owners.

Apps – those things you install on your smartphone or tablet to perform specific tasks – have traditionally been seen as a luxury offering available only to large or tech-savvy organizations.

By: Jeff Quipp Special to The Star, Published on Wed Mar 27 2013

Apps – those things you install on your smartphone or tablet to perform specific tasks – have traditionally been seen as a luxury offering available only to large or tech-savvy organizations.

A small business can’t easily afford to invest $10K – $40K to develop a customer-friendly app. But new products available now let small businesses purchase their app services on a monthly basis, just like internet and phone. These cover areas such as payments, scheduling, and appointments, messaging and marketing with coupons, deals and social sharing.  This means that, for the first time, apps are now affordable for small businesses — and they may be one of your best secret weapons to staying competitive.  With more than one million applications available across the Google Play and the Apple App store, and users spending nearly half a day each month using the programs, the message is clear: users like apps.  With this in mind, here are five reasons why a small business should consider investing in its own mobile application:

Customer service – providing information at the fingertips of your customers is a significant value add. From the convenience of wherever/whenever they are, they can find information that is essential to their purchasing decision.
Retention through brand recognition – Staying top of mind is easy when an app puts your company’s logo in front of your customers.
News and information updates – Whatever you need to share, an app gives you the ability to ensure a customer’s smartphone has up-to-date information. From holiday closures to extended hours to trending news and reviews or something as simple as construction they might want to avoid while making their way to your business, an app can be a valuable information resource.
Company image – Having your own app projects a professional, tech-savvy image. It shows you’re invested in the latest customer trends and can make your business appear larger or more well established than it may in fact be.
Push out messages for promotions/launches – Apps are a new direct line of communication with customers. You can push out notifications for promotions and new product and service launches, literally putting the news in the palm of your audience’s hands. Plus, these notifications tend to stand out from the stream of emails most people receive about the other guy’s promos.
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How to Increase your Company’s Customer Satisfaction Rate

The businesses that rank extremely high in customer satisfaction, implement a strategy called “implementation of intentions”.  This is “if then planning.”   For example if a business is late with the delivery of an item to its customer, it can offer a token gift to reset that customers internal clock.  Most customers are more sympathetic when a solution to their problem is trying to be reached, and therefore becomes more accommodating.  By being proactive many complaints could be avoided.  This approach also can be used if the circumstance is less then ideal for the customer; i.e. A salesperson must, especially in smaller retail environments, be able to assist their customers, helping them find sizes, staying past closing times… A sales person must always use good judgement in all customer interactions.

Sometimes the sales staff may have to be innovative, to show what lengths they are willing to go for their customer to have a satisfying experience.  By being attentive to a customers needs, staff should develop practices for meeting those needs.  If a customer is unable to find an item that the outlet usually stocks, then that customer should be contacted when those items are re stocked.  The customer now feels his needs have been acknowledged, and is pleased with the service he has received.

There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going.  Companies that seize their opportunity to deliver outstanding customer service will likely earn customers for life.  If a business is just as concerned about the next transaction, as it is with the current one, they are likely on the right track.

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