Why Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty is not something new and has been around for ages now. But with the advent of social media and new communication channels, there are many new ways to define loyalty. Earlier there were no metrics for word of mouth marketing. Now brands can quantify the buzz created by the loyal customers through tweets, shares, likes and checkins across Facebook, twitter or foursquare.

The impact created by a like of a close friend would be much more than a pamphlet one come's across a newspaper or a television advertisement. Going by the stats, we generally need to hear or read about a brand atleast 6 times to make a good impression about it. When we see 3 of our friends liking a page, we get more inquisitive to know about a brand and this slowly paves way to a network effect. 

What is the need of a loyalty program?

Lot of times people feel that their brand does not need a loyalty program. The quality of the product will be sufficient enough to drive the sales, so why make extra efforts. They are right, the quality of the product is the key to success, loyalty can only grow the topline. But it serves many more purposes. Here I list the four primary purposes.

1. Customer data Acquisition

Lack of access to customer data is primarily a problem for offline retailers and not E-commerce vendors. Enrolling customers into loyalty gives them access to this vital data. This comes very handy for communicating new deals and offers to the high potential customers. Besides, it gives good idea about the target customer demography. This data when combined with analytics can reveal great insights.

2. Locking customer through cash cards

Here the brands gives out prepaid cards loaded with discounts. This locks the customer for repeat sales and ensures loyalty. True that an already loyal customer is more likely to opt for such cash cards. But it brings in reverse capital and increases the frequency of the visits.

3. Creating social buzz

With the advent of social media, brands can reward their customers for sharing experiences in their social graph acting as hyper local marketing channel. This is the new form of word of mouth marketing and much more powerful.

4. Increasing Repeat Sales

The prospects of discount drives repeat purchase. This is all the more relevant for elite, and expensive brands and industries like airlines.

As evident from above, loyalty may not directly lead to repeat sales but the buzz or insights gained through the data acquired, can help the brands target their customers more effectively and drive sales. In the next article I will talk more about changing loyalty trends and how social media is playing a big role in the same.

Siddharth Gupta, Founder at tagNpin Social Loyalty | Linkedin

tagNpin Releases A New Loyalty Solution For E-Commerce Portals

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Delhi based startup, tagNpin, has released a new product for e-commerce portals. Besides the website, the new ‘Loyalty’ solution can be integrated on the portals Facebook page as well, within 10 minutes using a plug and play code.

“Loyalty has always been a big part of retail. We are living in a social age where people show their loyalty in new ways, like sharing product details in their social circle. These social actions may be equally or more valuable than purchasing the product itself. This hyperlocal marketing is fast replacing other traditional forms. Through tagNpin’s solution e-commerce sites can tap a person’s digital activities, including purchases to reward them appropriately,” informed Siddharth Gupta, Co-founder, tagNpin.

Customers can get rewarded for shopping, being social, and for actively recommending, commenting or liking something on the portals Facebook page. “E-commerce vendors will have complete flexibility to select the actions they wish to reward customers for,” said Siddharth. Brands can change the loyalty logic anytime. They can choose to reward the active customer for social activity, run marketing campaigns, SMS campaigns and view analytics; all this through their tagNpin dashboard.

“With increasing internet penetration, new e-commerce sites are coming up to fill every dot and in some cases brining retail experience online. Our loyalty solution was designed to provide shoppers a great shopping experience on any e-commerce portal and to make it easier for e-commerce players to reward shoppers for being a brand influencer,” concluded Siddharth.

To find out more about this, visit www.tagnpin.com | Register here, and don’t forget to enter the‘yourstory’ code.

You can read more about tagNpin here.

tagNpin Enables Multiple Loyalty Programs to be Under One Umbrella

Riddhi posted 24 days ago

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Today we see users burdened with so many loyalty cards that they don’t even bother to carry one. Besides, merchants are charged a premium by consultants to design the loyalty programs. Clearly Loyalty market is fragmented with so many independent loyalty programs.

This is where Delhi based startup, tagNpin comes in. “tagNpin provides loyalty program as a service to all merchants on a single platform. Merchants have complete flexibility to change the rules of loyalty program anytime/anywhere as well as the liberty to pick or change loyalty partners anytime,” saidSiddharth Gupta, Founder, tagNpin.

A tagNpin user need not carry any loyalty cards and they can track all their redeemable points and purchase history on the tagnpin portal. “This is not all, we have built a complete location based discovery layer on top of our platform to enable search of products and offers based on price or points,” said Siddharth.

The product development work started around 10 months back and it went through several iterations before finalizing the product. tagNpin is a mobile based loyalty program cum social media marketing platform that has the potential to unite independent loyalty programs under one umbrella.

The Indian retail business is valued at $550 billion, out of which about 4% comprises the organized sector. A Boston Consulting Group report puts the value of the organized retail sector in India at $28 billion and has penetrated 7% of the country. Over the next decade this is expected to increase to $260 billion with a 21% penetration. The Indian e-tail market is expected to become a $12 billion business by 2016. So, tagNpin is targeting a pretty huge market that can support multiple competitors with good growth opportunities.

tagNpin has a simple pay as you go revenue model. Merchants are charged on the basis of the resources used. “We have few small clients that are testing the product in private beta. Soon we plan to open the product to ecommerce as well as retail chains through multiple marketing channels. We have around 5000 registered users as of now through our partners within a short span of time,” said Siddharth.

“We want to make starting a loyalty program as easy as signing up on Gmail for small merchants. As the Indian market matures, we plan to leverage technologies like QR code and NFC to make the service even more seamless,” said Siddharth, speaking about what tagNpin plans to do in the near future.

They are in talks and have plans in place to expand through multiple channels like direct marketing, agencies and POS solution providers. There is a huge scope for a product like tagNpin to enable associated loyalty programs under one platform. Basically, anyone who sells or enables transactions is a potential tagNpin customer.

We at YourStory.in think that tagNpin is a really promising idea and we will be keenly following their progress.

To find out more about tagNpin, visit http://www.tagnpin.com/