BrainTrust Query: Ideas for Building Loyalty in Spite of System Beaters
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt from an article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research blog.
Marketers are training us to become system beaters, or those shoppers who time their purchases to when their favorite brand is on sale or just load up on another acceptable brand on sale the day they shop.
We all see a continuous flood of e-mails offering deep discounts and free shipping. Increasingly, marketers are making it easy for us by going paperless as we download the offers into our smartphones and loyalty cards. Remember when we had to wait until Dec. 26 for big sales? Now they start at midnight on Thanksgiving.
And social media is a dream come true for system beaters; not only do we find the deals we want for ourselves but now we get to share them with all of our fans, friends, and followers. Indeed, looking for deals is a main motivator to "like" a brand page on Facebook in the first place. Also, digital and mobile have compressed the timeline. I now know I can wait until the last minute to start my research.
But all is not lost as system beater behavior is itself habitual and selective in how a particular shopper goes about finding deals, just like we only use about 10 percent of the apps on our smartphones and watch only 10 percent of the channels on our TV.
Here are six marketing ideas to get loyalty lift from system beaters in return for hot deals:
- "Like-gate" your promotion offers on Facebook.
- Use paid search to drive traffic to your owned media, where the landing page offers a relevant discount in exchange for some lasting marketing benefit. People sign up for your e-mails, become members, download your app, or at the least, receive a cookie for subsequent promotional ad targeting.
- Make all of your offers shareable by including a sharing widget in the offer. Reward the fan who shares the most.
- For retailers, price matching should include matching Amazon online prices (as long as the item is new) so your store doesn't become a showroom and you convert the trip into a sale.
- Retailers should attach promotions to check-ins (like $5 off your purchase of $50 or more) to win the trip and build loyalty. (Check out Levelup, which David Berkowitz from 360i made me aware of.)
- Mastery of mobile is a must. Build apps that offer useful information as well as discounts so they turn your brand into a mobile portal. Also, optimize your website for mobile.