Loyalty Marketing Report: Forget the hard sell, try the smart sell

Long gone are the days where merchants employ stick-and-carrot tactics to drive sales performance. Increasingly these days, the focus has shifted to empowering the sales team so it is able to sell more effectively and turn them into ambassadors of their brand.

Case example 1: Corporate booker programme in a leading hotel chain

The problem

In the largest global hotel chains, corporate bookers make up a substantial revenue stream and hotel chains often develop loyalty programmes especially for their corporate bookers. However, in this case, the regional sales team had limited visibility on how the corporate booker programme impacted each hotel property.

Furthermore, with hundreds of properties throughout the region, it was extremely challenging to pinpoint opportunities or at-risk member segments and translate it into actionable insights for each hotel property’s sales agents.

The solution

What they needed was to empower the sales agents of each property with insights that were specifically relevant to them. This meant hundreds of customised sales reports had to be developed, not only displaying sales KPIs, but also including latest member acquisitions, profiles of the corporate booker segments and suggestions on how hotels could engage their new, potential, at-risk or loyal customers.

This resulted in significantly higher retention of top-tier members and accelerated the growth in new member booking revenue.

Case example 2: Building the toolbox for a high-end cosmetics retailer

The problem

In most cases, beauty consultants are given incentives if monthly upsell targets are met. These targets drive beauty consultants into aggressively pursuing their customers repeatedly within short periods. In most cases, this leads customers to experience “spend fatigue” and the relationship with beauty consultants deteriorates as a result of hard-sell, naturally leading to poorer sales performances.

The solution

By distilling membership data, a list of specially targeted customers are sent to each store every month. This empowers beauty consultants by giving them the right tools to reach the right customers and more effectively achieve their targets. This solution also ensures that no one customer will appear on more than one list and helps to avoid spend fatigue.

This collaborative approach results in greater return on effort and perfectly aligns the sales activity in the organisation.

Case example 3: Effective discounts turn transactions into interaction for supermarket chain

The problem

Retailers from grocery to fashion often risk the slippery slope of over discounting, which is dangerous and often damaging to the brand. Most retailers are aware of this danger, but still use the lever as a quick fix to bump up sales.

The solution

By using purchase data to paint a holistic customer profile, the retailer is able to design a personalised experience for each customer, instantly turning transactions into interactions and shifting the customer experience from price hunting into a more rewarding one.

For example, personalised digital flyers for each individual member instantly converts a mass marketing message into a one-on-one personalised experience. Greater relevance results in greater reciprocity and ultimately brand affinity.

This allows for fewer but more effective promotions, thus avoiding the trap of encouraging discount-seeking customer behaviour – and preventing unnecessary margin erosion.

In summary

1. Help them to help you. Insights from transactional or membership data is not only for management’s eyes – use it to empower the sales team. This empowerment streamlines the organisation’s sales function and makes it highly effective.

2. Design the right tools. Effective business tools must be relevant and timely – customer insights are only useful when they can be applied swiftly by the front-line to target opportunities or respond to impending threats.

3. If you keep doing the same thing, expect to get the same results. Stop the vicious cycle of deeper margin discounts. Sell smart not hard by attracting the right customer with the right offer and turn transactions into interactions.

About Aimia
Aimia Inc. (“Aimia”) is a global leader in loyalty management. Aimia’s unique capabilities include proven expertise in delivering proprietary loyalty services, launching and managing coalition loyalty programmes, creating value through loyalty analytics and driving innovation in the emerging digital and mobile spaces. Aimia owns and operates Aeroplan, Canada’s premier coalition loyalty programme and Nectar, the United Kingdom’s largest coalition loyalty programme. In addition, Aimia has majority equity position in Air Miles Middle East and Nectar Italia as well as minority positions in Club Premier, Mexico’s leading coalition loyalty and programme and most recently, in AirAsia’s BIG loyalty programme. Aimia is a Canadian public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX:AIM) and has over 4,000 employees in more than 20 countries. For more information, visit www.aimia.com or email enquiries.asiapacific@aimia.com.