The Loyalty & Reward Co team belong to a lot of loyalty programs. I mean literally hundreds. When we walk into a retailer and they ask if we’d like to join their loyalty program we jump up and down and scream, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’
We’ve even set-up a special email address just to receive all the eDMs the programs send us. We study them to understand the approach the program team is taking for on-boarding, growth, retention, winback and other lifecycle-type approaches, as well as the important bit; rewarding us with tangible value.
We’re also interested to study the frequency of eDMs as it helps us understand how hard the program is attempting to sweat their member base. And it’s here where we must take issue with flybuys.
Here’s a list of the top 4 loyalty programs (by size) in Australia, and how many eDMs we’ve receive for a single member account in the last 30 days:
flybuys: 32
Woolworths Rewards: 5
Qantas Frequent Flyer: 6
Velocity Frequent Flyer: 11
Just to clarify, the 32 eDMs from flybuys in the last 30 days isn’t a typo. This includes 15 from ‘flybuys’, 16 from ‘Coles at flybuys’ and 1 from ‘Kmart at flybuys’.
During that period, there were:
– 7 instances where we received 2 emails in one day, and
– 2 instances where we received 3 emails in one day.
3 emails in one day? Whaaaat? Ain’t nobody got time for this.
We hate to be the one, flybuys, but someone’s got to call it. You’re sending waaaay too many emails to your base. Maybe it’s time . . . just sayin’ . . . to have an internal chat about applying recency rules to reel your communications approach back in.
Woolworths Rewards provides a wonderful example of a modern eDM approach; thanks to their hyper-smart personalisation engine we receive one email a week with offers tailored to our previous shopping behaviour, plus offers from BWS. They know exactly what products we like and they serve up the value we seek without finding the need to smash us with comms up to 3 times a day.
Qantas Frequent Flyer has also done a great job in reducing their reliance on eDM’s by continuing to finesse their decisioning engine to deliver the right offers to the right members. They were in a space a couple of years ago where too many eDMs were being sent, and they pulled it back and got it right. And they’ve got 10 times the number of earn partners you do, flybuys.
We love your program, flybuys, but we also have our dignity, and like millions of other Australians, we won’t stay in an abusive relationship for long. Ease off the pedal, dudes. Others have done it and they survived. We know that you too can make it through. Peace, out.
Philip Shelper is a specialist loyalty consultant based in Sydney, Australia who obsesses about everything to do with loyalty and rewards. His company Loyalty & Reward Co are a leading loyalty consulting firm.
Let’s connect! https://au.linkedin.com/in/philipshelper
