Articles from Loyalty Marketing Blog

Going to Affliate Summit in Las Vegas
2008-02-09 12:08:44
On February 23rd, the OnCard team is heading out to Las Vegas for the annual Affiliate Summit conference from February 23-26. Each year, affiliate marketing professionals, e-commerce retailers, and online affiliate networks head out there for three days of education on latest trends, best practices and general business networking. It’s a great opportunity to meet the industry participants face-to-face. I’ve never been to Affiliate Summit before. This year, Shawn Collins, the industry pundit and veteran in charge of putting this event together, asked me to lead a round table discussion on the future of off-line affiliate marketing. I’m not responsible for creating a PowerPoint deck (what a relief) but do have the challenge of stimulating a two-way discussion on the future of affiliate marketing. The best part about it is that I’m not sure where the conversation will lead us but hoping it will spark some great debates. I’ll be sure to share any interesting ...

More on traditional advertising…
2008-02-02 15:08:21
In a previous post, found here, I discussed advertising as a risk continuum, where on one end of the spectrum, an advertiser pays up-front and waits to measure the return. On the other end, the media channel pays for the ad-campaign and waits to see the response. As far as I’m concerned, advertising fees should be tied to the success of the ad-campaigns, plain and simple, whether you’re measuring sales, brand recognition etc. The whole idea of pay up-front and wait and see for traditional advertisers has always puzzled me. So why do advertisers continue to pay ungodly amounts of money without any guaranteed returns? Online media is winning the game because of companies that are willing to take more of the risk and accountability for the advertising campaign. This greater degree of measurability is one main reason why advertisers are flocking online and away from traditional media. Has anybody attempted new ways to leverage online pay-for-performance strategies in the offl ...
Advertising

Advertising as a risk continuum
2008-01-23 19:44:07
When people think of advertising, they don’t always think about the concept of risk. Advertising is risky, plain and simple. Advertisers traditionally spend lots of dough up-front and wait to see the results. The pay-per-eyeballs advertising model has been around since the dawn of advertising and is the riskiest and least measurable by far. As many of you are fully aware, the internet has provided powerful new ways for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their advertising. For me, it all boils down to who is bearing the risk of the ad-campaign and how are they getting compensated for taking on that additional risk? Traditionally, the advertiser would bear all the risk because they paid regardless of the success of the ad campaign. Today, however, that’s a completely different story. With pay-per-click and pay-per-sale affiliate marketing, advertisers have developed models to transfer a lot of that risk to the marketing channels that are promoting their goods and s ...
Advertising

Can social networking influence brand loyalty?
2008-01-19 13:09:45
I think the answer is YES. Trust has always been critical in the marketing field, trust of the brand, trust of the product, trust of the media. Social networking is one manifestation of this trust-factor. It all comes down to the trust you have in the person referring the message to you. If you trust your social contact, you will likely trust the product, brand etc. Social networking has enabled a new generation of marketers, better known as Social Marketers. These marketers aim to leverage the ‘trust-factor’ of social networking to influence consumer decisions. The folks over at ReveNews recently discussed this phenomenon of Social Marketing (full article found here). I think that the discussion centers around Trust. In many ways, consumers respond to a marketing message because it’s relevant and trust-worthy. I see Social Marketing as a giant Word-Of-Mouth conduit. Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing is tremendously powerful because of the trust factor. People simply ...

The TiVO Effect
2008-01-12 10:40:33
Over the holiday season, I couldn’t help but notice the huge ad blitzes by several companies. The two types of advertisers I remember most vividly are retailers, like Macy’s and Kohl’s, and liquor companies. Clothes and liquor are pretty popular gifts for the holidays, so it makes sense… I also remember reading an article talking about how TiVO has led to the destruction of traditional TV advertising as more and more people are recording shows and fast-forwarding through commercials. Given the millions of dollars companies spent on producing and running ads on TV, they can’t be too thrilled that many of their ads are not being viewed by consumers. The media has termed this the “TiVO Effect” and you can check out a recent article by Business Week here. With the advent of TiVO and YouTube, any ads that are worth watching for pure entertainment / shock value usually end up on YouTube with other worthy content-related videos. This begs the ques ...

Problem Solved - Posting Comments to Blog
2008-01-06 11:57:18
I was recently notified that posting comments to my posts wasn’t working properly. I checked into it with Wordpress and found out that it is a well-documented issue dating back months. I messed around with the options in wordpress and it looks like it is finally working again. In case any of you have tried unsuccessfully to post a comment, this is just to let you know that comment posting is back in action! All the best, Jonathan ...

Can rewards influence online payments?
2008-01-05 13:55:25
There was a recent article in American Banker that focused on various online payments alternatives to credit cards like PayPal, Pay by Touch, Bill Me Later, among others. The article provokes the question as to whether or not these payment alternatives should employ rewards and loyalty currencies to promote usage. Credit card companies have been offering rewards to consumers for ages to promote card usage. Loyalty currency for usage of these payment alternatives doesn’t seem like a crazy idea. So why haven’t any of them done this? My general feeling is that loyalty marketing is not part of the core expertise of any payments company. A lot of these companies are focused on the product and offering a great consumer experience, not on figuring out how to use rewards to bolster consumer loyalty. While customer experience should be a top priority, loyalty rewards can help strengthen that relationship and actually makes a ton of sense for these companies. Think about it in c ...

What’s the Deal with TV Ads for Gift Cards?
2007-12-18 21:58:30
I’ve been noticing recently that there are a lot of TV ads focused on retail shopping. At this time of year, I’m not surprised to see all the major retailers advertising tons of promotions to last-minute shoppers. What I was surprised to see was the predominance of TV advertising focused on gift cards. At first glance, I thought that gift cards make really easy gifts that appeal to a wide-audience. But then I started thinking about what products a retailer would promote if it were to pay $500,000 to run a 30-second ad on TV. According to my logic, retailers would want to promote either their most expensive products or products with the highest margins to increase the chances of recouping that investment. Yes, they want to offer products with mass-appeal, but they also want to promote their most profitable products. Then I realized an interesting nuance after reading an article about the use of gift cards for purposes of charitable giving. After some thought, I realized t ...

Apple Has Cash - What Should They Do With It?
2007-12-08 17:39:13
One of my friends, Darren Herman, recently wrote an interesting blog post titled ‘Apple’s cash pile’ and brings up an interesting question. As Apple grows and does significantly more sales directly to consumers, are they going to run into a customer service problem that has destroyed the reputations of so many large companies? He mentions how Apple should probably invest in a stronger customer service infrastructure to prevent the pitfalls faced by customer service - nightmares like Verizon. I’d like to take this analysis a bit further by focusing on the consumer loyalty angle. Apple is a hugely popular brand and many people are loyalty (i.e. die-hard) Apple customers, especially when it comes to computers. Customer loyalty can be a slippery slope however and cannot be taken for granted. Psychologically, people don’t like waiting in line to buy merchandise in a store. People who have recently been to an Apple store location know the waiting game all too ...
Apple

Online Reviews Influence Offline Sales
2007-12-06 23:30:32
In a recent report by comScore and The Kelsey Group, online surveys and consumer ratings of hotels, restaurants and other services have been identified as having a significant impact on the likelihood a consumer will make a purchase. Online, consumers share reviews of services and products readily with one another. These informal reviews serve as referrals for others to make a purchase. Many of these purchase decisions are contemplated online by viewing these reviews and actually made off-line in a store or restaurant. The main point of this study is to confirm what we already know. Online resources have a major influence in driving off-line purchasing decisions. It would be amazing if a company could actually track the impact of these types of online consumer interactions on off-line spending… ...

OnCard Marketing Releases New Site
2007-12-04 09:20:09
We’ve been working on a new website design for OnCard Marketing and have just released it to the public. We realized it was a bit outdated and did not properly reflect what we’re doing in a concise format. As many of you know, OnCard’s big push is into the world of off-line performance-based marketing. I’ll try to follow-up with a few posts on the state of that market and how it relates to loyalty marketing. I hope you enjoy the new site. JT ...
Marketing

[First] « Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next » [Last]

3128 blogs in our database.
Statistics resets every week.