The overwhelming success of loyalty programmes amongst South Africa’s big retailers has encouraged many mid-tier brands to roll out their own offerings. While these can only help to attract and retain customers, many are missing out on the benefits of running the built-in loyalty programmes offered by QR payment platforms in tandem with their own.
“South Africans have shown that they are great at gamifying the various loyalty programmes. This has really helped retailers gather data, allowing them to influence shopping behaviour and improve the overall customer experience. The problem is that some see the built-in loyalty offered by payment solutions as competition to their proprietary offerings rather than using it cleverly to augment what they have,” says Brett White, CEO of Zapper.
White explains that in much the same way as a business would choose to advertise on multiple platforms and mediums such as search, social media, radio and press, payment loyalty programmes simply enable another way of incentivising a specific cohort of customers through a different channel that they already enjoy using.
While the in-store loyalty helps retailers action campaigns for their customers, enabling the payment loyalty programme, which spans thousands of merchants and venues, unlocks the potential to create broader use cases.
“Now you have the chance to design campaigns that span various user cohorts, merchant networks, and specific products. For instance, you could work with other merchants within a mall to create incentives for customers to buy specific products at one establishment while earning a discount at another establishment. This not only drives increased sales across merchants, but encourages mall loyalty, which in turn drives repeat business across the venue,” he shares.
