Retailers have been bombarded with approaches from the raft of daily deals companies that are following the Groupon model. These require deep discounts to be offered and for all customers to be treated the same - same offer, same time, same channel. While these certainly have their place we're seeing retailer fatigue at this one-size-fits-all approach.
There's another way. Not surprisingly - an approach that treats different customers differently is working well for retailers in the USA. To do that at scale requires a customer data driven strategy. There's a new breed of marketing pioneered in the USA called transaction driven marketing. Customers credit and debit card transactions, possibly the richest source of customer buying behaviuour available, are mined on behalf of retailers. Retailers are able to select target customers more accurately than perhaps any other method is capable of. They can address customers who have shopped a competitor more than them or have not shopped them recently. Customer data is anonymous and not handed to the retailer. The retailer then makes an offer to those customers (and not anyone else) which is presented inside the customer's online banking screen; some of the most trusted and highly use online real estate. To redeem the offer (usually a cash back) customers need only use one of their payment cards at that retailer in the offer period. If they don't - the retailer doesn't pay.
Today the largest bank in the USA - Bank Of America - launches this offering under the banner BankAmeriDeals. It's delivered by Cardlytics - a US based leader in merchant-funded transaction-driven marketing for electronic banking (full disclosure : we Aimia own a minority equity position in Cardlytics and have a long-term global strategic alliance with them). Cardlytics reaches almost 70% of the USA population with these offers.
New Zealand lends itself as a prime market for this type of marketing. We use our credit, debit and Eftpos cards more than almost any other country and we're high users of online banking.
Most importantly though the results from transaction based marketing are excellent. Cardlytics released their 2011 aggregate results at the National Retail Federation's (USA) Big Show two weeks ago.
