Secondly, a comment from Captain Obvious: it would be perfect if all tenants were included in the program, so customers would not need to check the list online and would be sure they will get their points for buying from any of the tenants. Unfortunately, not even market leaders could add 100% of their tenants to the program.
It would make sense for the offers from retailers to be interesting and carried out on a regular basis, so that shoppers would get a unique experience on the one hand, and a particular benefit of a visit to a particular mall on the other. All in all, the programs described above meet these criteria.
And one more thing, there are no loyalty program rules, which are actually readable. This is a failure of both, famous malls and individual brands. While preparing this article, I have studied websites of various malls with loyalty programs. Their rules are often presented as PDF files or long pieces of official texts. Not many have a digest of the main ideas, and if they do, they often forget to explain their perks in numbers.
Many malls cannot speak the language of the audience. And it is not even about using impolite second-person singular pronoun when talking to strangers in MEGA’s Instagram account, as this tone of voice seems to be friendlier to their staff. It is about being able to clearly identify the main idea of a loyalty program, explaining me why I have to download your app and how it is going to be useful for me personally, and will not just hoard the screen of my phone. People with mosaic thinking are not going to get through the offer documents. In which case, how else will they find out about your unique and super profitable loyalty program?
And finally, shopping for bargains must be a comfortable experience. If a customer is forced to put an effort into receiving or spending points and doing some other unnecessary actions, this will be nothing but annoying. This is what all malls must work on, while some retailers have already got more convenient programs. If even young and tech-savvy audience has problems using the apps and leaves a lot of negative comments, it means there is something wrong with the apps, not the customers. Based on the comments, it is easy to notice that current loyalty programs often malfunction, receipts do not get scanned, recognized, or downloaded, it is impossible to spend the points, there are some additional steps to register and so on and so forth. Yet even if everything works fine, just think about it, you get home after a day out shopping and immediately start scanning your receipts — is it really what you think of when you hear about innovative loyalty programs? A program which succeeds at becoming seamless will take the house in this segment.
Text by Ekaterina Sakharova