What’s your loyalty worth?
By Teamspirit on Thursday 16 February 2017
New app Bink is positioning itself as the answer to Britain’s loyalty scheme fatigue.
While the big three loyalty schemes in the UK, Nectar, Tesco Clubcard, and Boots Advantage, all have sizeable, regular user figures, there are many more schemes that struggle to either on-board customers or retain them as active users.
A Nielsen study of 30,000 consumers in 63 countries found a curious contradiction when it comes to Brits and loyalty schemes. We are among the most likely to be a member of a loyalty scheme, but one of the least likely to actually be loyal to a retailer because of their scheme.
Bink hopes to reconcile this odd situation by making engaging with loyalty schemes more frictionless – ditching the wallet full of cards for an app that automatically ‘swipes’ your loyalty account whenever you pay at a participating shop with a linked card.
In exchange for the customer and purchase data Bink collects, it plans to deliver relevant and valuable content to customers, whether that’s coupons, rewards, or simply the option to go paper-free with e-receipts.
With a world of apps competing for space on our phones, it will be interesting to see if Bink can manage to crack the double challenge of acquiring users and keeping them engaged, both for loyalty schemes and for itself.
