IndiaRetailBiz

“A single-player loyalty programme can never have a large base or offer as many rewards as one like i-mint which works by aggregating spends across various categories and the rewards under one umbrella.” — Vijay Bobba, CEO, Loyalty Solutions and Research Ltd.

Customer ‘loyalty’ or customer ‘rewards’ programmes are becoming popular among regular shoppers. They are critical to success of any retail business as they not only help retailers in understanding purchasing behaviour of their customers better, but also help them in retaining their customers at low cost, while encouraging their customers to make purchases more frequently.

While, almost all retailers, big and small, have designed one programme or the other, i-mint has come out with the concept of multiple partnership rewards programme. Multiple partnership programmes not only help offer the benefit to customers of purchases across multiple categories but more importantly also the benefit of earning rewards across programme partners. For example, a customer buying an air ticket from a travel agent through a bank credit card could end up being rewarded from all the three, namely, airline, travel agent, and the bank. i-mint, which was founded about 20 months ago, is one such card. It has recorded exponential growth since inception and is poised to grow very fast in the coming year, according to a Hindu Business Line report.

• i-mint, a unit of Loyalty Solutions and Research Ltd (LSRL), is the first large scale loyalty programme that unlike most other retailers co-brands its product with a number of corporate partners like Airtel, HPCL, ICICI Bank, Air India, Lifestyle and MakeMyTrip.com and over 2,500 merchant partners, from over 20 cities, that among others include establishments like restaurants, grocery stores, department stores, consumer durable chains, and jewellers.
• Unlike, rewards/ loyalty programmes offered by most individual retailers like Reliance (Reliance One), Future Group (ICICI-Big Bazaar), and Shoppers’ Stop (First Citizen), i-mint rewards programme offers its customers the flexibility of earning and accumulating reward points from multiple partner establishments.
• The rewards programme, funded by ICICI Ventures, has already logged in business worth Rs. 4,000 crore and attracted over four million persons as its members.
• Typically, i-mint members are young (25-35 year age group), mostly male (60%), and spend Rs 2,000 on an average across various categories. They are savvy with the usage of credit and debit cards. They are frequent users and have transacted at least three times in the previous six months.
• In an aggressive expansion programme, i-mint is looking at doubling its membership from 4 million to 8 million, quadrupling partner establishments from 2,500 to 10,000 and more than doubling its turnover in the next one year.
• While a single loyalty programme helps in retaining existing clients only, it can not help attract new customers.
• While, many single loyalty programmes reward only the higher-spending customers and alienate the others, multiple partnership programme treats customers more evenly.
• Additionally, multiple partnership programme provides better understanding of consumers’ behaviour across categories. Moreover, providing rewards across a network of establishments is of mutual benefit to both customers and businesses.
• In a marketing-driven world, when it’s essential to bring in more customers, repeat purchases and increase the bill size, and where the cost of acquiring customers is greater than retaining them, data mining becomes important, says Bobba.
• LSRL analyses the data from its database and helps its partners to exploit the same.