Socialisation Game Mechanics on Loyalty Cards

In our last blog I wrote about achievements such as points or rewards and the appointment dynamic. Another aspect that is very powerful is socialisation. There are many aspects to this including profiling, recommendations and forums and using the appointment dynamic to get more people in the same place.

There are many for and against aspects to profiling and it is happening from a Google level down to individual retailers. It is very important if you are profiling to correctly interpret information and to ensure that if you are doing it in a loyalty environment that the loyalty members understand what you are doing and that they have given their permission.

I have said on many occasions that done in the right way, combining educated opt in, location, interests and open to buy is very powerful. As I’ve said before, if Borders (I have  VIP Card on my key ring) sent me a notification saying that the new Stephen King Book 11/22/63 is in store and they will hold a copy for me with a special promotional offer for the next half hour, knowing that I am in the neighbourhood, I will probably go and buy it.

However, if they sent me the same message about the latest top 10 recommendations of a certain radio host were in stock, I would probably opt out of their service, even though I may at some stage have bought one of those books as a gift for my wife.

There are many ways to mine data about what people are buying and it doesn’t have to be down to product level, category level would be very powerful, and it amazes me that retailers don’t use this as a tool.

Profiling needs to be relatively smart and needs Business Analysts able to interpret information and look for trends and not make assumptions on the basis of one or two retail or other destination visits. Buying a hammer doesn’t make me a handyman, but buying tools on a regular basis would constitute a trend. Of course where someone lives can also be a valuable pointer and our new BIonaMAP application that I’ve blogged about before can provide valuable information in looking at trends from multiple people, especially when combined with data from the Department of Statistics Census which the application supports and Mesh Block and Area unit level.

Recommendations are powerful. In 2009 Nielsen’s released the results of a study that said that 90% of consumers trusted recommendations from people they know, 70% trusted recommendations from people who post them online and 24% trusted text ads that appeared on their mobiles. There are many ways to encourage people to comment on products or locations in a mobile environment. Some organisations worry about what people will say about them, but if that is the case, perhaps they have some work to do and better to know what they are saying and be able to engage with them, or as was agreed at the last Social Media Club meeting in Auckland, the common scenario is that if someone criticises a business in an online forum, others very quickly come to its defence. In a closed environment it is of course much easier to encourage the behaviour you are looking for from participants by providing them with the value they want. This can be done by rewards such as points for participation, bribes such as prizes and by engaging and showing an interest in them.

It has been expressed to me that social media requires additional resources and expertise often not available within destination businesses, particularly retail. Yes it does, the key cost is time and you do need someone who knows what they are doing, but what does traditional advertising cost. If you buy a reasonable sized advertisement in a newspaper, or get an agency to generate letter box mail, what does it cost for creative, artwork, printing and distribution? How many hours of a person’s time would that buy? It’s just another tool and the great thing is that to test the market using services like Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter is that you can try them for free. Add location in an app or mobile web site does involve cost, but done well the return can be huge.

Socialisation offers many more exciting opportunities, but to find out what I am talking about, you will have to come back for the next blog. Please feel free to add your comments in the meantime.

How Furniture Shops can Save Time and Money on Deliveries with Route2GO Lite

Do you have delivery vehicles? How would you like to be able to do more deliveries in a day just by being a bit smarter? It’s expensive running a truck, especially in the city where traffic congestion is a given most days of the week. In the furniture business you may have a plan of which areas you will deliver to on certain days of the week. That’s a plan, but if a customer says he will only buy that expensive lounge suite if you deliver it tomorrow, do you walk away from the business? Times are better than I thought if you can do that.

In this industry and today’s economy a furniture store or chain needs to be smart, deliver on its promises and be competitive.

So what does your vehicle truly cost you to operate. Your accountant should be able to give you information on the total cost of ownership for your trucks or vans per annum. This includes depreciation, maintenance, petrol and oil, road user charges if applicable, insurance, tyres and other consumables and of course petrol. You will know the distance the vehicle has driven over the 1 year period, so can come up with a per km cost for this vehicle. So now divide the total cost of the vehicle for one year by the kilometres driven and you have your per km rate. This is important because you can’t calculate your return on investment on a service without knowing what your initial costs are. This of course doesn’t include the costs of the driver and possibly second staff person required in the truck because much furniture is to bulky or heavy for one person to manage.

A key problem with furniture delivery is that no two days are the same. This means that you can’t just plan a route out and repeat it. Each day you need to prepare a new run sheet and rely on someone to put it into an appropriate order. Sounds easy and obviously this is what people are doing every day. The problem is that, even with a printed road map, you may not know about one way streets, no right turns, dual carriageways where you can’t do a U-Turn and so on. We are currently working through some recent daily run sheets for a medium sized furniture retailer. The very first run sheet we processed through Route2GO, the optimised route was half of the distance of the route they did. It cut down their driving time for the day’s work by about an hour, meaning they could have easily done two more deliveries in the same amount of time.

So what skills do you need to be able to use Route2GO Lite? The minimum is the ability to correctly spell the street names you are going to and to follow the instructions in our user manual. You enter the addresses you are going to and we tell you what order to do them in.It can be as simple as that. If you have someone on staff that has basic spreadsheet skills, you can do so much more.

You can load the truck in reverse order so you’re not wasting time re-handling the furniture on the truck each time you stop. You can do much more and we’re going to tell you more about it in this blog. You can also get some more information on our web site. Best thing you can do is talk to us about your business. you can contact Luigi Cappel on phone 09 9668 768, or email luigi.cappel@geosmart.co.nz. Send us a job sheet for a run you have already done and let us check it for you. We’ll tell you whether we think we could have suggested a better route. Want to try it for yourself, we can set you up with a free trial so you can see how it works for your business.

Subscribe to this blog if this is of interest because I am going to come back and provide more information about how this can help your business grow. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, you just have to have the desire to increase productivity and profit and provide a competitive level of service that will have your customers coming back for more and recommending you to their friends. Now check out where the tangible ROI comes from.

Finally remember that the companies who are best prepared in tough times are going to profit the most when the economy picks up. We want to help you. You understand the furniture trade, we understand New Zealand roads and how best to get around them.

Proximity Based Marketing and LBS is a Growth Opportunity

I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that traditional forms of Advertising are shrinking. There are many statistics backing this up. There are many statistics backing this up and in Asia Pacific, Carat, for example have forecast a 5.8% decline in ad spend for this year. Obviously the economy is a factor in this result, but it also signals a change in advertising behaviour as people are paying less attention to traditional forms of advertising. Many people now have products such as MySky and Tivo is almost here. These products make it very simple for people to avoid watching TVC’s because the can fast forward their recorded TV programmes. TVNZ announced that they were laying off 90 people as a consequence of a $25 million reduction in advertising revenue. The same applies with radio where many people are now opting for their iPods to listen to their favourite music instead of tuning in and being forced to listen to radio ads.

In my opinion, this doesn’t mean that people want to avoid advertising, specials and promotions altogether. They want them to be more relevant. ZenithOptimedia have forecast far greater drops in Ad expenditure, 11% drop in magazines, 10% in radio, 5.5 in TV, but around a 10% increase in Internet Advertising. So traditional forms of advertising decline, but Internet advertising is on the rise.

Why would that be? People are using the Internet far more these days, which takes them away from traditional media, but the key element to me is relevance. In the World Wide Web, it is far easier to ensure that advertising is relevant to the search or type of site that people are visiting. It also offers a great opportunity for call to action with Click Through, which is of course where Google makes the bulk of its income.

The ability to have people opt in to various services that are relevant to their interests and needs, their current time and place means that the offers will be welcomed and will have a far greater sales conversion rate than with traditional means of advertising and promotion. This is where the opportunity arises with Location Based Services (LBS) and Proximity Based Marketing.

The issue isn’t that people hate ads, specials, good deals and information. The relevance needs to be around space and time. I would welcome a Speight’s Mates Happy Hour electronic coupon, when I am walking past a bar, with a 2 for 1 offer on a Friday evening after work. But I probably wouldn’t even see a printed coupon in a magazine.

I’m sure tourists would take advantage of a special offer to a half price jet boat ride when they are on holiday in Queenstown, when they are within a kilometre of the boat on a sunny morning, than if they read an ad in the plane on their way to New Zealand. The tour operator gets a full boat and all the passengers have more fun. It’s timely, its based on their immediate location and its relevant to their current situation.

Many people think that the technology isn’t ready, but according to a story in ITWire, compound growth of GPS in mobile phones is over 49% and one of the major drivers in the proliferation of SmartPhones. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, despite the economy, the penetration of SmartPhones grew by 33% to February this year. The traditional definition of a SmartPhone comes from Operating Systems such as Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile, but if you look around today, many of the mobile apps in those phones such as Contacts, Diary, Email, Still and Video Camera are now standard in pretty much every phone and with the low cost of GPS, that is now being added at great speed.

With Software Development Kits being made freely available for the popular brands and models of phone, this is a perfect opportunity to become familiar with the web services and API’s available from GeoSmart and outlined in previous blogs. All you need is a good idea and a little market research. Of course GeoSmart can offer you a Developer Agreement which gives you free access to any tools you need during the development process.

You can find more information on the Developer Page at http://www.geosmart.co.nz or email info@geosmart.co.nz