Points Taken
As goes Manitoba, so goes the whole of the Great White North? Air Miles, a Toronto-based loyalty program, certainly hopes so: The program’s partners that participated in a new member mailer test saw response rates of 8% to 9% — double those of previous incarnations.
The success of the test prompted a full rollout this spring to more than 3 million of the 10 million active members in Canada, putting the Air Miles package in one out of every eight Canadian households.
What made the communications in the late 2008 test that preceded the rollout different from previous schemes? Customization. Through its partners — which include a variety of electronics, toy, appliance, grocery, apparel and travel and hospitality firms, among other marketers — Air Miles has access to a wealth of purchase records that it uses to tailor offers to program enrollees (known as “Collectors”).
But transaction information is only the tip of the data that Air Miles and loyalty agency Direct Antidote draw on when personalizing the packages. “Children in the household is a big driver,” says Marshall Warkentin, senior director of marketing segments and programming at Air Miles. “So are age, marital status and other purchase behavior, such as channels used and redemption through our awards network.”
While each mailer contains a customized selection of offers, the solicitations themselves have been standardized. Previous member communication packages featured a hodgepodge of insert shapes, sizes and styles. Starting with the Manitoba test, partners are limited to a few basic design templates for their inserts, each of which features a strong image atop the page and a clearly defined offer — which references the Air Miles program — on the lowest quarter of the page.
“The whole piece feels more like a relationship builder,” says Warkentin.
“Creatively, we realized after Manitoba that the more targeted and relevant we could make these, the better,” says Di Cullen, president of Direct Antidote. “For us, the big breakthrough was figuring out how we could execute on that process across a significantly larger mailing.”
The Manitoba test also vindicated the decision to standardize the design of the offerings: Direct Antidote credits holding the inserts to a uniform size, along with a switch to print-on-demand technology, with a 40% reduction in paper waste.
The full rollout featured 38 sponsors that contributed a total of 188 variations of inserts. And with each package limited to between five and eight inserts — so as not to overwhelm the recipient — the number of package permutations was quite high.
During the Manitoba test, Air Miles focused on two groupings: Collectors with children and Baby Boomers. (It also used a one-per-household select, meaning that the 170,000 mailers wound up in well over one-third of all households in Manitoba.) For the April rollout across Canada, the company added a third demographic from Generations X and Y.
