What is the Monday Morning Coffee with Spaycial? Every Monday morning, our editorial team brings you 5 need-to-know news from its weekly readings, on retail and payment data, to read in less than 5 minutes.
What's on the menu this week?
1. Discovering next-gen loyalty programs
Here's one legit Comprehensive Guide on Department Store Loyalty Programs in 2021, by antavo. This article explores next-gen department store loyalty programs and examines how department stores can use emerging and tech-oriented reward strategies to their full extent and (re)establish a strong bond with the post-pandemic customer! The article also gives you the 10 inspirational examples of well-known department store loyalty programs. A must-read obviously!
2. Shoppers increasingly expect cashback and discounts
Let's immediately double-down on this first read with this piece from Entrepreneur on the 3 types of reward programs every retail brand should know about. As the article explains it, "it’s now clear that brands can no longer expect shoppers to take extra and unnatural maneuvers while shopping online. Their experience should be paramount in order to ensure repeat sales, and take precedence when planning shopper acquisition campaigns." And you guessed it by now (because you're reading this on spaycial.com), the n°1 type of reward program is card-link offers : "a card-linked offer is tied to a specific payment card, and earns the consumer cash back or discounts at select merchants". Add some Spaycial Intelligence on top of it, and brands will offer the best shopping experience there can be.
3. Black Friday payment data reveals surge in BNPL usage
Let's jump to another topic that we love: payment data and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), the new trendy shopper benefit. Finextra reports a 51% increase in the use of BNPL payment methods in Europe (primarily from Germany, UK, France, the Netherlands and Belgium) during Black Friday, Cyber Week and Cyber Monday compared to the previous year. We also enjoyed reading that "Mollie's research shows that small and medium-sized merchants across Europe experienced a 102% increase in the overall volume of transactions on Black Friday versus the Friday prior, demonstrating that the event is not just about behemoths such as Amazon."
4. What brands can do with late-start Christmas shoppers?
Panic Saturday is just around the corner. "You know the one, that final Saturday before Christmas when all the last-minute shoppers descend on the nearest mall to snap up remaining gift items" as Retail Touchpoints writes it, clearly amused by the situation. In fact, 74% of shoppers plan to do at least some last-minute holiday shopping this season. And so what if brands would help shoppers' procrastination to actually pay off and offer special rewards for late-start shoppers? It adds an extra-layer of personalisation for those procrastinators and they will surely remember it the next time they go shopping.
5. The multi-channel strategy is the new deal for retailers
This last read of the week on "Commercial real estate on the verge of change" from Les Echos, caught our attention because it emphasises on how Covid-19 confirmed the necessary digital revolution of brands. Lockdowns have forced retailers to increase multi-channel sales (Internet sales, pick-up at relay points, home deliveries) which will become the norm.
Article also talks about the halo effect, a concept we are familiar with, as phygital will drive down rents."The Internet is the ally of physical commerce, not its enemy,"
says Marina Lavrov, director of the retail department at CBRE