RewardsNOW is set to launch its innovative Shop Main Street local merchant-funded rewards program in Lowell, MA. The Shop Main Street program is also slated to launch in Detroit next month.
RewardsNOW CEO Steve VanFleet told Loyalty 360 that the Shop Main Street program offers participating merchants an extensive suite of affordable online marketing tools that helps them use offers to attract new customers and reward loyal shoppers. And since Shop Main Street is integrated into local credit unions’ loyalty programs, merchants benefit from increased consumer awareness and interest. More than 250,000 consumers who have a credit or debit card tied to a loyalty program offered by one of approximately a dozen area credit unions will be able to earn bonus rewards when they shop at local merchants participating in the program.
The Lowell, MA launch will begin this week.
These rewards will be in addition to the rewards they earn from their loyalty program when using their card for purchases. Shop Main Street is unique, VanFleet said, because it allows participating merchants choose from more than 20 different offers to address their specific business objectives.
Shop Main Street also features useful content, including merchant news and consumer reviews, all of which bring “word-of-mouth” marketing to a wider audience. What’s more, Shop Main Street gives merchants valuable information about their customers and their purchasing behavior.
“Shop Main Street is a true marketing tool kit that lets merchants use offers and other program features to build long-term customer relationships,” VanFleet said.
Shop Main Street was developed by RewardsNOW with technology from Zavee.
“We want to get local merchants involved,” VanFleet said. “So, I needed a platform that could effectively board merchants, manage relationships, and manage billing and infrastructure. I heard about Zavee’s platform, which also integrates the social media aspect of the consumer. The platform is very robust and much more customer-centric and efficient in being able to board local merchants and manage them.”
VanFleet offered the following example of how a business could use the Shop Main Street marketing tools for sustainable business growth:
The owner of Jane’s Salon is introducing a new line of skin-care products and wants customers to purchase those products in addition to the products and services they already buy.
She creates an offer on Shop Main Street for an extra 10% reward on purchases of $75 or more (assume the average purchase is $50).
Shop Main Street automatically posts that offer to multiple communication channels as selected by the participating consumers. They will see the offers featured on the credit union’s website, the Shop Main Street site, via special emails, on their phone, or via social media like Facebook and Twitter -- where it can be seen by many of the salon’s customers and by other friends and followers. Some consumers share (on Facebook) or re-tweet (on Twitter) the offer to their own friends, expanding Jane’s word of mouth even further.
Jane also uses Shop Main Street to create and publish an announcement of the new product line, and invites consumers to sample the products in the salon before they go on sale to the general public. That announcement also is posted via the previous channels. This amplifies Jane’s word of mouth and increases engagement with her current customers.
Customers who then go to Jane’s and make a qualifying purchase (in this case, $75 or more) receive the 10% discount in the form of reward points added to their existing reward points they earn as a participant in the credit union rewards program.
Jane’s Salon can further entice the consumer to shop at Jane’s by electing to have a gift card/certificate as a featured redemption item in the rewards program catalog. As the credit union customer is earning points for shopping generally with their card and receiving bonus points from Shop Main Street merchants, when they go to redeem their points they can choose a Jane’s Salon gift certificate and thus generate additional future business for Jane’s.
Ron Stack, Co-Founder/Chief Operating Officer at Zavee, told Loyalty 360 that his company perfectly complements RewardsNOW’s Shop Main Street program.
“Our peg fit into their hole directly,” Stack said. “We developed a robust end-to- end program that manages every aspect of it for consumers and merchants. We had the ability to develop a merchant base and we were looking for sponsorship. It made a lot more sense to become part of a program where card holders are already enrolled and already engaged. This is a new set of features for which there was a demand from the financial institutions, merchants, and consumers.”
Stack said Zavee has two sales models for the program: leveraging financial institutions’ engagement and their relationships with local merchant bases.
“The demand for this on the merchant side is high,” Stack said. “It’s really an advance for them over discounts, punch cards, and more recent innovations like daily deals.”
Stack said Shop Main Street takes the best of conventional loyalty – “because RewardsNOW has been doing this for a long time” – and adds a new approach to loyalty for which there’s a great deal of demand. But it has been hard to scale down the local level. The loyalty industry has focused on larger merchants and larger institutions.”