I am begining the process of reveiwing best practices in frequent buyer programs.
Here is my start of options that would be nice, right now in no
particular order of importance or usefulness but all have been used by
some large successful sites.
include and exclude products for either earning or using. Right now as
I understand it I can manually edit a product to reduce or elimate the
frequent user points. But I would like to be able to do it by category.
Allow redemption (major forum request - spell check please) on only
selected products. Some popular items I have a high margin on and
giving them away withthe redemption of reward points would be a lot
less painless than ones that I carry as a convience to my customers
with a very small margin. Currently in some case a $1 redemption may
cost me anywhere from 0.30 to 0.80.
Also just having selected products would allow emailing with product
offering updates. A great reason to email, "you can now get these
new 4 great products free if you have 500 or more frequent buyer points"
This brings up how email authorization is handled. Right now
everyone ordering gets frequent buyer points. I would like to award or
not based on email authorization. While we do not abuse it, 6
times in 4 years so far, we reserve the right to email all of our
customers, (allowing easy and many means to opt out) for promotional
issues.
Even better to provide an option to email buyers with over x frequent buyer points.
Depending on how generous the point reward is, I might want to force
reclying them on a specific date. ie they expire at the end of the
year. ( otherwise I have to carry them on the books forever as a
liability, there is some disagreement on this point) Plus it would
provide me a way to drive sales at a particluar time of year. A
nice use it or lose it email at the end of a annual slow period might
make a big difference in over all sales levels.
I have not really looked in to the reporting section but knowing what
the total outstanding dollar value of reward points is critical.
While I am at it how about allowing excluding shipping costs?
I think that is enough for now
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John
http://www.ultimatewatermassage.com - massagers, heat therapy, buckwheat pillows and more
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