Postcards from Perkistan

Just this week Perkler has finalised a partnership with Trade Rite Group, assisting consumers by offering a loyalty program for a broad range of trades and services.

The Trade Rite Group is the only program that covers trades that we’re aware of, and the savings that can be made for everyday electrical, plumbing, or even if you’re building a new home, become very large very quickly.

Each trade or service you book through the Trade Rite Group will earn you 5% of the total cost in Reward Dollars. Those dollars can then be spent on other trades or services within the Trade Rite Group. Given that the group covers 32 trades and services it won’t take much creativity to find something to spend it on. Put it towards a new motorbike, spoil yourself with topshelf wine, or relax with a massage… the variety is there. For a full list of trades and services offered view the program listing.

The program definitely has potential and the service is excellent. Enquiries and bookings can be made from the Trade Rite Group home

Sweeet!
Graham

Heya!
Graham here. It’s tough to find a great sale in the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas, but we’ve found some great loyalty deals that will help you save on some great gift ideas. We’re going to be updating the blog when new cool deals come out.

My mum always loves a good read, if yours does too keep your eye on the Borders Shortlist and Angus & Robertson A&R Rewards. A&R Rewards you need to make a purchase before you can become a member. If you aren’t already then you’re probably better off signing up for the Borders Shortlist. Free, online registration and they send an email once a month (usually in the third/fourth week). Discounts are consistently 20-30% off. This week’s offer is 25% off one non-fiction book.

Candles are also a great idea, and we’ve got another free email signup for you. This one’s with Dusk, pretty much the only decent candle store if you ask me. Go to their website and signup for the dusk candle club. Immediately after joining you’ll receive a 10% off voucher for your first ONLINE order. So get your shopping done early and snag a great bargain: Sign up now

It’s tough to find dad a present that isn’t socks or jocks, or just the same old thing that you get him every year. Give him some excitement this year by getting him a RedBalloon adventure. They’re normally pretty costly, so you’ll have no problems saving on this one. Use your Presidential Card to make the purchase and you’ll receive a $30 discount on any purchase of $129 or more. Nice! Don’t forget to enter your voucher code at the checkout. All the details. The same discount is applied for MBF’s In2Life program.

For all your christmas shopping you can save 5% with your Presidential Card or QRI Lifestyle card by pre-purchasing gift cards. What’s also kinda cool (I asked FlyBuys but they didn’t get back to me) is that you can still earn QANTAS Frequent Flyer points when you make your purchase with a WISH gift card at Woolworths. Sweet, huh?

If you’re in to the hamper market, let’s face it… we all are, you can usually save 10% by ordering through your motor club or by using your credit card. At the bare minimum you’re gonna get some bonus points for it. Confirmed discounts are available through RACQ (usually the other big motor clubs are reciprocal so be sure to check out RACV, NRMA, RACT, RAC, and AANT), ANZ Frequent Flyer Credit Card, Westpac Instant Offers, ANZ Rewards Credit Card, St. George Instant Benefits, Bank of Queensland Q-Rewards.

You can also save up to 20% on Hampers with a National Pharmacies Membership. Simply view the Christmas Catalogue.

Shopping for kid’s toys is always a bit of a hard one to find discounts on. Save 20% by buying online with your Presidential Card at GR8 Toys. Save 10% at Entropy using your QRI Lifestyle card. Sign up to the Australian Geographic Newsletter and receive an in-store coupon. We’ll try to nut this one out and bring you some more great bargains from the free programs out there

Decorations: Keep an eye out for great offers from Myer and David Jones in their monthly instant offers. Failing that you’ve got National Pharmacies with some great low-cost and discounted decoration options that are up to 20% off.

Christmas Entertainment: Reading Reel Club, Hoyts Movie Club, Cine Buzz weekly emails include an exclusive member offer for a discounted movie.
Christmas Entertainment: AMF Bowling AMF Roller club - 10% off everything. They usually include discounted school holiday offers, it’s free to join. Thursday night is cheap bowling night, too

We’ll be sure to add the latest benefits here as they come… Also, you can do your own search from our home page: Search Now!
-Me

Hi everyone,

been a while (I think I say that every time…).

Our launch has gone really well and we are building a great community of people who love perks! Thought you might like to know a little bit about yourselves:

• 68% of you are female
• The average age of the female Perkler is 40
• The average age of the male Perkler is 43
• On average you have 15 loyalty memberships in your virtual wallets

Our top 10 cities that site visitors come from are:

1. Sydney
2. Melbourne
3. Brisbane
4. Canberra
5. Perth
6. Adelaide
7. Hobart
8. Cranbourne
9. Nerang
10. Richmond

So there you go - it’s early days but there are plenty of you around (and we look forward to plenty more).

Don’t forget- every new member who joins before the end of October we are giving away a free Yoga Pass from our friends at yogapass.com.au!

More soon,

Justin

Dan and Justin went to the Incentive Show in Sydney on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Incentive Show is the largest exhibition and learning event in Australia devoted to helping you grow sales, improve marketing effectiveness and build customer loyalty. Setup on Monday night made them believe they might have been in the wrong place being amongst a number of employee incentive stalls, but the next two days proved them wrong. Justin presented on both days about how loyalty works for consumers. This received great reactions including a lot of interest from potential clients. For the full two days Dan worked the room hard - making sure Perkler was top of mind with every Loyalty Marketing company in the joint, including all the big loyalty platform providers. Overall the show was a huge success!

Pictures from the event (facebook): Incentive Show Photos

More about the Incentive Show: Incentive Show 2009 Homepage

-Me

Wow!

This post started just before launch yesterday and was a nice retrospective on two years of work coming to fruition…

Then all hell broke loose!

As the starting point for our launch we engaged the fantastic Magnum PR. In reality we ‘hoped’ that they would get us some national TV coverage. They stepped up to the plate and delivered the big boys - A Current Affair.

While Dan and I were in Sydney filming Adam and Graham got to work preparing for a much bigger first night hit than we planned. As it turned out the ACA story lead to over 300,000 hits on the site from an extraordinary number of unique users. I’m not sure how anyone is meant to prepare for that!

So the reality was that the publicity was excellent, the site didn’t cope and we went into major server meltdown.

While the melted server has shown us that demand for the site is extraordinary, and provided us with a nice PR angle “demand crashes site…” we just want people in there using the service so they can get full value from their programs and we can get to work building this community.

So with the help from some friends we are rebuilding the back-end and getting it firing on all cylinders.

What has been interesting about the whole process is the response of our members. I’ve just emailed well over 500 new registrations. People who came to the site and signed up but have found the site slow and even unworkable.

So far I’ve had one complain back - and fair enough. Overwhelmingly our new members have got back to me thanking me for the contact, congratulating us on the site and remaining eager to get in there and play when we’ve beefed it up.

An amazing response and one that makes us happy to be in such a great business!

Roll on Perkler!

It’s been a very long time since our last post, which means we have been a bit slack but also means we have been up to our necks in work - which is a good thing.

Those following Dan or I on Twitter (@JustinBarrie and @BigHittingLama) would know that we’ve just been overseas for a market validation trip to the UK. 

As winners of the Australian Final of the Technium Challenge we were lucky enough to be taken over to Swansea to compete in the global final. A week long cultural tour introduced us to all that the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) are doing to support businesses (and encourage them to enter Wales as a base) and also gave us a look around a range of cities and towns like Cardiff and Aberystwyth.

We didn’t win the global final - we tell our families we can runner-up - but the experience was excellent.

The WAG have some very interesting support packages including running the 11 Technium Centres - incubators that allow companies an “easy-in easy-out” approach to setting up an office. The WAG also have a very vibrant Finance arm - Finance Wales and strong Angel Community - Xenos. All very interesting stuff.

The second half of our week was down in London. We had three days chocked full of meetings with interested investors, potential strategic partners and most interestingly some really high-quality retailers.

We learnt from brands like French Connection and the Arcadia Group (representing fantastic brands like Miss Selfridges, Dorothy Perkins and Top Shop that the idea of Perkler very much translates to the UK market. We were pleased that with very little adjustment it could become a very successful export market for us.

We also learnt that the expectations of retailers in the mobile space in particular seems to be significantly more advanced than here in Oz or even than in the US (where we were last year). Most of the meetings focused on how the Perkler mobile platform can be extended to really enhance loyalty offerings which was really exciting for us and our future product runway.

Overall I’d say that the UK retailers were very focused on loyalty stopping being a “met too” industry and really looking for ways to really reward loyal customers. Particularly interesting was their desire to link loyalty directly to ‘live’ performance of a particular physical retail location on any given day. Using the loyalty program to drive customers in when times are slow. Very very interesting notion.

On the investment front there seemed to be a fairly buoyant mood. The Australian Government should probably take note of some pretty good initiatives like the London Technology Fund which combine the best of private venture discipline with a softer government approach - we were very impressed. The WAG also had a range of funding options that were very attractive to the right business at the right time.

So the trip was extremely valuable for us in terms of understanding where to after Australia, but also in re-confirming that we need to focus on the Australian launch (only weeks away) and get it right here. And that’s exactly what we are doing.

Negotiations are fairly advanced with a couple of really good brands here at home, and Adam is working bloody hard to get the new version of the site up and ready for solid QA next week ahead of the launch.

For the launch itself we have appointed Magnum PR to lead off our campaign. We are really excited about working with the guys and know that a sustained campaign (combined with our product offering real value to consumers and retailers) will result in some great commercial partnerships and, most importantly, a big intake of members getting value from Perkler.

So back to work - but more regular posts now that we are back in Oz. Don’t forget to follow our community manager Graham on Twitter as well @perkler. 

Last thing to report is that whilst in London we were lucky enough to score Centre Court Wimbledon tickets on Ladies Quarter Final day. The seats were amazing and we ended up right next to the members. I can assure you all (because I know you’re wondering) Sir Cliff Richard’s tan is quite extraordinary!

Justin

We received some pretty negative feedback today from a new user, but ALL feedback is welcome at Perkler so we were happy to hear it.

Not impressed, boys. Not cool. Should have connections to mileage accounts off the bat. I won’t use this. Ya lost me, and everyone I know. There are better options out there. I would never use this for networking. There are far too many other places to have to chat and connect with people. That is stupid. Posted by a visitor. 

The core issues raised here revolve around mileage programs and Perkler as a network, let me address these points.

Mileage Programs. In the Australian version of the site we have actually entered quite a few frequent flyer programs, purely because there aren’t that many and they have some good brands in them. But for US and other users we are concentrating less on the high-end points based mileage programs and more on retail. Why?

Because retail perks are more immediate and offer pretty much instant benefits to a much bigger number of consumers than the mileage programs.

Don’t get me wrong - we love unlocking the great merchandise and brands in Flyer programs and will do as we build relationships with airlines, but for now our focus is on retail because that’s what people need in the current economic climate. And because there are lots of cool brands there for people to build an affinity with and discuss.

Another point about Mileage Programs - people who are into them are really into them (just ask Randy Petersen). As a result our ‘Perkler’ is right - there are lots of products out there servicing that market. But in the end, even though they are huge these programs only represent about 20% of the total loyalty membership (in the US). So not only do we love retail, travel, grocery etc - we’d be crazy not to cater to 80% of people’s real memberships. Otherwise we wouldn’t be doing a very good job of getting that virtual wallet going. Remember Perkler is about ALL your memberships in one place.

Second point - Perkler as a network. We should get this straight from the outset. We are not trying to build Facebook, or Linked-In or any other uber-network. We are trying to use the community to simplify the loyalty and rewards experience. We think one of the keys to getting better results for consumers and retailers out of loyalty programs is sharing information, rating programs and finding out about programs from people.

Eventually we will link in (yes I get it) with the larger networks and are looking already at openid and Facebook Connect to integrate our community with them.

So, we may have lost this user (and everyone he knows) but we aren’t being flippant about the feedback - we appreciate it and take it on board. Rest assured though, because we don’t have blanket coverage of mileage programs doesn’t mean we have failed the loyalty test. People are much more than their airline travel!

Having said that I’m standing by Aeroplan - call anytime

One of the things we want to do at Perkler (and Adam is working hard to implement) is to not only allow you to search across your loyalty portfolio in one place, but receive special offers or discounts, on top of the current loyalty offering, to get you in the store.

As we build relationships with retailers we’ll be pushing this as an opportunity for them and consumers and will offer coupons for use on the phone and web to facilitate this.

It’s a good space to be in as belts tighten and interestingly the idea is gaining traction in markets that you wouldn’t expect.

The US is traditionally big into coupons - thanks to green stamps and the Great Depression there is a strong culture of coupon use. The UK on the other hand has has a good tradition of coupons, but don’t tend to attack them with the same veracity. Until now!

New Media Age out of the UK reports today  (you’ll need to register with NMA to see the whole article) that searching online for coupons is up 133% in the past year (my guess is that demand and searching will double again in the current climate in just a few months). At the same time Google is talking about the move to mobile advertising.

Perkler - mobile based search results linked to an additional discount coupon AS WELL as your current entitlements is looking pretty good in this space.

Justin

I was put onto a post on Read Write Web this morning by a twitter connection ( @paulmckeon ) which highlighted a very interesting reaction to a technology we are investigating here at Perkler.

The story talks about price comparison smart phone apps - based on bar code scanners. It’s a cool idea and, I think, one of the next big moves in retail. For ages retailers have been talking about ‘real time inventory’ this is ‘real time pricing’.

RWW give examples of stores not really knowing how to cope with customers scanning products for their own purposes (in this case price comparison). The RWW article even links to an even more interesting (worrying?) blog post warning retailers to install phone jammers or have ‘no scan policies’ to stop people doing this.

I think retailers who even countenance such an approach are missing the point. Surely, if your customers are price matching and comparing - the best place for them to be doing that is RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSE!

If they are there and doing it, you are uniquely placed to counter their bargain hunting and get the sale.

Ironically, emerging apps that use bar codes to provide reviews and ratings on individual products could actually lead to shoppers spending more money. If I scan a product that is $14.99 and a review tells me the $16.99 version is better, doesn’t the store win?

The reason this technology (and retailer behaviour) relates to Perkler is two-fold. Firstly, we think the use of scanning technology on smartphones is a great way for retailers to entice shoppers into the store.

When a Perkler does a search on the perkolator for a loyalty program in a location near them (on our iphone and storm apps that Adam is building as we speak), what better way to motivate them in-store by offering a small, additional, tailored on-phone perk. We think it is the next phase of loyalty and builds on a combination of on-phone coupons and loyalty infrastructure. And because the consumer initiated the search through the Perkolator, it isn’t a global offer and isn’t sent to them without warning (we hate ‘push’).

Neat.

The second way it relates to us gets me back on topic. I simply can’t understand retailers who aren’t willing to jump in to a consumer-driven competitive landscape. When meeting retailers to discuss Perkler most are very keen. They understand that if they work with us they will learn more about their brand and program performance than if they simply stick to their current research methods alone. They also know that our data will tell them if they are under-performing (not coming up in search preferences, not having perks that stack up or missing perks completely). Seems to me that is exactly the kind of information you would want to know.

Sure, it might be confronting. But if you don’t have a perk that is up to scratch, would you prefer consumers switching off without you knowing or would you like the heads up so you can evolve your program to meet the needs of the consumer. Isn’t that why loyalty programs are there?

So - let them scan I say! And partner with Perkler (and other social media tools like twitter) to learn things about your program before they disengage.

Justin

I feel like I don’t even really need to write a post after that title!

Motley Fool had a story today (found via a link on twitter - thanks @retrogrrl ) that highlighted the importance of retailers NOT doing away with customer care and loyalty as times get hard for the sector. Couldn’t agree more.

The amazing statistic they quote is that retailers lose half of their customers every five years, with two thirds claiming customer service as the reason. They also cite research that highlights the maths in the title of this post!

Interestingly, what this story says to me is that the formal ‘loyalty program’ isn’t the enough on it’s own to create a loyal customer. There are so many other touch points that consumers roll-up into the service, and hence positive experience mix.

At Perkler we have a simple thought about how to connect the formal programs with real touchpoints of companies - create a loyalty community that involves consumers and retailers.

So that’s why we have the Perkolator - to allow consumers to search, manage and take advantage of all of the perks they are entitled to, but also have built in a range of community functions. Ratings, forums, favourites all lead to learning from other consumers but also influencing the companies behind the programs to use them to build real customer service.

As more and more retailers engage with consumers through Perkler we absolutely believe they will benefit as much as the consumer.

Justin