Susan O’Neill is the public relations manager at Delvinia
Canadians love loyalty programs. More than 90 per cent of Canadians belong to at least one loyalty program and the average Canadian household belongs to more than eight, collecting loyalty rewards towards the purchase of everything from fuel to travel and drug store necessities.
But despite this high number of loyalty memberships, Canadians are typically only active with a few programs. So, what’s going to make them loyal to yours?
In late 2012, Petro-Canada, a Suncor business, partnered with AskingCanadians to offer their guests a unique opportunity to earn more Petro-Points by joining AskingCanadians and receiving Petro-Points for their participation in consumer surveys.
And, as Petro-Canada has learned, creating partnerships designed to get more loyalty points into your customers’ pockets is an effective way of increasing engagement with your brand.
“Our Petro-Points loyalty program is designed to give value back to our members,” says Marc Goodman, Director, Loyalty & Strategic Partnerships, Suncor. “By being able to issue Petro-Points outside our environment we provide our members with even more ways to earn valuable points by doing something they want to do.”
The Petro-Points loyalty program is one of Canada’s longest tenured and largest loyalty programs. With over 4.3 million active members, it was recently ranked among the top five loyalty programs in Canada in an IMI Loyalty Study.
Petro-Canada recently re-evaluated its loyalty strategy, and according to Goodman, one of the elements the company wanted to examine was how Petro-Points members could earn more points faster, helping to make rewards more easily attainable. By allowing their guests to earn more points through non-traditional avenues, their “time to redeem” would accelerate helping to increase loyalty and engagement with the Petro-Canada brand.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What can we do to help our members earn more points?’ You can only buy so much fuel, so we wanted to think about what we could do when our members are not at our retail site,” Goodman said, adding that offering loyalty points for guest surveys was one option that came up.
When Petro-Canada started looking at possible partners to add value to its guests, AskingCanadians came to the forefront. “The partnership resonated with us because it meant adding more value for our members by giving them the ability to earn additional points by doing something that was not selling them anything, but simply allowing them to share their opinions,” explained Goodman.
AskingCanadians, a Delvinia company, made sense because it is one of the leading online data collection companies in Canada with an established brand and a large panel of consumers who have opted-in to participate in research studies and earn rewards.
The panel, which provides marketers and market researchers with access to more than 600,000 Canadian consumers, has been partnering with loyalty programs since 2005 to offer loyalty rewards as incentives to participate in various market research studies. Prior to partnering with Petro-Points, AskingCanadians had already developed partnerships with some of Canada’s most-established brands including Aeroplan, Hudson’s Bay Company and Walmart.
What made AskingCanadians unique was the fact that they already had an established base of Canadians who were part of their research community, they provided incentives for every survey that their members participated in, and they had their own bilingual customer service team in place to ensure that they could manage any issues that arose, Goodman said.
AskingCanadians purchases loyalty rewards from partners and issues these rewards on a monthly basis, ensuring that loyalty members receive their rewards in a timely manner.
Since partnering with AskingCanadians in late 2012, Petro-Canada has recruited more than 140,000 Petro-Points customers to join AskingCanadians. And, since the beginning of 2013, AskingCanadians has issued over 1.2 billion Petro-Points to Petro-Points members.
With the success of the AskingCanadians model and the collaborative approach towards the partnership, Petro-Canada is enjoying the benefits of that growth and increased engagement from their members.
“With any partnership it has to be a win-win-win. First, it has to be a win for the guest. This is an opportunity for our members to earn more points if they want to participate in completing online surveys. It’s a win for Petro-Canada; by allowing us to issue more Petro-Points, which inevitably helps members become more engaged, leading to more loyalty. And it has to be good for our partner by giving AskingCanadians a platform to recruit new members to their panel,” Goodman said.
However, Goodman admits there were some initial concerns about how the AskingCanadians survey invitations would impact Petro-Points members.
“We’re very protective of our guests and their information,” Goodman said, adding when Petro-Canada first started talking about a partnership with AskingCanadians, there were concerns around membership fatigue. Petro-Canada also had its own Guest Insight panel, which the company uses for internal research, and they didn’t want to confuse their guests.
“Like all companies, we have contact rules in place so our guests don’t tire of us and start unsubscribing. There was apprehension in opening this up to that risk of fatigue,” he said.
Adam Froman, CEO of Delvinia and AskingCanadians, says that’s a common concern and it’s one he understands well.
“The reality is, that’s the challenge in market research,” Froman said, noting that AskingCanadians has been at the forefront of tackling these concerns head on through its panel-centric approach and its commitment to creating an engaging and positive panellist experience.
“While our loyalty partners initially tend to fear that their customers may receive too many surveys, the opposite is true. Most loyalty members join AskingCanadians because they want to receive surveys, and they understand that the more surveys they receive, the more loyalty rewards they can earn,” Froman said.
Froman explains that privacy, reciprocity and trust are not simply tactics to placate panellists, but are at the very core of the company’s philosophy. AskingCanadians runs over 2,500 survey projects a year through its research community and is continually learning how to better engage and compensate consumers to deliver more value to its research clients.
“This is how we build long-term relationships with our panellists to ensure that we provide our clients with honest, thoughtful and meaningful consumer feedback they can trust,” he said, adding the panellist experience is one of the three pillars of AskingCanadians. The other two being client service and operational excellence.
For Petro-Canada, AskingCanadians’ approach towards its panellists and the partnership is working well.
“We’re leveraging the loyalty assets to improve our guest attainability to earn more Petro-Points,” said Goodman. “This partnership makes good business sense to us. From our perspective and from a guest perspective, it’s a win.”
AskingCanadians is currently looking for prospective partners. Click here to request a copy of the RFI.
