E-Catalog: Creating Channel Incentives

Attempting to market across multiple channels, catalogers have been using myriad marketing methods to drive sales to particular channels and across channels. While the promotions can be effective, they are hard to track. Netcentives, a loyalty and e-mail marketing solutions company, is offering catalogers a new way of following customers’ buying habits, creating more effective marketing campaigns and encouraging multi-channel shopping with its program Retail Rewards.

Customers join Retail Rewards by registering their credit card with their favorite catalogers to receive rewards for their purchases in any channel.

Catalogers who join the program create a customer credit card registration page on their sites. They then reward customers with such incentive currencies as promotional rebates, gift cards and points. Catalogers also can use the program to track shopping behavior across channels and provide targeted e-mail and direct mail incentives using Retail Rewards.

Netcentives maintains all the customer registrations, administers the rewards to customers of participating catalogers and manages transactional reporting and analysis. Through its recent acquisition of Universal Value Network, Netcentives has daily access to approximately 90 percent of all U.S. sources of payment card transactions.

According to the National Retail Federation, consumers who visit a retailer’s Web site and then buy from the retail store spend 33 percent more on an annual basis than the average bricks-and-mortar customer.

“Netcentives’ Retail Rewards system enables merchants to expand their customer base, and more importantly, build and retain long-term customer relationships by offering incentives no matter where customers shop,” says West Shell, Netcentives chairman and chief executive officer.

No technical integration is necessary for catalogers. All data are processed securely and managed by Netcentives’ backend, which verifies payment card transactions, awards incentives for each consumer purchase, and manages transaction reporting and analysis.

Among those already using Retail Rewards: The Sharper Image, Jos. A. Bank, Magellan’s, Natural Wonders, T. Shipley, Paul Fredrick and Travel Tools.