I had a terrific meeting with Jason Jones of Vertical Motion in Calgary yesterday, and he showed me his company’s latest product, called eTrove — a loyalty marketing platform. While large companies such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Starbucks typically have multi-million dollar loyalty card programs, smaller and mid-sized businesses often find it very difficult to set up and keep track of their customer loyalty programs.  For example:

• What happens when a customer comes in and says, “I forgot my card”?
• Are the prizes and reward affordable?  What if you’re giving away too many freebies?
• Is the program generating any referral business?
• If you don’t know whether referrals are happening, how can you reward people for those?
• Is shipping/handling or emailing of rewards a big pain or expense?
• What about people who say, “No, I don’t want another card stuffing up my wallet”?
• If people like your service, how can you more easily get them to share/review it?
• How can I easily measure whether the program is working?

With a background in business process development and systems integration, Jason’s firm has been able to develop a solution that takes care of all these issues, and is affordable to small businesses – in a custom iPhone or Android app. The bones of the solution are ready to go – and it is simply a matter of customizing/configuring it to your overall marketing strategy.

While out of the gate, you might assume it would be appropriate for only retail stores, there are many service businesses to which this might also apply — professional services (such as dental offices, eye care practitioners, hair salons), hospitality venues (bars, restaurants, entertainment/attractions) and service businesses (plumbers, cleaning services, auto mechanics).

We’re very excited to have a chance to put this new technology to use for our clients.  Please give us a call to discuss how we can assist you with a loyalty marketing program in Calgary.