What are bonus points

After finishing the first version of PointLoyalty Manager product and www.pointloyalty.com web site our employees started to send links to it to all their friends in order to get impressions and critical comments.

The majority of answers were of the following type: “Great, I like this! But what are the bonus points?”
Of course, our product is designed for marketing people and customer loyalty specialists. But the fact that significant part of people does not know about bonus points surprised us.

Let’s try to find formal definitions of Bonus points term.

Definition from the Wikipedia:
Bonus - something extra that is good.

For marketing area and loyalty programs issues we can formulate the definition of “Bonus point” term as follows:
Bonus points – abstract points given to clients for customer operations which can be later converted into some kind of rewards.

Simple example – 50 bonus points to everyone purchased video equipment from June till August on weekends.

3 major issues coming out of this definition:
- Bonus point – unit for measuring client loyalty in some form. I.e. more bonus points client earns – better reward we must prepare for him since loyal clients have more value for the company.
- Bonus point – delayed reward and it is not necessarily a discount. This gives much more flexibility for your marketing force.
- Unlike discount cards bonus loyalty programs are more complex. As in example – we tried to reward clients for expensive purchases during low sales season.

Summarizing, we can say that bonuses is more complex but, in the same time, more flexible tool for raising client interest in working with your company.
Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/01/11/what-are-bonus-points/

Loyalty blog

With this record we open a series of posts about customer loyalty programs.

We are going to collect all related information and give our own view on the problem of building effective bonus loyalty programs and different aspects of their technical implementation.

We have our own solution for managing loyalty programs - you can take a look at www.pointloyalty.com