Background

American Express set out to improve performance of their Membership Rewards program in Latin America and Canada in 2006/2007. Their specific objectives were to increase loyalty and participation in their Membership Rewards program and reduce the overall cost per redemption. Marla Showfer was hired by Haggin Marketing to analyze Amex’s Membership Reward customer rewards database and develop recommendations for increasing program usage, cross-selling and up-selling members to increase customer value, improve performance of direct mail programs and create efficiencies across markets.

This plan earned the American Express Annual Chairman's Award for Innovation in 2006.

Strategy
We worked with Amex to develop six key usage segments, based on how often members were redeeming their membership rewards points, how many points they were redeeming and what types of merchandise they were redeeming their points for. The objectives could be met by up-selling low engaged members and shifting members to more profitable merchandise redemption categories.

Some of the challenges were: each country had a different composition of members and required a custom marketing strategy.  Also each country had a centralized marketing team resulting in some inconsistencies of brand message and strategy across countries and cost inefficiencies, and little analysis or sharing of results of past programs.

The overall communications plan included:

• Defining communications objectives
• ROI analysis of past 2 years of programs by country to determine what worked, what did not and provide recommendations for continuous improvement
• Data analysis of member breakdown, points earned and points redeemed by consumer segment and country
• Key segment priorities by country
• IMC strategic plan by country and segment; recommended IMC mix included catalogs, direct mail, email, call center cross-sell and airport lounges.
• Contact strategy by country
• Program metrics recommendations