Vouchers have been around for some time, why did you decide to create OMG Rewards last year?
OMG Rewards was actually created 5 years ago primarily as a peer-to-peer referral solution. At that time, we wanted to deliver a solution that answered the concerns brands had around the growing reliance on incentive affiliates, and their desire to build greater loyalty and engagement with their own customers direct. The recent voucher code implementations are only one aspect of what OMG Rewards does, and it seems that these have come into their own over the last year as a result of a few things – where there was scepticism before, brands now have a greater understanding and of and confidence in the value that incentivised customers can bring, vouchers themselves have been digitised, making it a more relevant offering and consumer appetite and trust has increased in the validity of these kinds of deals.
How did you make the service stand out from its competitors in the voucher space?
CA: What makes OMG Rewards stand out is that we offer a complete solution to manage every part of the process – where our closest competitors offer one or some of the elements involved, they still place an onus on the client to deliver in other areas. With OMG Rewards, we develop and host creative and customer interfaces on affiliate and advertiser sites, capture and handle customer MI, track and report performance data, source and acquire the rewards themselves and manage customer queries too. We’ve found that many advertisers have a real need for this end to end service as they simply don’t have the resource capacity to build their own technology in house or manage the process and customer experience.
How did you tailor vouchers to suit finance advertisers?
CA: It’s not just finance clients that we tailor offers for. Our current implementations span consumer electronics through to utilities too, working with brands such as Lenovo and O2 respectively. In all of these instances, there are 3 core considerations – the value of the reward and impact on ROI, the customer demographic and relevance of the offer, and finally the customer journey and experience in redeeming the offers. Many clients are using the technology to run tactical and bespoke campaigns, monitoring the success of each type of reward and subsequent acquisition. We can then refine the rewards proposition to drive optimum acquisition and ROI levels to meet their specific objectives. Managing various Rewards types, including on and offline implementations, we have seen that the most popular rewards remain simple online vouchers which customers trust and can easily redeem. Amazon and M&S; have really nailed the online incentives market with their simple buying process, easy redemption and massive brand presence. It’s true to say though that more need to follow suit – there are simply aren’t enough of these kinds of online vouchers available, and using offline solutions isn’t as convenient, so more Advertisers lean towards the simplicity of online vouchers.
Where are the biggest performance marketing gains coming from in finance?
CA: With key drivers in the finance vertical being a need to broaden the marketing mix and lessen the reliance on single channels such as aggregators, whilst also focussing on lifetime value and retention, the biggest gains come from increased engagement across multiple touch points and relevant, personalised offers for customers. With OMG Rewards we are empowering advertisers to increase sales performance through multimedia channels, including mobile and social media, right through to telephony and in-store, while still effectively managing their budgets and achieving ROI.
How did you build on your Performance Marketing Awards win throughout the rest of 2012?
CA: We’ve continued to capitalise on the innovation aspect of our win by enhancing the capabilities of Rewards to integrate with call centres, optimising the mobile channel further and improving retention in-house. We’ve also integrated Rewards campaigns with our Affiliate Network clients, implementing initiatives to expand their Performance marketing mix, creating new acquisition channels from their existing customers or direct partners for example. And we’ve continued to build a sizeable network of large-scale publishers that can now run tactical promotions through bespoke interfaces, placing OMG and our clients in a unique position to continually deliver a breadth of solutions tailored to their individual requirements.