â–¶ Loyalty Programs Miss Mark: A study by ACI Worldwide shows that many retail loyalty programs leave consumers feeling underappreciated, and many consumers are enrolled in a program they don’t completely understand. Key findings include:
• The majority of American consumers (62%) join retail loyalty programs so they can get discounts on the things they buy most, yet only about one-third of Americans (36%) receive a reward or promotion that would make them come back to the retailer again, and 1 in 4 (27%) complain they receive a reward or promotion for something they would never buy.
• Just 27% of Americans receive a loyalty program reward or promotion that made them feel valued.
• 85% of loyalty program members report that they haven’t heard a single word from a loyalty program since the day they signed up.
Source: ACI Worldwide
â–¶ Disgruntled Consumers Speak Out: The Retail Consumer Report—commissioned by RightNow and conducted online by Harris Interactive —polls 1,605 U.S. adults who shopped online during the most recent holiday season. The report finds that consumers who have a bad experience will not come back to a site. And more than ever, unhappy consumers are turning to the social Web to share their complaints. Other findings include:
• 68% of consumers who posted a complaint or negative review on a social networking or ratings/reviews site after a negative holiday shopping experience got a response from the retailer. Of those, 18% turned into loyal customers and bought more.
• Of those consumers who received a reply in response to their negative review: 33% turned around and posted a positive review, and 34% deleted their original negative review.
• Consumers, however, have fairly low expectations that retailers will respond to their negative posts. Of the 32% of consumers that did not receive a response to their negative review from the retailer, 61% would be shocked if a retailer responded to their negative comment on the social Web.
Source: RightNow/Harris Interactive
â–¶ Charities Tops Socially: Every one of the Forbes top 200 charities surveyed uses at least one form of social media in its communications strategy, says a study by the Society for New Communications Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Other findings include:
• Charities’ adoption of blogging outpaces both the Fortune 500 and the Inc. 500 by 23% and 50%, respectively; 64% of these top performing charities maintain a blog for their organizations.
• 97% of these charities have a Facebook presence, 96% have Twitter accounts and 92% use YouTube.
• 55% of these charities are using online video to deliver their message and inform their audience about their mission.
• These charities report using search engines and social networking sites (76% and 75%, respectively) in their recruiting and evaluating processes.
• 90% of respondents consider social media to be very important in increasing awareness of their charity mission.
Source: Society for New Communications Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
â–¶ Keep Making Those Videos: According to a recent study by Nielsen, online video usage in the U.S. is up considerably from the same time last year, as time spent viewing video on PC/Mac/laptops from home and work locations increased by 45%. Other findings include:
• While the number of unique online video viewers only increased by 3.1% from January 2010, the level of activity was up as viewers streamed 28% more video and spent 45% more time watching.
• Total video streams also saw significant year-over-year growth, up 31.5% to 14.5 billion streams.
• MSN/Windows Live/Bing was the fastest-growing video brand month-over-month, increasing 26.1%. PRN
Source: Nielsen