Have you had a Kit-Kat recently? What about played scratch and win at a McDonalds in France? Americans, have you taken part in the MyCokeRewards program at all? If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then there’s a little startup based in Paris and California that has influenced your behavior lately.
ifeelgoods is a leader in distribution of digital rewards. Essentially, what they have done over the past five years is compiled a catalogue of over 100,000+ digital rewards, capable of targeting almost any demographic. There can be e-book subscriptions for readers while subscriptions to running applications for the more sporty people out there. Users could win $50 of credit on Google Play or $10 on iTunes. The point is, they can get something that they really wanted for participating in a rewards program of a participating brand.
The method to ifeelgoods online reward system is to cultivate customer loyalty. “People love digital goods and content, but they don’t necessarily like to pay for it”, says Michael Amar, co-founder and CEO of ifeelgoods. So, rather than give a consumer a 5% discount on a product, they will be much more likely to return if you give them $5 worth of credit towards something, be it for use on Google Play or credits on Facebook.” It’s a win-win strategy for companies who are able to have more people return to them, while at the same time bringing a consumer something that he or she may have wanted but wouldn’t get on his or her own.
Incredible Growth
After the launch of a new online platform to manage digital rewards campaigns, the delivery of such rewards has increased from 20,698,669 in 2014 to 100,000,000 in 2015. This is all from a company that was delivering only 4,755 rewards upon its creation in 2010. This is absolutely phenomenal growth in one year, and, as Amar says, that ifeelgoods “could never have had such growth without this technology”.
This is all because ifeelgoods was managing campaigns manually beforehand. However, when running campaigns and managing verticals that traverse international borders and use different currencies, where real-time data is needed on inventory management, delivery tracking, and, more especially, fraud management, manual management is not possible. “Working with the biggest brands, the level of excellence they are asking for is pretty high” says Amar.
As previously stated, ifeelgoods is managing digital rewards campaigns with companies like McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Gap, Starbucks, and Samsung. For such campaigns, a technology was surely needed for the speeds at which consumers could redeem their rewards; the average time it takes for a user to get his or her reward is 2 minutes. For example, with the McDonalds Scratch and Win campaign in France, a user could order their food, win movie streaming on Google Play, and be watching their movie with their Big Mac.
Team Coca-Cola
I’m personally really fascinated by the work ifeelgoods is doing. The psychology behind the idea of rewards is brilliant, not to mention the way they’ve managed to completely manipulate the way people are behaving. However, it’s all in the name of helping people to feel good about their decisions, right? It’s implied in the name of the company after all.
As a Coke person myself (sorry Pepsi), I was quite impressed when Amar told me a story about their campaign with Coca-Cola in Turkey. With the ability to track user data, they were able to notice that true customer loyalty is surely cultivated through rewards, no matter how small the reward may seem. With the equivalent of $1 worth of gaming credit, a person came back 18 times to redeem the same reward, rather than when a $10 gift card was at stake. I consider this a sure win for Coca-Cola, even though they don’t really need that much brand loyalty. It at least shows that people are paying attention to the possibility of digital rewards.
At the very least, I know I’ll be a lot more attentive the next time I see the possibility of getting something for free online, and I might even know who’s behind it all too.