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David Weyher from Creative Communications
At the Sonic Bar Experience Store I found this kiosk with a screen for Virgin and rep David Weyher who took me through the concept from Creative Communications. Direct mail provider Mail America partnered with this company to integrate a direct mail piece that is trackable.
It starts with a personalized card card sent to a targeted list. In this case the offer was a contest with a discount for bringing the card in. Nothing particularly new about that you may think.
Once you got to the kiosk, you scanned the bar-coded direct mail piece to check if you won, (everyone wins something.)
After it tells you that, it offers for you to signup for a reward card and could do the same with a store credit card.
Direct mail has always struggled with redemptions and the codes usually are so generic any employee can add it to any sale.
The beauty of this to me was the fact it’s individual bar code could tie into your POS and you could see the average check of those who redeemed your offer. You would stop multiple redemptions because it is checked against the mailing list.
Also, you could easily capture their information for your own database. This is important because a paid list only lets you use it once unless the customer signs up. In the old days that meant a dedicated person had to manually enter that information which rarely if ever was done.
This would be perfect for a big store like Virgin, probably not so much with a smaller store format but time will tell.
Another product at the Sonic Experience Bar was KeyRingThing which combines 6 loyalty cards onto one wallet card. 
The customer sets up an account online, registers up to 6 loyalty cards and they get a plastic card with three on the front and three on the back.
The cards are free because they are targeting selling the ad space at the top to larger companies like Coke, etc.
Watching people’s reactions to the product, looks like there is interest.
Finally, if you are pursuing a green strategy, what do you do with your paper receipts? Apple emails them to you but not everyone is open to giving their email address out. Jayson Lowe, Executive Director of Alletronic has a new idea.
Their focus is to stop the 9 million pounds of paper used for paper receipts. Their facts are a bit startling: a single big box store will use enough trees to encircle the globe twice. More details for retailers here.
Here’s how it works for customers. Register any of the credit cards you use to purchase items, choose from retailers who are part of the program and every time you make a purchase, your receipt is emailed to your Alletronic account. No more paper or looking for receipts. Getting the word out may take some time but it definitely is where we are going.
I promise the financial stuff tomorrow.
I hope they have other clients lined up for this interesting concept. Certainly seems like an easy way to measure direct mailings.
Not sure Virgin is the best example:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/nyregion/15virgin.html?em. While they are still claiming they were “very very profitable”, this seems a bit hard to believe. The claim that it’s because they “shifted to apparel” also seems like a long shot, as apparel is being hammered at the moment. In addition, the retail real estate market in NYC is softer than it has been in decades, which would refute their claim it is more profitable to rent the space out.
The article states: “It comprised 11 stores when it was acquired, but now will be down to just five, two of them in California. Virgin closed other stores late last year.”.
Not likely that it was “very, very profitable”. The fact that VNO (1/2 owner of VMS) is also paying 60% of its dividend in stock rather than cash doesn’t shore up this argument, either. You don’t close your flagship Times Square store willy nilly, after all …