Payment Card Linking

Jan 8, 2024

Making loyalty participation effortless and accessible through payment card linking seems on the face of it to be a very effective strategy for recruiting and maintaining valuable loyal customers.

Payment card linking has been around for years, it’s nothing new, but what have we learned?

It’s a very effective way of offering a simple mechanism for consumers to benefit from the use of their payment cards either at specific retailers/businesses, for transactions from specific merchant categories or for all transaction through a specific web channel. Once linked, the consumers can sit back and enjoy the rewards – something for nothing, no effort required, and this is perhaps the ‘double edged sword’ that leads to a significant issue!

Most loyalty programmes are founded on the principle that they give rewards in exchange for data, they learn from the data and then deploy those learnings to influence/change customer behaviour in a way that benefits the programme operator.

For the vast majority of consumers, payment card linking leads to ‘lazy loyalty’. Customer inertia often wins out and therefore, the customer enjoys the rewards with little or no behaviour change.

On the plus side, payment card linking does provide a very powerful mechanism to break down barriers and learn about consumer behaviour across multiple payment categories, allowing the operator an insight into its customers that only Banks can enjoy today.

So, before ging down this well trodden path, it is well worth considering how this mechaism will bring about the changes in customer behaviour thet you seek.