the rise of Loyalty apps in Singapore

Deals services bring people to the business with discount coupons, but people tend not to go back without more deals/coupons.

Loyalty card, on the other hand, engages and motivates old customers to keep coming back. In my memory, loyalty cards became very popular in the heydays of Bubble Tea craze. 

For the longest of time, I was hoping for the day when I do not need to bring all my loyalty cards out (I like my wallet to be thin). Till date, the loyalty cards I have are from Ikea, Starbucks, McCafe, Ichiban Sushi, one from an Indonesian-stall and one from a bubble tea shop. 

So naturally, it’s great to see several “loyalty-card” app popping out during the second half of 2011. Here are some:

1. Hachicode

Saw Hachicode from the Angel’s Gate site. It has an “innovate receipt scanning” that tracks spending on the receipt. 

(first impression, yet-to-try-app) This potentially can better draw the link between amount spent and amount of loyalty points rewarded. But I presume it will be difficult to get small merchants on board due to the need for a special receipt.

2. Squiryl

Squiryl encourages consumers to collect Acorns from participating merchants from every purchases, and use these Acorns to redeem rewards. As its name implies, squirrels and acorns are used in its branding. Its introductory video also stated the problem and usage very clearly. 

(first impression, yet-to-try-app) Love the “Squirrel-Acorns” branding. Can’t wait to try it!

I like the general visual design of the app. The moving cloud and trees on the menu-selection fits into their branding of a squirrel collecting acorns in the forest. Its loading animation is also that of a acorn dancing across the screen.

However, their information architecture can be quite perplexing. The app adopt a menu-selection approach as its main navigation. However, users also have several other ways to link to the “Receive acorn” page. There’s also a tokens and acorns page, titled “Squiryl” which is a separate page only accessible through the sub-pages.

This brings me to my next point, I know there’s Acorns, but Tokens? Having two different types of “currency” in this small app made me felt even more lost and perplexed, especially when the metaphor used is not direct to start with.

Lastly, there’s the Trade page. Nice UI design again, but I’ve yet to test its usability since I’ve no acorns yet. On its function, it looks pretty interesting and fun to be able to trade acorns with my friends (i suppose).

3. Around

Around! app shows the deals around the vicinity of the user. User can only redeem the deal in the shop by scanning the QR code handed by the staff at the counter. Customers can also earn loyalty stamps pertaining to the deal. 

Around! combines deals and loyalty stamps together. I wonder what will happen to the stamps if the deals are no longer valid.

(after using it) I think the interactions in the “merchant coupon” page can be better improved. The color combination of the app just felt too pastel for my liking. 

4. Streetegy

From my brief understanding, Streetegy is more of a location-based service that directs people to places. It should have loyalty point feature built in as well. Hope to know more about it when it launches in a few weeks time.

5. Be Disloyal

This is not a mobile app, but it is rather special and deserved to be mentioned. BeDisloyal encourages the customer to be disloyal. To complete the card, customers have to try out one merchant, get a stamp, then move on to the rest of the merchants before going back to the starting place to claim the reward. It strives to introduce consumers to small business. For now, BeDisloyal card are only used for the 8 cafes under this program.

(first impression, yet-to-try) It is like a game that makes me want to explore all the 8 cafes. Very interesting. Hopefully they can enable this service on the mobile platform eventually.

6. Perx

According to the Straits Times report, Perx has the most number of merchants signed up with it, standing at 54 now. Perx uses the metaphor of “chopping” a loyalty card, and accumulating chops to redeem the voucher. With the usage of this direct metaphor similar to the physical cards that most consumers are familiar with, it makes it very easy for normal users to understand. I believe it will make it easy for the merchants to adopt since it’s just a direct replacement of their existing chops.

Perx has a shallow information architecture with just 3 tabs (Cards, Chop Card, Rewards) for its main navigation, and not much depth. The appearance of the UI is very clean and simple as well.

It will be interesting to see how these apps fight for the Singapore user and merchants bases. To me, a loyalty-card-app is something that I will only use when I’m at, or near, the merchant place itself. The maximum interaction time will be 2minutes, thus it has to be very simple and clear-cut. It will be good if there are some game-elements to make it more interesting. 

Now, if only these apps can store my receipts as well. It will reduce the wastage of paper, and help me better keep track of my spendings.

*update* Straits Times released a report on 23rd Nov about the state of digital loyalty apps in Singapore (http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_737095.html) . The fight for merchants and users begin. The relationship between merchant and user adoption are so tightly intertwined together that it make this a much more interesting watch. It might be down to “first-come-first-serve”, and “cheapest-price-plan-wins” ultimately. Who will prevail?

6 Notes/ Hide

  1. joelchua posted this