After surviving the downfall of parent Netcentives.com, retail loyalty service ClickRewards relaunched last spring under its new owner, Charles River Consultants Inc., a diversified technology company. Now, with its loyalty program built around its affiliate relationships with dozens of e-retailers, ClickRewards sees a broad market in helping retailers run their own loyalty programs, James Goudreau, vice president of corporate operations for Charles River, tells InternetRetailer.com.
"It's a huge market, because there are as many different angles for developing the value of loyalty programs as there are marketing professionals," Goudreau says. "With the increased cost of acquiring new customers, it's more important than ever to bring back existing customers."
For example, he adds, eBay.com's recent acceptance of loyalty points from American Airlines, Hilton Hotels and others opens up broad new opportunities for developing loyalty programs and sharing points with multiple companies.
ClickRewards now operates its own loyalty program on its own network of computer servers, but plans soon to offer to host loyalty programs on its infrastructure for retailers that want to develop their own loyalty program. The company will begin a marketing push to retailers this spring, Goudreau says.
At ClickRewards.com, shoppers can link to more than 100 retailers ranging from major national brands like BarnesandNoble.com and Dell.com to niche players such as GotFruit.com and Inkjets.com. By linking through ClickRewards.com to one of its affiliate partner retailers, shoppers earn points to spend within ClickRewards' own awards redemption center. ClickRewards maintains a list of 5 million registered users, half of whom are active, Goudreau says. He adds that shopping activity has been growing steadily since ClickRewards relaunched last May.
But Goudreau says Charles River doesn't view ClickRewards.com itself as an important long-term business model. Rather, it serves as a showcase for selling its loyalty technology platform as a hosted application to retailers, Goudreau says. He notes that the application would take the average retailer about 4-6 weeks to implement, depending on how much integration it built into its back-end systems.
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