Loyalty programs are great for both customers and businesses.

Globalization has made market penetration impeccably competitive; sustaining an existing customer base is not much easier. As brands can now easily go beyond borders with ease, marketing managers have to be quite scrupulous and must exercise many marketing channels.

While a portion of marketing is focused on growing a customer base, a number of marketing operations focus on retaining the market share that has been penetrated. One of the most commonly utilized tactics to retain existing customers is the development of loyalty programs.

Loyalty programs are great because they give customers any opportunity to be rewarded for being consistent buyers of their favorite brands’ products. This provides them a sense of gratitude from the business. At the same time, businesses tend to benefit from these as it incentivizes greater sales from the existing customer base. Loyalty programs provide a mutually beneficial arrangement for both customers and businesses, and for this very reason, almost every major brand exercises them.

The fact that nearly every brand utilizes loyalty programs is problematic.

As customers are being offered loyalty programs left and right, they have become somewhat desensitized to them. A major problem is that as customers are highly likely to be a part of loyalty programs of competing businesses, their loyalty points become highly distributed; thus, most consumers rarely reach a point where the loyalty points amass to a meaningful value. Eventually, customers tend to give little attention to their loyalty point earnings and a massive volume of loyalty points go unredeemed.

Accenture’s research has shown that most customers tend to join loyalty programs but a large portion of loyalty points remain unredeemed. In fact, nearly a $100 billion worth of loyalty points remain unredeemed in just the US.

Improved Redemption of Loyalty Points

The key points holding back the redemption of loyalty points is that it simply remains very inconvenient to do so. Often, the particular loyalty reward many customers seek requires an amount of points that they do not possess; additionally, maintaining a large volume of loyalty rewards split across myriad applications and cards is an immense hassle.

Raincheck intends to target the loyalty program market with the intent of making it easier for users to manage loyalty programs while facilitating an ease of loyalty point redemption.

Raincheck is an existing application and browser plug-in that is going to integrate blockchain technology into its existing system. Raincheck already serves as a powerful tool merchants can use to make customer’s shopping experience more convenient; it creates smart wish lists that connects online product searches with offline stores. Raincheck users can record their favorite products in the wish list and the application notifies them when the desired product becomes available in a shop near them.

The addition of eased loyalty point redemption compliments Raincheck’s existing functionality.

Raincheck aims to provide users access to loyalty points from one platform, thereby making it convenient to manage the ever-growing amount of loyalty programs that are being issued by businesses all over the world. Additionally, Raincheck makes it possible for consumers to convert points into one token (RainToken) so they may redeem the specific reward they want.

Raincheck’s existing functionality is to give consumer’s greater convenience in shopping; the addition of convenient loyalty point management will only improve the product without diverting from its core purpose. This is a good example of a product that evolves over time to incorporate new technologies in order to provide an even better experience to its users.