2011 COLLOQUY Loyalty Awards
American Express 
Award: Loyalty Innovation in Financial Services (North America)
Initiative: Membership Rewards: Everyday Rewards
Historically, cardmembers often reserve American Express® Membership Rewards for special occasions or rainy days - but what about all those missed opportunities in between? American Express decided to fill that gap by adding more attainable rewards to its portfolio and simplify redemption for cardmembers.
Based on customer input, two new redemption options were introduced. The first was the launch of Everyday Charges, a feature that enabled customers to use points to offset charges on their statement, like gas and groceries. The second was the launch of a new partnership with Amazon.com, which enabled customers to use Membership Rewards points to pay for part of all of their purchase on Amazon.com directly within the purchase path.
With the introduction of these two redemption options, American Express cleared the way for customers to redeem more often. Only 12 months after launching Everyday Charges and four months after the launch of Amazon.com, these rewards drove over three percent of total points redeemed, placing them in the Top 10 rewards.
What's more, card members who chose these rewards were making more frequent, lower point burn redemptions, and more than 50% made repeat redemptions. Equally as important, almost 60% of cardmembers who redeemed for these new options had no prior redemptions in the prior 12 months which demonstrates the new everyday strategy is as rewarding for cardmembers as it is for American Express.
See American Express' award entry.
See COLLOQUY's September 2011 issue for more on 2011 COLLOQUY Loyalty Award winners and finalists.
