Last month a new startup, Womply, launched to bring “effortless offers” schemes to local merchants—coming with an impressive pedigree because it’s cofounder Brandt Squires was formerly LivingSocial executive. Just weeks later, Womply has an additional offering—Loyalty Cloud—that promises the same sort of effortless experience but for customer loyalty schemes, rather than Groupon-style “special offers.”
According to the new site, its simplicity rests on the fact that, “Merchants create offers that reward customers for repeat visits and Womply handles everything else, from marketing and remitting offers to customers, to providing analysis and insight on the amount of revenue generated as a result.” To this end, Womply’s new Loyalty Cloud is trying to be a complete one-stop shop for local business loyalty schemes: Simpler even than stamping a rubber stamp on a collector card, and providing deep customer analytics that would be tricky to get any other way. It manages this by being seamless from a customer and merchant point of view, with the transaction happening “in the cloud” via “Womply’s high-tech platform that enables the company to spot credit and debit card transactions at participating merchants and to push cash credits to customer payment cards.”
The whole thing is designed to be merchant-centric, rather than focusing on the deals or the end-user customers. Womply itself makes money by charging merchants a low annual rate (in the hundreds of dollars a year range), and it even offers a free entry level. Womply CEO Toby Scammell says that, “From square one we started with this premise that we didn’t want to interrupt merchant’s operations at all. We think one of the biggest problems, a kind of untold story, from an operational viewpoint with Groupon and LivingSocial there are real costs associated with training your employees, managing the offers in the restaurant or in your bar. We eliminate those completely at the transaction—somebody who’s receiving a reward looks identical to someone who’s not.”
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