Friday, October 19, 2007

A Closer Look at Pay By Touch Empowered, Club DLM

Dorothy Lane Market (DLM) signed a deal to implement personalized marketing kiosks and biometric payment services from Pay By Touch's throughout the entire chain by the end of July 2007, including an upgrade to the store's Club DLM customer loyalty program.

By adopting the Pay By Touch platform, the Club DLM loyalty program will "evolve into its new form", being re-branded as Club DLM 2.U. Under the new program, upgraded members will receive personalized offers from a kiosk as they enter the store (using a biometric finger scan or swiping their Club DLM card to identify themselves).

When shoppers enter the store, they scan their finger or swipe their DLM Club Card at the kiosk. The kiosk prints out a customized page containing up to 10 offers for products that the shopper buys most, based on past shopping history records. At the check-out, shoppers don't need to present the offer sheet because the offers that they've been assigned that day are automatically redeemed and deducted from their bill.

Grocers that have adopted Pay By Touch's kiosk-based personalised marketing system also include Green Hills Market in New York, Foodtown in New York and New Jersey, and Shop n' Save in Pennsylvania.

At the end of August, I blogged about an article in Progressive Grocer which stated that Dorothy Lane Market's biometric loyalty and payment service had already been used in transactions totaling 24 percent of sales, even though the program was launched "only two weeks ago".

As always, click the pictures to enlarge and enable you to read the print.

It said that the system, powered by San Francisco-based Pay By Touch's SmartShop, went live for shoppers on July 25, and had driven a 26 percent average redemption rate, as opposed to a 0.6 percent average redemption rate on FSI coupons. (Sunday Inserts)


Not unlike Green Hills Grocer, Dorothy Lane is no stranger to loyalty programs, and its Club DLM is well known in the industry. So, in essence, the two foremost and well renowned loyalty and rewards pioneers in the industry have both chosen to empower their industry famous programs with Pay By Touch enhancements.

The SmartShop is an enhancement to the program. "Previously, club members would get some mass offers and some personalized offers," Amy Brinkmoeller, Dorothy Lane's manager of information systems told Progressive Grocer.

According to the retailer, more than 36 percent of active shoppers - those who shop the stores on a weekly basis - used SmartShop.

One number Brinkmoeller, who spearheaded the SmartShop deployment, said she is particularly happy about is the number of users now paying via ACH through the Pay By Touch system.

Pay By Touch has invested a lot of time and money shaping this program and, ironically, should themselves be rewarded with a excellent return on their investments. It all started back in December 2005, with the acquisition of 7th Street Software, and Covena, two companies that had made tremendous headway on technology of One-to-One Marketing introducing an entirely new approach referred to as "Statistical Inference." (also known as "Bayesian Inference")

Speaking of "inferences" I've got one: I'll call it the "Full Circle" Inference.

See my next post for details....