Uber, in the U.S., is allowing clients to pay for their rides with points that have been accumulated through American Express. The service is compatible with the latest iOS version. Now, rides can be paid for by downloading points that have been accumulated by making acquisitions with partners that belong to the initiative. But there’s more: whoever decides to settle with other payment methods will still earn points for the payment directly on the registered American Express App.
The loyalty program tends to favor mobile, like Vodafone My Shopping (we already discussed this here), because smartphones have become a tool for making online acquisitions.
The reason for this success is because it simplifies life. Emil Michael, senior vice president, business at Uber, explained that, “this integration with American Express helps make trips easier… and enriches the experience of our clients”.
The loyalty initiatives are one of the main reasons why mobile will be increasingly used as an acquisition channel and the Uber case reinforces this theory. The trend is such even on the other end because the more we pay via mobile the more we get used to using loyalty programs.
In Italy, it is estimated that about 80% of the population uses mobile phones, a number that is doubled if penetration of SIMs that are sold on the market are taken into account, that is, SIMs per each final customer. With this data it is easy to intuit the evolution that the management at big companies must be ready to welcome and follow in order to maintain their market competitiveness. The target of consumers for these campaigns is changing, moving from families to the “Youngers”, those who are defined as “high mobile users”. It is a social class that is between the ages of 18 and 40, who already frequently use mobile phones for work reasons. The activities of collecting points, activating loyalty cards, and distributing prize catalogs, will now make way for new Mobile Loyalty programs.
Enlarging the field of this brief analysis, it is also evidenced that many sector experts consider the so-called Mobile Value Added Services as the next gold mine for phone operators, application development companies, as well as banks and institutions involved in money and payment systems, not to mention startups. The goal of these companies is, in the short-term that, in the face of this increased spending, awareness is also raised about the fact that anything can be bought via mobile phones.
