We’ve been conducting loyalty program analytics for many years and are setting out to make analytics approachable to tech-savvy marketing people using desktop tools.
The examples we will use are based on restaurant loyalty programs, but the principles apply across other industries. It’s all about who, what, when and where. The ‘who’ is the member of the program. The what is actually the ‘how much’ and that is how much the member spent. The ‘when’ is the date and time of the transaction. The where is the location, assuming this is a multi-location type of business. It could apply to restaurants, retailers, hotels, golf course, whatever. You get the idea.
We have worked with about half a dozen different loyalty platforms; the systems that collect and organize the data that supports a loyalty program (who bought, what they earned and what they redeemed). These platforms have some way of exporting transaction data, usually defined as a detailed ‘report’ that can be exported as a CSV (comma separated values) file or an Excel spreadsheet. Keep in mind the Excel option is typically not practical because of its maximum row constraint of one million.
For many medium-sized application we use Microsoft Access to handle up to 10-15 million rows of data, depending upon the size of each row. In this first episode we’ll walk you through loading CSV data in Access and getting your hands dirty.
As always, feel free to reach out to us with questions or if you need help.
Email Dennis at Loyalogy Dot Com.