Why we need to stop giving out membership cards
Last night I ended up in the grocery store for the second time in half an hour. This is what happens when cheese is accidentally missed off a shopping list and you are trying to feed a three-year-old.
We’re in equal parts blessed (selection of bougie things to buy, many styled as Essentials) and damned (eye-watering costs) by the fact that our nearest grocery store of any size is a Waitrose, but it does a wonderful job of illustrating many of my points below!
On these trips to the shops I checked out my handheld scanner, claimed my free coffee and implicitly opted in to letting the John Lewis Partnership know exactly who had purchased what groceries, without them even having to do frequency analysis on my credit card number. This was all achieved through my membership and the associated benefits of a myWaitrose card.
“No surprise there,” I hear you say, “they’ve sent you one of those fob things that lives on your key ring, to save you having to dig the credit card-sized one out of your wallet every time you go in?”
Nope, my Waitrose membership fob was condemned to the drawer of not-yet-gotten-to filing and despair, right after I scanned the barcode into the Google Pay wallet on my phone!
The arts marketing takeaway
I read a website brief recently that specified once a membership was purchased online an email was to be sent to the correct department so that the team could start making up the card.
Presumably part of their workflow would be to associate the barcode of a pre-printed card with the customer record in the CRM or ticketing system, allowing the customer to be pulled up the next time the card is scanned.
Membership schemes are undoubtedly of huge benefit to arts organisations and venues. Namely they:
- Engender a sense of loyalty in individual theatregoers
- Potentially provide an extra revenue stream if the membership is charged for
- Hopefully turn loyalty into increased customer spend through increased frequency
- Ideally bringing revenue forwards through exclusive access to ticket on-sales ahead of purchases being opened to the wider customer base.
A London colleague once told me that the best place to work from in London was the Southbank Centre, mainly because you could get a desk and a cup of coffee anywhere but the Members’ Lounge on the sixth floor had by far the best view out over the Thames and access was granted for nothing more than an annual £65 membership fee.
Compare that to hot-desking at WeWork for £550 a month across the road and you start to see the cost saving!
This colleague was very right, and as soon as I started Scottie and was going to be in London I renewed my Southbank Centre membership, lapsed since my last London freelancing days. Somewhere near two weeks later, what should arrive in the post but a shiny yellow Southbank Centre membership card of such exquisite quality I could carve a Sunday roast with it. But why?!
The only thing I really need from this membership is the Southbank’s box office system (Tessitura if you’re keeping track) to know when I login that I’ve got a valid membership, thus allowing me to receive the earlybird booking benefits to which I am entitled.
When I’m in London and need a desk in the Member’s Lounge I join the scrum at the doors at 09:55 and wish I had worn more lycra for the sprint to find a desk with a nearby plug, allowing my working day to be longer than the lifespan of my laptop battery.
The Member Host politely comes round once the rammy has died down and asks for membership cards so that we can all be scanned off and checked in. The Southbank Centre have got a bit of cash behind them — that’s done from a nice handheld scanner. If you don’t have your card to hand they ask for some details which are scribbled on a Post-it so they can go and find you in the CRM.
What could be different and what are the benefits?
Both Apple Wallet and Google Pay have the ability to add a loyalty card with a barcode to be stored on your phone.
These appear alongside saved payment cards, which (not many people know) you can use above the £30 floor limit on contactless card transactions and (and absolutely no one goes to the bother of inputting these manually) stored gift card values.
So, why haven’t I got my Southbank Centre membership in there next to my REI, Hertz, Ikea Family, KLM, Tescos Clubcard and Nectar cards? Well the main reason is that there’s a bit of an overhead on the merchant’s side — in this case the theatre that’s offering the membership scheme.
In order to take advantage of the pass functionality on both iOS and Android, the merchants have to use a developer account to register their scheme. Android’s is accessible from the Google Pay developer documentation, iOS is from the Apple Wallet developer guide.
As a fudge I’ve stored my Southbank Centre membership card barcode in Google Wallet using a merchant that shares some of the same of the same letters, none of the Michelle Obama book tour talks and a very poor train service — Southern Rail 😥.
Once the scheme has been properly setup they then appear when you search the “Add Pass” menu. The list is theoretically tailored by popularity and location proximity, so Boots is the top of my list when in the office, but a search for ‘Theatre’ in Google Pay just now returns what looks like a list that’s polling worldwide and includes a lot of North American cinema chains.
There’s also a possibility that some merchants are in there having used a Google developer account for other things that’s got nothing to do with loyalty scheme pass membership.
There is another, far more straightforward, way of a member using a pass once the scheme’s properly enrolled — one that doesn’t involve them getting a physical card with a barcode on it and scanning it in — they can be given a link to their shiny new digital membership card at the point that they’ve purchased their membership, have it surfaced in their confirmation email or available from the membership/account area of the venue website.
Admittedly to provide this sort of integration does require web development on the part of the merchant, mainly as the pass needs to be generated by Apple or Google before it can then be associated with your account and the relevant wallet on your device.
So what are the benefits to the merchant — in this case our venue or arts organisation with their membership scheme? Why should this be something that we see more of in the performing arts?
Well for a start it would stop customers having to walk around with a wallet full of membership cards that they may not use and almost certainly don’t have space for. In a world where we’re rightly being encouraged to think about our plastic usage, is a membership card that we might use infrequently the best use of resource?
There’s a staffing and postage overhead that can be removed as well depending on your organisation’s workflow. The issuing of membership cards suddenly goes from a batch process that requires cards to be issued, associated to accounts and posted to members with welcome letters to a self service process where customers are downloading their “cards” at the touch of a button from their automated membership welcome email.
When properly configured the passes can prompt users from their lock screens based on locations meaning if a member enters or passes the venue then their phone can automatically pop-up their membership card for you.
Both the iOS and Android versions of the loyalty scheme and wallet have offers functionality that can be used to incentivise behaviours by loyalty scheme customers.
Those offers would mainly be based on activities to encourage in-venue spend as both platforms are based around geo-location-based offers rather than arbitrary push notifications to loyalty scheme members.
Want to get your coffee numbers during the day? How many of your members are passing without realising that you offer a very reasonably priced latte to members and that it’s always available to take away?
Shortcomings and the potentially difficult bits
Scanning a barcode and recalling a customer is really of value when your box office system is then able to load the customer and gives discounts, subscriptions, seats or other benefits based on having the customer loaded to the transaction.
Many systems are setup to accept a barcode scanned in which recalls a customer ID, but some may be expecting a magnetic swipe or an NFC value. Some NFC functionality is baked into Google Wallet, it’s more restricted on Apple with access slowly being liberalised.
Scanning a barcode from a smartphone screen might actually require an upgrade to your barcode scanner depending on what you’re currently using. Whilst a reasonably cheap 2D barcode scanner will read a traditional barcode from a flat surface like a membership card, chances are you’ll be looking at a more expensive 4D barcode scanner for smartphone screens.
The good news if you’re currently using an iOS or Andoid app for your scanning then the camera based scanning engines should be able to cope with either a plastic card or another smartphone screen.
There will be arts marketers who argue that having a physical manifestation of the venue in your pocket at all times is a great way to create engagement and elicit loyalty. I think there might be some validity to that argument, but really engaging with your membership base should be about far more than the touchy feelies that might come from holding your brightly coloured, beautifully hewn from plastic card.
Your member’s relationship with you as a venue or cultural organisation should be about privileged access to those making and creating, thoughtful and useful membership benefits that add value and the ability to vote with your wallet to support the endeavours and artistic output, not just taking up space next to my credit cards.
What’s coming to help with this in Scottie
With Scottie we’ll be building and integrating with tools that help make the lives of those running venues easier.
There will no doubt be intricacies in how digital membership cards can be issued based on which box office system is being used, but even if it’s just presenting a QR code on the purchase confirmation page and allowing a customer to scan that into their phone’s wallet, we can still remove away from plastic cards.
I mean what I say about what the values of a membership scheme should mean, and I look forward to partnering with organisations to look at how those offers can best be expressed online, and how they can be cleverly and easily redeemed by members.
As ever, there’s lots more to come. Please stay connected with us and everything that we’re building by visiting Scottie.io.
