Microsoft recently announced that it was ending the cashback awards program that supporte Bing (the search engine, not the singer). Bing cashback will end end June 30, 2010. Yusuf Mehdi, SVP of Bing’s Online Audience Business Group, noted in a blog:
In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.
I found an interesting potential contributor to that lack of broad adoption in Internet Retailer’s coverage of the discontinuation. The publication quoted Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp.: “. . . they’ve had a bit of a hard time getting word about the program out there to consumers. I’ve frequently had to explain it to consumers. . . .”
The Bing site offers its explanation:
Find [through Bing search] great deals on millions of products from hundreds of brand name stores that you know and trust. You’ll earn a percentage of the product price as cashback. The search advertising fees from participating stores are passed on to you. After we wait for potential returns and exchanges, your savings will be rewarded to you by your choice of a deposit to your PayPal account, direct deposit to your bank account, or a check in the mail. It’s that simple.
So it would seem, though there are potentials for disconnects in understanding. The hold for possible returns, for one. Or perhaps the lack of specificity on when earnings will be issued. Or maybe some other program or marketing element that consumers didn’t quite catch.
Whether confusion about the program, its operation or its value prop had significant impact on adoption rates is, of course, hard to speculate. But I bring it up to stress that crystal-clarity of any loyalty-marketing effort, from operation to value prop, is critical. Give your program the consumer clarity test. Ask consumers–both members and non-members who have been exposed to your marketing materials–to explain the program to you. If you find them searching for words (and not on Bing), you may have some work to do.
