NEW STUDY: Local Loyalty Programs Turn Good Intentions Into Foot Traffic For UK Merchants

The past year has pushed local businesses into the limelight in the United Kingdom.

It has been 16 months since health-related closures began, and the nation’s consumers are more aware than ever of just how important the small, family-owned businesses are to their communities. Thirty-nine percent of them consider local commerce as essential, whether it is because it keeps money in their communities, allows them to reinvest in their local economies or because it is better for the environment.

For all the importance U.K. consumers place on supporting local businesses, they do not shop with local High Street businesses nearly as often as they do with national chain retailers or mass merchants. Only 13 percent of consumers in the U.K. see local businesses as their primary merchants, in fact, while as many as 52 percent shop primarily with national chain stores. Many might be willing to change that if given the right loyalty and rewards offerings, however.

Making Loyalty Work For Small Businesses: United Kingdom Edition, a PYMNTS and Pollinate collaboration, explores how tapping loyalty and rewards programs can help High Street businesses across the U.K. boost their footfall. We surveyed a census-balanced panel of 1,115 U.K. consumers about where they shopped, whether they used rewards programs or if they would be interested in doing so and, if so, which types of programs they would like to use. Our goal was to determine how local businesses can tailor loyalty programs to meet their customers’ expectations and, in turn, earn more customers.

PYMNTS research shows that there is a massive untapped market for local rewards programs in the U.K. Fifty-two percent of all U.K. consumers would be “very” or “extremely” interested in signing up for services that allow them to receive rewards and other special offers from local businesses, in fact. More would be likely to use such programs if their lingering concerns about data security could be assuaged.

PYMNTS found that banks are uniquely qualified to help local businesses tackle these security concerns. U.K. consumers are six times more likely to trust banks with their personal data than they are to trust local businesses themselves, with a total of 44 percent saying that they would do so. This means that local businesses’ chances of converting new customers with rewards programs is six times greater if they use banks to enable those programs rather than building their own from scratch.

This so-called trust factor is only one of the reasons that bank-enabled programs are suited to helping High Street businesses deliver the types of rewards programs that will earn them new customers. Making Loyalty Work For Small Businesses: United Kingdom Edition expands on this topic to provide actionable insights into how these businesses can make the most of this opportunity.

To learn more about how loyalty programs can help boost High Street commerce, download the playbook.