One of the most exciting things about the meed platform (yes, the brand is lowercase) is what we call the Super Voucher. This innovation represents one of the core IPs within the meed ecosystem. It will bring gamification and gaming into a loyalty solution for SMEs still using printed stamp cards and newsletter marketing as the core of customer engagement.
What is a voucher?
A voucher is an offer you give or send to a customer, which they can redeem later. It could be for a fixed amount, e.g. $20 off, or a percentage discount. It can require a minimum spend and can be for a specific range of products or an individual product. A voucher can also be an invitation to a private event. The point is businesses use vouchers to bring in customers. It’s a predictable cost of sale in the books and is only booked as a cost if converted. Until such time, it is just a piece of paper (or a bunch of pixels).
The Challenge for SMEs
SMEs, representing about 80% of retail globally, generally don’t have many voucher options. To this day, many print vouchers and hand them directly to customers or mail them in the post. They might also email them. Neither of these methods is particularly effective compared with pushing offers to people’s phones. Phones can announce, remind, and give directions.
Moving from passive loyalty to active loyalty has been a step too far for most SMEs. Having an app is costly in terms of time and money to implement, manage and maintain. It also requires skills often that need to be at hand to use, such as interpreting analytics. Surprisingly, many SMEs avoid digital loyalty because they want to prevent the culpability of handling private data. Even if an SME can overcome all these issues, there is still the issue that, on their own, they generally need more traction with their customers to justify cajoling them into putting another app on their phone, which will hardly be touched.
Enter meed
Meed’s approach is one platform and one app. SMEs might not have the traction to justify an app, but they have the traction to justify joining a ready-made infrastructure. Customers will love this because, well, it is only one app! And because it is a digital loyalty platform, all the push features readily used by enterprise loyalty schemes are now at the fingertips of any business, even the smallest independent retail shop.
SMEs can push vouchers directly to customers’ phones via the meed app. This action is automatable based on visits or spending - thus replacing the printed stamp card - or based on seasonal campaigns such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. These vouchers can be personalised based on their customers' spending habits, ensuring a higher chance of conversion.
Now Enter the Super Voucher
meed’s voucher infrastructure allows for far more than simple redemption.
They are designed to promote usage and brand interaction. They are even a form of entertainment in their own right, as I will explain below.
Augmented Reality
First, courtesy of our partnership with Auki Labs, our vouchers don’t just know which product they are for; they know where the product is in the shop. For businesses that use the AR feature in meed, upon arrival to the store, the voucher will prompt you to scan a QR code and then guide you through the phone’s screen directly to the shelf that holds the product on offer.
Gamification
Another option with our vouchers is the chance to increase the value of the voucher through a bounty system after it is transmitted to a phone. One example is playing mini-games, which use App Clips on iOS or Instant Apps on Android. Another is tying it to activity, such as a sports store increasing the value of a voucher based on the number of steps you take the day you purchase.
The options are endless for how this can be used. What is clear is that this tool promotes brand interaction outside of the purchasing experience, a capability previously limited to enterprise customers.
Of course, the meed app itself has a gamified layer. People earn XP for simply using the app. For example:
Joining Programs
Redeeming vouchers
Playing games
Upgrading vouchers through the bounty system
Gifting vouchers
As consumers earn XP, the meed meter (progress bar) fills, rewarding customers with additional offers or power-ups to increase the value of a voucher they hold.
If we combine AR with the gamification layer, things get interesting. We can gamify store visits, town treasure hunts, and so on.
Web3
All our vouchers have a Web3 layer, which businesses can choose to activate when they create them. This means that they could be traded on a blockchain-powered market - they are NFTs - and provide an alternative method to prove authenticity.
As we plan to be a web3 identity solution in the long run, the option to create NFT reward doppelgängers presents many opportunities.
Summary
Our goal with meed is to enable small businesses to earn more from their customers. Meed will give them access to previously inaccessible or unusable tools outside of large brands. But we will go further than that, with gamification of the entire app experience and the ability to game a voucher up in value. In some ways, meed will debut gamification levels beyond what is current in the enterprise zone.
The Super Voucher. It’s really super!
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