The Hindu Business Line : i-mint looking to add more members

Typically, i-mint members are in the 25-35 year age group, savvy with the usage of credit and debit cards and spend at least Rs 2,000 on an average across various categories.

Sravanthi Challapalli

Chennai, March 21 i-mint, the customer rewards programme that uses multiple partnerships to maximise benefit, aims to double its membership to 8 million in the next year.

Speaking to Business Line, Mr Vijay Bobba, Chief Executive Officer, Loyalty Solutions and Research Ltd (LSRL), said the company also intended to double its transaction in this time. Since its inception in August 2006, business worth Rs 4,000 crore has been transacted between customers and the various partners of i-mint.

LSRL is a company funded by ICICI Ventures. i-mint is the first such enterprise on a large scale, though credit card companies have been co-branding their products with various partners of late in a smaller way, Mr Bobba said.

i-mint partners with Airtel, HPCL, ICICI Bank, Air India, Lifestyle and MakeMyTrip.com to offer a single rewards platform. In addition to these partners, i-mint has more than 2,500 merchant outlets in over 20 cities across India. The range of its growing partner businesses includes restaurants, grocers, department stores, consumer electronic chains, jewellery stores and entertainment. It wants to expand the categories as well as the merchant outlets to anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 next year.

Aggregating spends

Mr Bobba says a single-player loyalty programme can never have a large base or offer as many rewards as one like i-mint which works by aggregating spends across various categories and the rewards under one umbrella. For instance, a customer could use the ICICI Bank credit card to book tickets on Air India from MakeMyTrip.com, and would be rewarded on three fronts — “it’s the power of multiplicity”, he says.

Customer profile

Typically, i-mint members are in the 25-35 year age group, savvy with the usage of credit and debit cards and spend at least Rs 2,000 on an average across various categories. The loyalty factor averages 2.5, which means that there are at least three transactions per customer in the previous six months. About 60 per cent of them are male.

Mr Bobba said i-mint’s growth has been exponential. From January 2007, when it had 3 lakh customers, the membership now stands at 4 million. i-mint mostly acquires customers through promotions run by its partners.

Having a single loyalty programme will only help in retaining existing clients but will not involve attracting new customers. Also, many loyalty programmes reward only the higher-spending customers and alienate the others. Understanding consumer behaviour across categories and providing rewards across a network is to the mutual benefit of both customers and businesses, Mr Bobba said. In a marketing-driven world, when it’s essential to bring in more customers, repeat purchases and increase the bill size, and where the cost of acquiring customers is greater than retaining them, data mining becomes important. LSRL analyses the data from its database and helps its partners exploit it, Mr Bobba said.

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