Be loyal to your loyalty program

Almost all Canadians — 97%, according to statistics — participate in at least one loyalty program, while some of us participate in as many as three or four. But in order to get the biggest return on your loyalty investment, experts suggest sticking with a single program instead of spreading your point-earning dollars around.

“If they are loyal to a loyalty program it’s amazing the kinds of rewards and the kind of attainability you get,” says Caroline Papadatos, V-P Marketing, Air Miles Reward Program. “Certainly when we ask people if they could only participate in one loyalty program, usually they say that it would be Air Miles due to the sheer number of places you can collect.”

Air Miles are available in pretty much every single category where Canadians shop — groceries, gasoline, drug store purchases, retail shopping, etc. The fact that you can collect Air Miles in all the places you shop is what makes the attainability so impressive.

“For fun, we did the math to see just how many Air Miles one can collect within a year,” says Papadatos. “First of course you look at all the core categories where Canadians shop every day and the average number of miles you can expect to collect in each category. Generally, it’s in the neighbourhood of 900 Air Miles.”

These are just your “base” Air Miles. We’re assuming that you’re not getting any bonus miles. “Of course, we know that most of our collectors get bonus miles at all of our sponsors,” Papadatos says. “So when I go to Dominion to buy groceries, I usually walk out with 30 or 40 bonus Air Miles. So let’s say you get about 50% of your miles in bonus miles — that adds another 450 Air Miles to your total at the end of the year.”

Add to this the number of miles you can earn were you to you put all of your purchases on an Air Miles credit card — even items you might normally not use a credit card for like fast food, phone, cable, utilities, cell phone, etc.

Then add miles you might collect by shopping at an online shopping portal such as yourshops.ca. “Here we have essentially all of the key online retailers offering Air Miles,” Papadatos says. “So if you buy a Dell computer, you can get Air Miles because you’ve gone through yourshops.ca. You buy from Dell, and it’s shipped from Dell, but you get Air Miles on your purchase. The same goes for Apple, Victoria’s Secret, Eddie Bauer, and 55 other retailers.”

At yourshops.ca you get 1 Air Mile for every $20 you spend. So a $2,000 computer would earn you 100 Air Miles.

With all these steps in place, Papadatos says it wouldn’t be difficult to earn about 2,500 Miles in a year — enough for round-trip airfare for two, as well as merchandise, gift certificates, ski tickets, etc.

“The wonderful thing about the Air Miles program,” says Papadatos, “is that it was designed so that people wouldn’t have to be collecting on multiple reward programs and never actually get to the point of being able to get a reward. If you consolidate your spending you get to a reward that much more quickly.”