I completely agree with this. I rarely see offers for places I shop on Amex or get offers that make me feel like what’s on offer is at all personalised for me. The only offer I can recall using is the Caffe Nero offers, which have scaled back since Nero have started pushing their own offers in app.
Honestly - rarely. There are occasionally free offers, and to be fair there are regularly offers from Greggs, but most Wuntu offers that look appealing tend to be for new customers only. For example, here are the current ‘hand-picked’ offers on Wuntu:
I don’t think I’ve ever made use of an offers programme provided by a bank. The problem is disoverability is so poor. You often have to go to a particular website to see the offers, and I just don’t bother. So surfacing relevant offers is the the thing I hope Monzo can nail.
Amex is better than most because they have an offers section in the app and even show the locations on a map, but its still a heterogenous list of different types of retailers and offers.
What I think I’d like is to be able to tell the Monzo app something like ‘today I want to go clothes shopping and not travel more than 30 minutes’. The app would then show me relevant offers I might be interested in. Perhaps this would work well via a tie in with a voice assistant.
I dislike the Halifax cashback one simply because it takes ages to find an offer, select the offer, wait for the offer to activate and go back to offers. Then I forget it’s activated. And they were never really relevant to me. I’d be cool with location aware offers for physical stores - especially if the app knew I had arrived at a new place and started offering offers for places near me.
There always seems to be a disproportionate amount of offers for new customers. I’d like to see Monzo encourage merchants to reward loyalty and encourage previous customers to return.
Lots of loyalty schemes (Morrisons More, Santander) require to find, activate and then use an offer. I’d much rather an offer was triggered based on my spending whether I was aware of the offer or not which seems to be relevant here in some cases so that’s good.
If this offering has really easy visibility that will be a huge plus for both me and the retailer as I might then modify my purchasing.
Sorry, what I meant by that was the offer looks attractive “Spend £100 and get £20 back at Sunglasses Hut” etc, but the stars would all have to align for me to actually spend there (the offers are very much “occasion” type offers, and not places that would be used on a daily/weekly basis".
If it was… “spend £200 in “insert semi regular shop here” and save £20”, then despite me not wanting to spend £200 in one go, I probably would to save the £20.
Appreciate offers are there to entice you in, but the Amex ones seem to be good value, at places I just wouldn’t normally spend any money at.
That’s very true usually. However, there was a rather good one at Morrisons last December which was 10% off each time you shopped there between certain dates and regardless of the amount spent. More of this kind of thing would be what I would like to see.
I chose a cashback Amex as I don’t fly very often and didn’t need the airmiles. It encourages me to buy things first on my Amex and then pay it off immediately with my Monzo card.
I miss the visibility/granularity of my spending patterns by doing this though So would love a reward to tempt me back!
I’m not sure why retailers would get on board with funding such a passive scheme though. I suspect the reason they require you to activate an offer before using it is it then serves as an advert and so they can justify spending money on enticing you to their store.
I agree with this. I do want Monzo to improve the discoverability compared to offer programs at other bank/credit card providers, but don’t think I want them to go overboard and bombard me with lots of daily offers by trying to be too clever. I’d like them to find some middle ground.
This is partly why in my previous post I suggested it might be good if we could tell Monzo what we are interested in on a particular day and have it surface relevant offers for what we are looking for on that day.
I don’t trust that Amex will present me with relevant offers (nor any other “offer” type service), so I just switch off and forget it exists.
That would be very cool. I’d like a “I’m going shopping in X city today, what offers would be available to me”…
Then if it’s little things like Pret/Costa/Starbucks or whatever, perhaps places I wouldn’t normally go to, or an alternative to a place I’d normally go, I would use the offer anyway!
I have had some okay offers with Santander actually. Had 10% off at Waitrose and 5% off at Sainsburys.
10% off at a few big chain restaurants that I very occasional go to but the thing i like about the santander offers is that most of them last for at least a couple of months.
So my point to Monzo is to try to make as many offers not time limited or make the time at least as long as possible.
Hate offers that are spend X amount TODAY to get X amount off. Forcing you to make an impulsive decision that you might regrtet
Really like this idea. Happy to see points are progressing - this feels like an area Monzo really could improve a lot. As others have said, loyalty offerings from other banks are pretty lame. The main problems are treating it as an advertising channel, not a loyalty channel, and putting advertisers first. Barclaycard offers for example I never look at, it’s too much hassle.
Many large retailers have their own schemes and might be hard to entice, it’d be great to see Monzo cast the net a bit wirder and help small businesses with a loyalty scheme offer that was simple to set up, and applies to all monzo users. Something like sign up, register, and any monzo payments will automatically trigger x% off after x purchases - show the offer once in feed after first transaction, and on the transaction page every time as a reminder. Nice and simple, and customers would probably appreciate automatic loyalty like this, merchants can track how well it works and make money, and monzo makes money. You could then have loads of small shops sign up and monzo would be a friend to small businesses, not just allied with large retailers.
I’m unsure about offering rewards from rivals myself - this feels weird for the customer, and would probably really annoy those rivals. I can’t imagine where you’d put it, but I definitely wouldn’t want to have spam popping up like clippy in my feed - Hi, I see you shopped at Waitrose, why don’t you try Harrods instead? and IMO the transaction page for rivals would be a no go or they’d get annoyed - IMO the user should own the feed, the merchant should own their transaction page eventually.
Re where to start food retailers and coffee shops would be a great starting place.
Things I’d love to see:
Offers near me - list of all the points offers nearby (must be user triggered)
Points for doing monzo a favour (cleaning up data etc)
Points for referrals
Points for regular spending (loyalty program)
Please have settings to turn off all notifications on this (separate from other settings)
Golden tickets for merchants to give out - if I can have a voucher code I can share with a friend for a discount, I think that’d be really cool. Often after a purchase I don’t want to buy more so a discount won’t work for me, but friends might.
Please try if you can to offer this as a service even to really small retailers (popups etc) - I was at a coffee popup the other day which gave me a card, if they’d instead been able to ping me something on monzo, and track how their referral scheme worked on monzo, that’d be great for small retailers I think, if it was proven to generate revenue, they’d probably pay for it.
Things I really don’t want from points/offers:
Please don’t spam my feed with unsolicited offers
Please don’t require us to choose or activate offers by following links (except maybe shared vouchers)
I really like American Express’s ‘Shop small’ initiative in December. Whilst I wouldn’t always go to those shops, with £10 spend gives me £5 back and that often includes pubs and bars. So I managed to save quite a bit by just choosing a different place for lunch, or a different pub with work colleagues.
Actually this year, three places I went randomly happened to be shop small so it was a lovely bonus.
Also I like how American Express is good at supporting local businesses more than other places. I see this just based on where I spend:
These kind of things would be great for Monzo to look into.
(Incidently The Mayflower is a great pub if anyone wants a small, ‘local’ feel)
For a loyalty program with small independent retailers Monzo might want to keep an eye on Pixie, as that’s their focus. They are very small at the moment (restricted to Bath and some nearby towns) but I believe they are expanding. Might make for an interesting future partnership. Judging by their card colour, they’re probably Monzo fans!
I use swipii quite a lot - they are Glasgow based company, that have lots of small retailers on now. It started off with QR code loyalty which you scanned on a tablet however it’s now linked to your payment card so you don’t need to remember to scan the card separately. Had lots of freebies off it!
So would love a reward to tempt me back!
