Starbucks Rewards Ratio Changes Yet Again

Two things come to mind when I think about Starbucks' loyalty rewards: a) 3rd party rewards are getting expensive to fulfill, and b) customers are still gaming the reward system. But, on the latter point, it's because Starbucks allows such things to happen with their current reward system which includes tasks such as:

• Double points day (basically 4x points for a purchase, excluding tax)
• Buy item x and item y (and sometimes item z), and get 10, 20, 50, 75, or 125 extra points
• Buy any item three times for x-bonus points
• Buy any item on three (up to 5) consecutive days for x-point

Which Part of the Funnel Should You Focus On

What do you have control over? If you don't have any input into how SEO/SEM works for your company or maybe inbound leads are driven by a 3rd party, you should probably not fret over the top of the funnel where potential buyers coming into your marketing+sales cycle.

Scenario:

Zoho: Lead Funnel example

You don't have any problem with inbound leads. In fact, there are so many, it makes you want to not care about all these marginally interested people who want to check out your website. But, you should care if your industry has a finite number of prospective decision makers with budget authority.

After a lead converts to becoming a prospect, where the prospective buyer has expressed some sort of hand raising (e.g., downloading a white paper, signing up for a sales demo, setting up an appointment with a sales rep, or scheduling an on-site consult), that's when it gets tricky to a) define the handshake sign-off between marketing's lead nurturing (MQL) and sales' rationale for considering a prospect as a sales qualified lead (SQL).

In reality, many leads get stuck in the middle of the funnel. The only part where a marketer can really focus on first is the middle with tactics such as marketing automation to help further entice the customer to give out his/her BANT (budget, authority, need, and timing).

You can only write and deploy so many touchpoints before a prospect marks your communications as spam or simply unsubscribes even though they were so close (according to their lead score) to becoming a paid subscriber.