Struggling online loyalty and direct marketer MyPoints.com introduced new hotel, airfare and car rental discount offers into its collection of consumer incentives.
The new incentives have been packaged together and dubbed Travel Values Plus.
It represents a new way for the company to lure new Web users into its 16-million-member opt-in database.
“Value-added clubs and services deepen the relationship we have with our members by exposing them to additional values through our community,” said Stefan De Cota, vice president of product marketing. “This makes our members more responsive to our direct marketing offers while delivering incremental new revenues to MyPoints.com.”
Travel Values Plus is powered by online marketer webloyalty.com.
Instead of earning a recurring monthly fee for running this program, MyPoints earns “a bounty, a sign up cost” from webloyalty for getting members to enter the program, MyPoints spokesman Geoff Ossias said yesterday.
“There is no back-end earning opportunity. Normally we look for recurring revenue streams,” Ossias said.
MyPoints.com, San Francisco, is a database-driven direct marketing service that helps businesses identify, acquire and retain customers through targeted opt-in e-mail and personalized offers with incentive points. It depends on the offline behavior of its members for profits.
Earlier this month, MyPoints said it expected to post a loss in the fourth quarter of 2000 in the range of $16.5 million to $18.5 million, or a loss of 41 cents to 46 cents per share for the quarter. Analysts had been expecting a loss of 33 cents per share, according to First Call/Thomson Financial. MyPoints.com said its revenues for the fourth quarter should be $12.5 million to $14.5 million.
The company said at the time that it would announce a new CEO sometime this quarter. Ossias said the company is “narrowing down” candidates for its CEO post.
