AMEX, Kuwait and Shop and Ship

Ahead of my trip to Kuwait this weekend, I thought i would write a bit on some online retail promotions, since we never treat Kuwait like an independent entity when it comes to marketing and advertising.  It just gets lumped in with the rest of the GCC.  

Based on Aramex stats given at the CoE Ecommerce event in Jordan and the recent Twitter infographic about users in the arab world, some interesting trends appear:

Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar have far more twitter users per capita

Kuwait generates the highest number of tweets overall - surprising given both Egypt and KSA have highest number of active twitter users


The biggest market for Shop and Ship is Kuwait.  So this means that Kuwaitis like to buy stuff from abroad.  Hence, a twitter based campaign for American Express that targets Kuwaitis would work well. Using the shop and ship database Amex could target the ideal consumers by appealing to their shopping habits allowing them to spend more.

A campaign earlier this year saw US based American Express cardholders sync their card to their Twitter account for deals and discounts at their favorite stores – and millions were signed up taking advantage of the new partnership in just the first five days of the campaign. (march)

Twitter users were given deals at Zappos, H&M, Virgin America, FedEx, Best Buy and other big retailers across the US. These retail outlets partnered with AMEX, who is offered discounts if its cardholders tweeted related hashtags.

In the first 48 hours of the campaign, there were over 2,000 tweets sent which included the hashtag #AmexMcDonalds, as people tweeted about which menu items they were going to spend their $5 on. AMEX claims this year’s Twitter campaign was more successful than last year’s SXSW campaign with FourSquare.

Between 6th March (launch date) and 23rd march the campaign had generated a total spend of approximately $7.2 million and discounts of $1.4 million

As at today (June 10) total spend is $12.8mn and total savings applied $2.8mn

29.7% of participants were “new” so that could mean $3.8million was spent by new customers

How might that work here?  

  1. Proper segmentation of the Shop and Ship database would occur to reveal spending habits of Kuwait account holders.
  2. Key retailers would be contacted by AMEX to agree on giving discounts to these people if they used the relevant hashtag.  
  3. Some direct marketing to these Kuwaiti Shop and Ship holders would tell them of the great offers they can get if they sign up to the AMEX card.
  4. Follow up marketing would press them to start making purchases - with free shipping offered as well for the campaign period (AMEX would subsidise the Shop and Ship costs here).
  5. Finally, and most importantly, all the data would be analysed.

See http://visibli.com/monitor/amex for stats on the US based campaign and http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/sync-your-amex-card-with-your-twitter-account-for-instant-deals_b19280 for a lengthier description