Vesdia Selected by SunTrust For Customer Reward Programs

The enhanced SunTrust rewards program will provide cardholders with additional rewards-earning opportunities with thousands of leading national and local retailers. In addition to earning SunPoints on transactions, cardholders will be able to take advantage of bonus SunPoints, discounts and special offer opportunities with more than 150,000 brick and mortar locations, service providers, catalogs and gift cards, and more than 750 online retailers.

“When we decided to enhance our reward program with a merchant network, we wanted to provide cardholders with the ability to earn incremental rewards not just for shopping online like other programs in market, but especially for shopping at both local and national retailers where the overwhelming majority of cardholder purchasing occurs,” explained Stef Anderson, SunTrust’s vice president of rewards & loyalty. “With the network, we can provide additional rewards to SunTrust credit and debit cardholders through partnership marketing activities that enable both SunTrust and our merchant partners to leverage strong brands and an extensive customer base.”

The partnership also offers merchants unique marketing benefits. Through targeted promotions to SunTrust cardholders and more than 30 million consumers in Vesdia managed loyalty programs, participating merchants gain access to new customers while driving increased basket size and repeat purchases from existing customers. Vesdia program participants have been shown to increase their spending with partner merchants by an average of thirty-five percent. Merchants see these types of benefits from a pay-for-performance model that, unlike other advertising media, provides positive, measurable results with no up front investment.

“Traditional partnership marketing can be successful,” noted Sahir Anand, retail analyst from Aberdeen Group. “However, more mature loyalty processes focused on customer insights, such as those provided by Vesdia, can provide effective results for companies. Loyalty programs are a proven contributory factor in the sales and customer retention performance of retailers.”

“SunTrust partnered with Vesdia due to both the accelerated reward-earning opportunities our solution offers to cardholders as well as our ability to help merchants to grow their businesses,” remarked Peter Davis, president of Vesdia. “Through our leading pay-for-performance partnership marketing programs, Vesdia helps merchants successfully target key customer segments, identify new acquisition channels, increase customer loyalty and grow sales.”