1 in 4 Gen Z Shoppers Use Card-Linked Offers for Specific Products

Brands looking to drive adoption with card-linked offers have found their best customers in the younger generations.

By the Numbers

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Leveraging Item-Level Receipt Data: How Personalized Card-Linked Offers Drive Store Card Usage,” created in collaboration with Banyan, drew from a survey of more than 2,000 United States consumers to understand more about their interest in loyalty and rewards programs, their preference for card-linked offers and what merchants can do to increase awareness and usage of these offers.

The results revealed that, when it comes to product-specific card-linked offers, Gen Z leads in adoption. Specifically, 23% of Generation Z consumers said that they have used a card-linked offer program just for specific products, and 22% of millennials said the same — well above the 15% of the population overall that did so.

Consequently, it appears that personalized card-linked offers hold greater potential for driving store card usage and fostering consumer engagement among younger shoppers.

The Data in Context

These findings could be helpful for brands looking to get more targeted with how they incentivize consumers to purchase.

“I think card-linked offers have been a rather blunt instrument in a retailer’s marketing toolkit,” Jehan Luth, CEO of FinTech firm Banyan, said in a PYMNTS interview posted in December 2022. “One of the biggest reasons it’s a blunt instrument is because as a retailer, I cannot drive traffic to certain items. Instead of traditional loyalty offerings that may not be consumer-personalized, the overlaying of SKU-level data or item-level data in rewards and offers makes card-linked offers a much more versatile and powerful tool in the toolkit for retailers. Now I can drive traffic to certain categories within the store, or certain items within a store.”

By embracing this more nuanced strategy, retailers can enhance their marketing toolkit, harnessing the versatility and power of card-linked offers to effectively drive traffic and cultivate loyalty among their desired customer segments.