• Ad Age, Monday, October 5, 2009 10:44 AM

Many observers consider Harrah's Total Rewards program, which was rolled out as Total Gold in 1997 and renamed a year later, to be the gold standard of customer-relationship programs, Michael Bush reports, including David Norton, who happens to be svp-relationship marketing at the company. "It's certainly the best program in the gaming industry and, more broadly, in loyalty," he says.

David Frankland, principal analyst at Forrester, puts it right up there with Disney and 1-800 Flowers. One reason for its success is that it mines and tweaks a lot more data than most direct response programs do, such as revenue, customer profitability and customer value, and figures out how they are all linked. "Once customer-intelligence people start thinking about business metrics, you know that they have gone into the next tier of sophistication," he says.

Good customers can receive as many as 150 pieces of mail a year from one or all of its hotels, Bush writes. Harrahs sends nearly 8 million e-mails collectively to its loyalty members in a month. Harrah's average response rate for direct mail is in the high single digits. One of several takeaways: "Use every consumer interaction to learn something new about your customers."

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