Clover Rewards (formerly Perka) is a digital

loyalty marketing Loyalty marketing is an approach to marketing, based on strategic management, in which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives. Branding, product marketing, and loyalty marketing all form part of the c ...

platform that was launched in April 2011. An alternative to traditional paper and plastic card-based

incentive program An incentive program is a formal scheme used to promote or encourage specific actions or behavior by a specific group of people during a defined period of time. Incentive programs are particularly used in business management to motivate employees ...

s, Clover Rewards provides

interactive Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...

loyalty marketing solutions for businesses. The technology that Clover Rewards is built upon works on mobile phones via app or SMS (text messaging) and allows merchants to reward customers for frequent purchases. Clover Rewards also serves as a direct-marketing platform and analytics tool. Clover Rewards fits into the category of mobile loyalty, a modern type of

loyalty program A loyalty program is a marketing strategy designed to encourage customers to continue to shop at or use the services of a business associated with the program. Today, such programs cover most types of commerce, each having varying features and ...

. In summer 2018, Perka was rebranded to

Clover Clover or trefoil are common names for plants of the genus ''Trifolium'' (from Latin ''tres'' 'three' + ''folium'' 'leaf'), consisting of about 300 species of flowering plants in the legume or pea family Fabaceae originating in Europe. The genus ...

, its sister company. The company is headquartered in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...

, and in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Market position

In 2013, Perka was listed in ''Fast Company'''s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in the local category. Expansion both domestically and internationally - including Canada, the U.K., Latin America, Australia and Africa - has registered Perka as a notable company in

digital marketing Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development duri ...

. With the introduction of enterprise features in mid-2013, including a full API, Perka integrates with national brands such as Virbac’s More Smiles Program, regional brands such as The Melt, and more than 1,000 other businesses.

First Data First Data Corporation is a financial services company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The company's STAR Network provided nationwide domestic debit acceptance at more than 2 million retail POS, ATM, and Online outlets for nea ...

, the global payment processing company, acquired Perka in October 2013. Perka now operates as an autonomous subsidiary and is run by the same executives and product-development team as when the company was founded. A major difference from other loyalty software relates to what actions can earn customers rewards. Some offer rewards for visiting a store - without the requirement of making a purchase - while others, including Perka, reward customers only when a purchase is validated at the

point of sale The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice f ...

. Originally designed primarily for coffee shops with a "buy 10 get 1 free" model similar to

Starbucks Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational chain of coffeehouses and roastery reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It is the world's largest coffeehouse chain. As of November 2021, the company had 33,833 stores in 80 c ...

' rewards program which is one of the most prominent digital loyalty programs in the US, Perka has since expanded and now offers a flexible points-based version that is geared toward more diverse types of businesses.

Founders

CEO Alan Chung is a serial

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

with twenty years of experience creating

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

companies. Chung was formerly the CEO of Zenbe, a

web-based email Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, Gm ...

suite which was acquired by

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

in 2010. Prior to Zenbe, Chung founded

iAmaze iAmaze is an Internet company that specializes in web applications created in dynamic HTML. Applications created by the company are designed to run on all browsers and operating systems, without downloads or plug-ins. AOL AOL (stylized as ...

, an early web application development tool which was acquired by AOL in 2006. Before that, he co-founded

Lighthouse Design Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NEXTSTEP, NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner ...

which was acquired by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

in 1996. Other founding partners include Robert Bethge, Rob Coury, Jay Harlow and Joe Stelmach.Julie H Case
"Here Comes a Regular"
''Fast Company'', 19 October 2011. Retrieved 14 March 2020.

References

{{Authority control Customer loyalty programs Reward websites