Bringing the Woodlands Local Rewards Club to life was a serious technical challenge but thanks to the great work of our partners Velocity Worldwide and Retail Solutions, the system is now deglitched and running smoothly – and from now on it’s all about recruiting members.
by Antony Begley
The hard work is almost over on the creation of the Woodlands Local Rewards Club and we are now in the next phase of the project: an all-hands-on-deck drive to recruit members.
The true value of the new solution will only become apparent once we have a significant number of members, generating data every time they use their key fobs. When that happens we will begin to get a new, unique and immensely powerful insight into our customers, something we hope will help us build even stronger relationships with them as we gain far greater understanding of what they like, what they don’t like and what motivates their purchases.
Big battle
We always knew that the challenge of bringing to life an entirely new form of loyalty club in Woodlands Club would be a formidable one, but we love a challenge! The complexity comes not from the simple process of setting up a loyalty club: our existing EPoS system already has the functionality built in and can be activated with the click of a mouse. Rather, the complexity comes from ensuring full, seamless integration between our EPoS system, provided by Retail Solutions, and the Darius shopper engagement solution provided by our partners Velocity Worldwide.
The final piece of the jigsaw – the building of a new API by Retail Solutions – was completed only in the week before SLR went to press. An API, or Application Program Interface to give it its Sunday name, is basically a bit of software that sends the data from every key fob transaction to Darius in real time. Think of the Darius shopper engagement solution as the ‘brain’ behind the system.
One of the beauties of that brain is its ability to add all this straight transactional data – what the customer bought, when they bought it – to a whole host of other data on that individual customer’s profile. So, for instance, we can add his or her date of birth, the football team they support, the name of their children. In fact, if we can dream it up we can add it to the customer’s individual profile.
All of this data is then analysed and can be used to drive genuinely personalised communications to each customer, via text, email or Facebook – depending upon how the customer would prefer we contact them.
So we can go fairly simple: send a special offer to, for instance, all women in the FK1 postcode area. Or we could go super-segmented by sending an offer to all males between the ages of 25 and 35 that support Falkirk FC and have ever bought a product from Coca-Cola, for instance. Imagine the possibilities!
Recruitment drive
At the moment however, these remain only possibilities. We are around the 50 members mark and while the data being generated is useful and exciting, we need far more members for the system to become genuinely powerful.
So the focus for the next couple of months will be driving recruitment. So far we’ve tried a number of strategies, including:
- free Reward just for signing up (4 pack of Coke, 4 pack of Double Deckers or 6 pack of Walkers)
- ‘Free Lunch Friday’ where we gave members the chance to sample our new hot food range from Cuisine de France free of charge (see next page for more detail)
- a member’s draw where those signing up before 17th December were entered into a draw to win one of five £100 vouchers to spend in the shop
- 5% December where members received a 5% discount on every purchase in December (excluding tobacco, alcohol, Lottery and PayPoint).
All of this was communicated through all of the channels we have available to us:
- The Woodlands Local website
- Facebook posts
- Promoted Facebook posts
- Exterior posters
- Interior posters
- Staff
- Leaflets
It would be wrong to say that it hasn’t been a challenging process for all those involved because it has been very tough indeed, mainly because this is the first time it has ever been done in this way and we’re learning as we go – but our hats go off to Velocity Worldwide and Retail Solutions for the amount of effort and energy they have committed to getting the Woodlands Local Rewards Club off the ground.
We have laid the foundations for what we believe is a truly ground-breaking solution that we expect to see adopted in future by many more stores.
Cross-category POS from News UK
News UK has teamed up with Mondelez and Danone UK to launch a new cross-category merchandising unit which features copies of The Scottish Sun, Cadbury’s Twirls and Volvic mineral waters.
A new unit was dropped off in Woodlands Local last month and sits neatly beside the hot food counter, tempting customers into impulse purchases as they wait on their food to be prepared and served.
The unit has only been in-store for a week or so, but we’ll report back on sales in the next issue of SLR. Anything that encourages impulse sales is welcomed.
