United Colors of Benetton increased customer LTV by 10.3% year-on-year with experimental loyalty program tools

It’s been about three years since the loyalty program launched. We’ve been working exclusively with Mindbox all these years as it has continued to meet our business needs and current demands.

The platform allows us to actively develop our loyalty program through new integrations and features, such as the Next Best Action algorithm, which we are testing now and seeing positive results.

What makes the game interesting is the fact that it’s a rarity for our market segment. Fashion retail mostly focuses on discounts and coupons, rather than gamification.

“Giuseppe's Lamb” allows customers to have fun while they’re riding on the subway, for example, while earning points towards their next purchases.

In the future, we would like to expand the prize fund by adding electronic gift certificates to our partners’ products. This approach will prevent us from overstraining our margins. The privileges that we buy will affect the marketing budget only, and not store sales.

With gamification, we’ll be able to encourage customers to make repeat purchases. After they've made an order, we send them an offer to play. They then earn bonus points by playing, and then spend them in our store.

We got a return on our investment in the game in about three months after launch. We recouped the money spent on development and even earned a little extra from customers who made repeat purchases after playing the game. For every $1 spent, we earned $5.6.

We also compared segments of loyalty program members who had and hadn’t played the game. The order value for playing members was about 1.5 times higher than that of non-playing members.

Similarly, the LTV (Lifetime Value) of playing customers is $40 higher than non-playing customers.

In the future, we will conduct a complete survey of playing vs. non-playing customers to back up our analytics, alongside customer feedback. As of now, we have plans to expand the game further, as this is a long-term project whose design is meant to move us away from cliché store discount campaigns while simultaneously maintaining our premium brand image.

The Wallet app gives us a constant influx of new customers into the loyalty program database. However, these customers aren’t as hot a lead when compared to our current customers. Customers from the app see us as a store where they would like to make a purchase and often simply issue a loyalty card for future use. Only 3% of new customers are converted into a first-time purchaser, but this 3% also allows us to pay off our investment into using the Wallet app.

Now we are facing the massive task of widening our Wallet audience to increase the amount of purchasing customers. To do this, we launched cascading campaigns with push notifications in Wallet, which we send directly from Mindbox.

The Wallet app users may not respond to our other forms of communication, but they are certainly actively interacting with Wallet. That is why most of the emails and text messages sent to them are duplicated in push notifications.

Our collaboration with Aeroflot aims to attract new traffic, as the company has a vast customer base of more than 9 million people. More than half of them are active members who regularly fly, and save up and spend their miles.

Cooperation with Aeroflot gives us about 600 new customers per month. This is not an especially large significance, but it is important to note that these are mostly new customers. The overlap between our customer base and Aeroflot’s customers is less than 1%.

Three integration mechanisms are possible with our service: promo codes, real-time bonus points deduction, and integration via Mindbox. For United Colors of Benetton, we had to refine the product. Together with approvals and code programming, it took about three months. The integration is now ready, so connecting the company to Mindbox from a technical standpoint will take only 3-4 days.

It’s too early to talk about results because we have just completed integration testing, and are currently at the launch stage. For us, our collab with Bewearcy is an important publicity project as well as a way to access new customers. Bewearcy plans to actively promote its services, and as a result we expect that some of its customers will be converted into our customers.

To use Bewearcy points in Benetton stores, customers must become members of our loyalty program. That way, they are already entered into our database with their personal data, which allows us to communicate with them from the get-go.