United Colors of Benetton Personalized Product Cards and Increased Order Conversions by 10.3% Year-on-Year with Experimental Loyalty Program Tools
United Colors of Benetton Personalized Product Cards and Increased Order Conversions by 10.3% Year-on-Year with Experimental Loyalty Program Tools
United Colors of Benetton, founded in 1965, is a world-famous chain of clothing stores from Italy.
Company size.
23 offline stores and online stores in the CIS
Goals
Increase customer lifetime value (LTV)
Attract new customers to the loyalty program
Attract new customers to the loyalty program
Solutions
Connect experimental loyalty program tools
Results
The customer’s LTV increased by 10.3% on a year-to-year basis
The number of loyalty program members has increased by 1.5 times
The number of loyalty program members has increased by 1.5 times
IT stack.
ERP, online store, Wallet app for iOS and Android, marketing automation platform, and loyalty program processing
Noteworthy features
Benetton Loyalty Program members can utilize third-party bonus points from partners
The following case study is from Mindbox, the original brand behind Maestra’s technology
United Colors of Benetton has implemented dozens of marketing tools during its three years developing its loyalty program. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at some exciting marketing tools, screenshots, results and testimonials that feature the following:
- Giuseppe’s Lamb Game;
- Cascading campaign with push notifications in the Wallet app;
- Aeroflot miles;
- Bewearcy clothing recycling project.
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.
Last year’s results
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+10.3%Year-to-year growth of lifetime value (LTV) per customer
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×1.5%increase in the number of loyalty program members (up to 600,000)
Data from United Colors of Benetton’s internal reports in Power BI
Giuseppe’s Lamb Game
This game is only available to loyalty program members. It was developed on Hezzl, a platform that provides ready-to-play solutions to attract customers and increase sales. The game is quite simple: you need to move haystacks to help sheep find their way out of the pen. The faster a customer can do this, the more points they earn.
Each round is time-limited, and the difficulty level is randomized for each player
The game is located on a separate page of the website, which uses an iFrame code, allowing UCoB to embed interactive media elements on this pafe. A nice feature is that the animation adapts to the screen size on mobile devices.
A text message notifying the customer of successful gameplay and awarded points. This is the fastest communication channel. In the future, however, we plan to use emails and notifications in the customer’s account on the website.
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.
Judging by the open rate of 21.2%, loyalty program members are interested in the game
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.
Results of “Giuseppe’s Lamb” game
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$5.6earned for every $1 spent on the game
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×1.5higher order value from the playing customer segment
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+$40higher LTV for playing customers
To confirm customer interest in the game, we conducted an A/B test, using the Next Best Action algorithm for segment selection. Half of the customers who were likely to place an order in the near future were sent an email with best-selling products, whereas the other half were sent an offer to play Giuseppe’s Lamb. Although we’ve not yet obtained a statistically reliable result, the click rate for emails with the game is notably higher: 1.9% vs. 1.5%.
Cascading campaigns with push notifications in the Wallet app
In the fall of 2020, the company’s marketers connected the Wallet app on iOS and Android as an additional source for new customers.
A year later, not only did Benetton start sending push messages in Wallet, but also transformed them into cascading campaigns. Cascading campaigns are a type of communication conducted through several channels where:
- each subsequent message is sent only if the customer could not be contacted in any of the previous stages of the cascade sequence;
- free email and push notifications are sent first, followed by paid notifications via an instant messenger and/or text message;
- messages are stopped as soon as at least one message reaches a “Delivered” status or if the customer completes the target action.
Push notifications from Benetton in Wallet. The app allows you to insert illustrations into messages
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.
We connected Aeroflot bonus miles
The Aeroflot airline has an Aeroflot Bonus loyalty program, which allows you to save and redeem miles from the airline’s partners.
Benetton became one of these partners. In 2020, Aeroflot Bonus loyalty program members could earn miles for purchases at Benetton retail stores. In 2021, we added the option to collect and use miles when making purchases in the online store. You can use miles to pay up to 50% of the total purchase cost.
Presentation of United Colors of Benetton on the Aeroflot Bonus website
According to the rules, customers cannot use points from Aeroflot and Benetton’s own loyalty program simultaneously. This restriction was taken into account on the platform. Now, when selecting one loyalty program on the website’s shopping cart checkout, the second one becomes inactive:
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%.
Integration with the Bewearcy clothing recycling project
Bewearcy is a service where customers trade in old clothes that are in good condition in exchange for a promo code or bonus points that can be used from any partner associated with the program.
Bewearcy allows you to trade in unwanted clothes in exchange for a promo code. Benetton, 12 Storeez, Charuel and other well-known brands are all program associates
Integration with Beawercy took three months. Points from other, external loyalty programs are converted into Benetton loyalty program points. The official launch of the project is scheduled for November — December 2021.
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.
Our next step is to connect electronic receipts
Instead of paper receipts, customers will receive electronic ones by email, which will contain entry blocks for joining the loyalty program, information about promotions, an NPS survey and an opportunity to sign up for campaigns.
P. S. In this article we discussed the Loyalty program and Customer Data platform — CDP modules used by United Colors of Benetton. Learn more about these modules by following the links or by reaching out to us.