Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty. An Industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m Paula Thomas, the Founder of Let’s Talk Loyalty. Today’s episode is hosted by Tom Peace, Managing Director of The Loyalty People, a strategic consultancy with a laser focus on loyalty, CRM, and customer engagement. The Loyalty People also runs a free global community for anyone working in the loyalty industry.
If you are working in loyalty marketing, make sure to join Let’s Talk Loyalty every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to hear the latest ideas from loyalty experts around the world.
This episode is brought to you by Collinson Worldwide, leaders in Customer Engagement and Loyalty, creating and orchestrating customer engagement and loyalty initiatives and programs for some of the world’s biggest brands in travel, retail, and financial services. Doing it globally for over 30 years. Want to know more?
Go to collinsongroup.com.
Tom: Hi, I’m Tom Peace, Managing Director of The Loyalty People and Presenter of Let’s Talk A Little Loyalty. Welcome to this week’s short summary show on behalf of Let’s Talk Loyalty, this week my Let’s Talk a little Loyalty podcast showcases Paula interview with Eadaoin Keane, Head of Marketing for Circle K Ireland, who won the best loyalty program 2021 from the Irish Loyalty Awards for their “PLAY or PARK” program.
For those that are not aware, the “PLAY or PARK” program is a fantastically innovative solution to gamification within a loyalty program where customers earn points on their spend on either fuel or retail, or both. These points can be used to play competitions to enter the chance to win anything from an iPad to a holiday.
You can also choose to park your points to have them saved up for an even bigger prize competition at a later date. This is a very clever way to drive engagement and repeat shopping as everyone loves the idea of winning a prize. It’s fun, simple, free to the customer, and very valuable to the brand.
Since Circle K can create very positive marketing around the winners. As loyalty marketers, we all know that a customer’s ability to burn their rewards in, in a valuable and engaging way is crucial, to their desire to earn points in the future. Circle K have really cornered the market here with this valuable lottery mechanic.
As a program, it’s perfect. Customers are highly engaged and revenues are up. Meanwhile, points, liability is extremely well managed and the program delivers positive stories for the business as a whole. Circle K also use their “PLAY or PARK” loyalty program to align with their local market interests and needs in Ireland through sponsorship of the Irish Olympic team.
And further to this sponsorship, they have also given members the ability to donate their loyalty points to local athletes as digital coins that they can use for food or even training equipment. This is a very clever strategy. In 2015, Circle K had bought the Irish Fuel retail business Topaz. So this strategy really helped to engage the local population, creating a huge amount of goodwill.
Well done Circle K, a very innovative use of points to create a fun and engaging customer proposition and a well-structured, locally first focused ESG strategy for the business delivered through your loyalty scheme. I’d highly recommend listening to the main show, which can be found at www.letstalkloyalty.com and first aired on the 20th of April, 2022, episode number 212. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed my summary show all the best and speak to you soon. Tom.
Paula: This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing news, insights, and research. The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training, through its Loyalty Academy, which has already certified over 500 executives in 38 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.
For more information, check out thewisemarketer.com and loyaltyacademy.org.
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