GameStop has had a vast amount of brand loyalty and a significant portion of that emanates from its highly successful PowerUp Rewards loyalty program, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.
Darin Smith, Senior Director of PowerUp Rewards, spoke with Loyalty360 about the company’s ever popular loyalty program.
Can you talk a bit about the growth of the loyalty program in the past five years and some of the more prominent customer insights gleaned from it?
The PowerUp Rewards program was born out of the idea that we wanted to take the face-to-face experience customers have with our associates and extend those relationships through other channels. It’s given our customers a platform to share their likes and dislikes and, in turn, having this great information has allowed us to give them better offers and more items that are relevant to them. We have looked to enhance their experience and not deluge them with products and offers that aren’t necessarily what they are playing or buying. We’ve also launched the PowerUp Rewards catalog, which is a key differentiator for us and through that we’ve gained many partners. Now, five years later, PowerUp Rewards has become the fastest growing loyalty program in retail.
Brands are looking to create communities of “engaged” fans via personalized experiences. What are the challenges / opportunities to effectively leveraging communities in your loyalty / CX / VOC processes?
For us, it is a unique challenge as we are still heavily influenced by our brick-and-mortar stores. Our biggest challenge is duplicating the experience our teams in stores give our customers and matching that through digital channels and the loyalty program.
Gamers are a community and they build tighter communities based on games they play. They like getting communications from the program that keep them informed about the games they like to play and where they like to shop–and they like to shop and hangout at GameStop.
We try to give them personalized experiences whether they play alone or with others and we take an old school retail approach: Knowing customers by name, knowing their purchase preferences, developing a strong relationship in which the customer feels comfortable accepting new product and service recommendations and intuiting when to engage with customer, and when not to.
We apply this personalized approach to our more than 4,000 U.S. stores and then further to the more than 40 million PowerUp Rewards members worldwide and an ever increasing demand for authenticity.
What are the challenges brands face with data, analytics, and creating insight today and how has that changed over the past 18 months?
Whether two years ago or today, one challenge is this: How do you condense what a consumer needs and not get lost in the data? All brands are facing more and more data, what do you do with it all? We have keyed in on the right data, not getting more data. We are also listening on more channels.
We are more interested in getting the data that allows us to provide more relevant information to our customers. In order to better serve customers, GameStop is harnessing the power of analytics. Purchasing behavior is tracked with each member’s card usage, allowing us to review collected data and modify inventory accordingly to meet the demands. Lastly, what the industry calls “householding” continues to be a challenge as we need to market to multiple people at the same address.
How has social media being used differently today than a year ago, and how do you see it changing over the next two years?
With the continuous growth of smart phones and how people are communicating, it means we need to be more focused and appeal to the right people on the right platforms. By using feedback from our customers, we listen to what they want and how to message it properly. As social platforms are big with our customer base, GameStop has a presence on all major channels and as new ones form we’ll look at those too. Now social platforms aren’t about the posts or comments but about the shopability–monetizing those social channels.
How do you define loyalty and what does it mean to your organization?
We launched our PowerUp Rewards loyalty program in 2010. Today, it is one of the most successful loyalty programs in all of retail. We have more than 40 million members around the world. We use sophisticated CRM technology to provide our customers and our associates with relevant offers and information. But most importantly, PowerUp Rewards allows us to take the same passion and relationships that we have with our customers in our stores into the digital ecosystem.