Customer Engagement Program at The Container Store Provides Behavioral Insights

When officials at The Container Store launched their POP! customer engagement system in 2015, they wanted to get a read on key customer behaviors.

“Test-and-learn activities have been one of our prevailing mantras and had been very prevalent in our marketing activities,” The Container Store CEO Melissa Reiff said recently. “In fiscal ‘16, we reached an important two-year milestone with our POP! customer engagement program and now have a better view into year-over-year purchase behavior of our best customers, which supports these test-and-learn activities. We are now able to identify out-of-pattern lapsing customers and in Q4, delivered targeted offers to re-engage them, which had a quantifiable positive impact on our fourth quarter sales improvement, particularly in our product categories, excluding custom closets.”

Reiff said the company continues to grow its POP! Star base and ended the fourth quarter with about 4.8 million POP! Stars.

The Container Store’s loyalty program, POP (Perfectly Organized Perks), isn’t based on points but focuses on customer frequency. As The Container Store enrolls more customers, it will be able to further engage and surprise and delight them in a more personalized and targeted way.

When company officials launched the program in 2014, one of the top things they learned was that customers wanted to hear more from them–she wanted more tips and communication that were customized to her organization challenges and to her lifestyle.

Lucy Witte, vice president of employee engagement at The Container Store, explained the program to Loyalty360 in 2014.

“We really feel the approach we have taken by choosing not to create a traditional points-based tiered program helps make us unique,” she explained. “Keeping with our goal of simplicity, it was important to us that the program was easy to participate in and drives additional value to our members, we call POP! Stars. The focus of our program is on targeted communication and tips as well as serving up special Perks in a surprise and delight manner. This approach requires a lot of focus for us on program and customer analytics to ensure we are creating offers that are relevant and meaningful to the customer. We also know that this level of customized offers and content will evolve over time. One benefit to this approach is the wonderful ‘test and learn’ opportunity it provides which gives us constant learning about what works and what doesn’t. This will allow us constantly refine and optimize the program as we move forward.”

Witte added: “We knew that we wanted to take the time we needed to create a program that would be different from a traditional loyalty program–and one that is true to our brand. As a storage and organization retailer, it was important that our program to be simple and easy to use–minimizing the need for customers to have to keep track of levels or points, plastic cards or coupons. We really wanted to create a program which was intuitive to our customer and drove additional value to their relationship with our brand.”

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