Objective
For this project, we were asked to develop a loyalty program for a brick-and-mortar business. Using a strategic marketing approach, our goal was to get more people to not only sign up for our loyalty program but also encourage our customers to advocate for the business and visit more frequently. We chose to work on a small local coffee shop called Revival Coffee, as we found that online competition had disrupted the market and made it increasingly challenging for this brand to reach and engage with its customers.
Background
We found this is the kind of real-world challenge facing many businesses today and knew that we needed to use our marketing skills, creative thinking, and problem-solving to truly come up with a solution that a small business like Revival coffee could see themselves implementing. Revival Coffee is located in East Austin, their mission is to “provide good coffee to good people”. They also love their community and donate 10% of their proceeds to local charities.
First thing was to define specific KPIs for this loyalty program marketing plan that aligned with Revivals business objectives. We wanted to use social media marketing and PPC to drive people to our loyalty program signup landing pages. We wanted to have at least a 25% conversion rate on these landing pages. By doing this we hoped to increase the customer return rate by 5% and in turn increase Revival’s overall profits. This data-driven approach would all be tracked by Google Analytics and their POS system.
Currently Revival Coffee uses the popular Square POS system, after some research, we found that Square actually offers a software add-on that allows you to implement a loyalty program. We found that this software was affordable, and it was also easily customized to fit the point system that we developed. Our “Revivalist” program rewards frequent customers and incentivizes new and infrequent visitors by giving them a point system that they can redeem for things like a free/discounted purchase, exclusive deals on new products, and access to community events put on by Revival. This also rewards customers who engage with partnered food trucks and businesses, which feeds into Revival’s focus on local engagement and community.
The coffee market in Austin, Texas is so saturated we knew we had to start by performing an efficient audience and competitive analysis. We found our direct competition did not offer a loyalty program. We truly wanted to know our customer’s desires and pain points so that we could design a loyalty program that fit their needs and helped us stand out from the competition. Using Facebook Audience Insights, and other research we were able to craft compelling and actionable personas. We knew that our first persona was drawn to brands that helped her give back to her community, so we could use ads that featured our involvement with local charities. We discovered that our second persona would often purchase coffee from our competition. We felt he would see the value in our loyalty program, to him it would be like a return on his investment. He buys coffee often, so he might as well earn rewards for purchasing it. This gave us ideas on how to target him in a way that would get him to respond and become an advocate for our brand.
We created multi-channel ads based on our customer journey maps. These ads would be shown to our target audience and if clicked they would lead to a signup page for our loyalty program. We tailored our landing pages to have the same look and feel as our ads. The seamless transition from ad to landing page would help establish trust with our target customers. We also gave them an option to just sign-up for our emails, in case the loyalty program was asked for too much. This would allow us to create an email list to stay connected with our audience through emails, which they were not doing before.
For our project presentation, we not only developed slides to demonstrate our marketing plan but we also created a website on WordPress. We wanted our audience to truly see and understand our “Revivalist” loyalty program. This site smoothly demonstrated our research and show the exact landing page that our target customers would see if they clicked on our ads.
To successfully complete this project my group used a project management tool called Trello. This helped us organize our tasks and stay on track with upcoming deadlines. We also used Facebook Audience Insight to help identify our buyer personas. Google’s Keyword Planner and SEMRush helped reveal keywords to target. We developed ads and content on Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, Twitter Ads, and Mail Chimp.