You are a coffee or bakery chain – or maybe a convenience retailer on a journey toward “foodvenience” growing your fresh food-to-go offering and sales by every quarter. You are considering to launch a customer program – your app – in the near future or maybe to upgrade your existing one. You are looking for ideas, inspiration and advice. These visualisations are made to help guide you and share our point of view on what we believe your app should contain. We also recommend reading this ideas-to-go.
SIMPLE REGISTRATION
We believe you should keep the registration as simple as possible. Make it easy and frictionless to opt-in to your program. Take the “Fresh” app program as an example. You need a mobile number as a unique identifier and then we recommend using birthdate and set age limits (13-16 years old based on country specific rules) to avoid parental consent requirements with the new GDPR. You may also add Gender for future personalisation and analytics. Once the user is in it is all about marketing. Our recommended front page allows you to promote your products!
COUPONS AND REWARDS
From the front page you can scroll the top thumb which is the thumb images of the coupons and rewards. You can click on the thumb to enter the coupon or reward “rooms” in the app and here scroll between the different offers. These offers can be any of our promotional mechanics like coupons, hurry, chicken, share & care, happy hour, VIP zone, recruiter/recruited reward, sign-up reward, birthday reward, prepaid card and week card. From anywhere in the app you can always click on the fresh logo to revert back to the front page.
STAMP CARDS AND FOLLOW-UP REWARDS
From the bottom thumb you can browse the stamp cards of the app. When you use the stamp cards in-store you get digital stamps and, in this case, once you have purchased 4 salads you get your reward (the 5th one free). In this visualisation this is a separate reward and we recommend that you set up the stamp card this way. This offers choice for the consumer – to use whenever she wants, within the expiry date. At issue the expiry date is set for the coupon and you decide what dynamic time to expiry that should be applied to the rewards. E.g. 1 month from issue. Further you may add a push notification in the app at issue of the reward and you can also set push on expiry – e.g. 3 days before expiry as a reminder to the user.
You decide whether you want to run every 7th free or every 5th free. Or every 6th at 1/2 price for that matter. You can also choose to set up the stamp cards with levels. At bronze level every 8th is free, at silver level every 7th is free and at gold level every 6th is free. You can even define that the customer needs to loop the bronze level 5 times and the silver level 3 times before laddering. Each stamp or specific stamps ( e.g stamp 3) can trigger specific follow-up actions such as push, a coupon, a game or a survey. We recommend to try to motivate the next visit and increased purchase frequency by doing follow-up coupons, e.g. a salad at 30% off with tomorrow as expiry date. Follow-up coupons should always come with push notification and can either be done immediately after purchase – or delayed, e.g. 2 hours after. Any follow-up action can also be done by probability. This can help you create a program that is “surprise & delight”.
RATE THE SHOP EXPERIENCE
Any stamp card (or coupon/reward) redemption can trigger a rating opportunity in the app. Typically the rating opportunity lasts for 2 hours. Use our rating module to put focus in your own organisation on the customer meeting or the overall customer experience created. Reward your customer e.g. for every 5th rating with a rating reward. The rating opportunity may also be triggered only by e.g. purchases of coffee or sandwiches. This way your rating program is more product focused. The app user always sees how many ratings they´ve given and what their status is trying to reach the 5th rating and a reward.
FIND A NEARBY STORE
The app should of course also contain a store locator using the customer´s location and sorting the store list by distance. Click on any store and you will see it in the map, see store details such as name, address, opening hours – and the number of ratings and average rating. With our dashboard you maintain all store details in our stores register.
CONNECT CUSTOMERS TO LOCAL STORES
Our algoritms can ensure that you automatically allocate all app users to a local store based on where they have purchased the most last x months. You can also allow the app user to chose to connect with the local stores herself. Allow your users to connect to one or multiple stores. Connecting with a store means that the store manager will reach you with his local offers. These local coupons will be distributed only to those customers that belongs to his store – and the coupon code can only be used in his store.The store manager will have our local dashboard on his/her mobile to schedule local coupons or local shop offers. The below show how you can allow the app user to connect with multiple stores and edit the list of stores connected.
OTHER BASIC, BUT KEY FEATURES
Your app should have an easy-to-navigate menu and content like recruit-a-friend, my page/profile, T&C and contact support. Recruit-a-friend allow any app user to promote the app to friends and family – and get a reward once the friend registers with the app.
With the new GDPR it is important to allow customers to edit the information they have provided in a “my page” and to allow the customer to withdraw consents (master consents and granular consents such as “profiling” or media specific communication such as SMS) and even delete profile. Customers should also be able to see all information on their profile and personal data stored as a consequence of their actions (for example receipts or coupons validation history). Furthermore the terms and conditions which you accept at registration should also be easily available. We register the opt in date, method, text and version. If you make breaking changes to the consent text or privacy policy, we force the customer to accept the new version before continuing to use the app.
Lastly the app should communicate how to contact the retailer and our user support tool will help your customer service department do support towards app users.
SHOP OFFERS IN THE APP
Enable the app user to use their points or payment enable the app: nudge purchase decisions to the app. Control offers in the shop by time so that you can have special happy hour offers certain time of the day to drive app openings. Set price on each offer. For example you can allow your app users to buy a juice in the shop today, which they commit to pick up tomorrow (reward expires tomorrow). You can use any payment service with the app although that the illustration is with ApplePay.
LOCAL OFFERS AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP
Add a social responsible element to your shop in app. Avoid food waste and allow your store managers to offer goodie-bags to be picked up just before the store closes in the evenings. Goodie-bags prevents damage to price perception and gives a lot of flexibility. It is up to your store managers how many goodie-bags and which size to promote each day to the app users. App users pay in the app and pick-up during the pick-up time by verifying with the unique voucher code.
“Fresh” App users can easily filter their searches to identify the closest stores, the relevant pick-up time or the desired price levels.
SEND A GIFT APP-TO-APP
Allow the app users to send gifts to their friends and family app-to-app. From the menu and “send gift” area of the app they can personalise their message and choose the products you have made available for them. The app user pays in the app and the gift is sent. For the friend it appears in the app with the message and in-store the unique voucher code is used to redeem the gift.
DIGITAL RECEIPTS IN THE APP
In the “Fresh” app program, digital receipts can be available for the customers. Allow the app user to send the receipt to his/her e-mail.
SCAN CODES & GET REWARDS IN THE APP
Scan codes received offline or online and receive unique content in your app. This can be paper codes received in-store after a purchase and the content in your app may be rewards/coupons, but also e.g. games. In this example below the app user scans a paper code and gets a 50% off on a smoothie coupon in the app.
“ONE-SCAN” IS THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
If your POS can support using multiple coupons per identification (”one-scan”) and also support tender we recommend creating a slightly different app user experience where there is only one unique code presented in the app. All other coupons, rewards, stamp cards etc are still unique giving the same functionality such as single-use and analytics, but you do not present the codes to the consumer.
To show a different example than the above we´ve put the menu in the bottom on this example and you can easily navigate from the home screen to the other sections (Pay, More, Me). The home screen is still focused on marketing – promoting your products – and the banner in the bottom still receives dynamic content like games, rating opportunity etc. From the thumb images in the front you can view more information on coupons like the expiry date. The retailer also include important information such as single-use vs. multi-use in the graphics. In the “Pay” section everything that is relevant for your in-store use of the app is gathered in one page. You can easily scroll the stamps banner and the rewards/coupon carousel to activate the rewards and coupons you want to use.
Further you go into the “More” section where most of the content is collected into a menu. Click on any of these, e.g. “send gift” to enter into this part of the app. Lastly everything related to your account is gathered in a my page where you can edit your information, add credit cards, edit consents, withdraw your master consent or delete your profile.
