Download our free Fashion eCommerce Report 2023 for insights from Australia’s best digital minds. In this extract, Country Road Group customer lead Paul Conti reveals how the brand is driving customer acquisition through its loyalty program.
Country Road’s acquisition of new members into its Rewards Program is growing at a rate of about 70% on last year. This is according to Country Road Group customer lead Paul Conti, who further notes that well over two-thirds of customers sign up to the program when making their first purchase, whether in store or online.
And with around 80% of Country Road’s total Australian sales coming from the program, which boasts over 2.5 million members according to parent company Woolworths Holdings Limited’s 2022 annual report, it makes sense why the brand is aiming for further acquisition.
“We're setting a new baseline at the moment, because we are far exceeding the targets we'd set 12 plus months ago,” Conti says. “And there's no real signs of slowing at the moment.”
The brand has been driving its loyalty program acquisition rates through three key strategies, according to Conti, including ongoing marketing investments, online sales channel expansion, and fine-tuning exclusivity for Rewards Program members.
For the first, Conti says Country Road has increased brand investment in acquisition marketing by almost 70% year-on-year, with plans to scale and invest that even further as the brand enters its 50th year in 2024.
“The investment has allowed us to scale what's been working, but also bring the brand to new spaces that we couldn't plan before,” Conti says. “For example, we've invested much more significantly in Out Of Home and what you might call upper-funnel, digital marketing channels, that is acquisition-oriented digital marketing.
“This is giving us a really nice mix of complementary marketing channels that capture attention, change brand perception, and bring customers in store and online to discover more. And that, coupled with some onboarding and retention strategies that we have in the loyalty stream of our business, is making the most of that increased audience coming into our brand, stay sticky and keep coming back to us.”
The second area is an ongoing sales channel expansion. Conti says the team has been improving access to the brand, beginning with its initial launch on The Iconic just over a year ago. Then, in January this year, Country Road secured a position on Qantas marketplace, marking another new venture for the brand.
“We found that with The Iconic, as a case in point, the vast majority - up to 75 plus percent - of Country Road purchases on The Iconic were from customers that were entirely new to the brand in the last 12 months,” Conti reveals. “And a significant portion of those have, in fact, since visited Country Road directly in one of our own sales channels to further explore the brand.
“This is important for us because we have incredibly strong awareness in the market, but that awareness is sometimes a little out of date. The Country Road today looks nothing like it did five or so years ago. So showing up in those environments gives customers a reason to take another look and reconsider the brand.”
And then in February this year, Country Road announced that it will launch online with Myer for the first time ever in July this year, as well as returning to selected stores, as part of a new deal.
“I've been at Country Road long enough to have been part of the core team that managed our brand's exit from Myer back in the day,” Conti says. “But I guess there's a very different market and brand context today, and I think it's an opportunity to find and connect with a new customer and indeed an opportunity to win back a portion of customers who maybe didn't follow us when we left Myer and opted out of the brand.
“The other side of the coin is we've never traded online with Myer before - even when we had a bricks and mortar presence there - which is just another exciting opportunity for us. If we find that Myer online holds true to the same pattern that we've seen with other marketplaces like The Iconic, then we can definitely expect it to be a very strong acquisition channel for us.
“Needless to say, we'll be watching the customer response and behaviour very closely and testing some of the assumptions we've made.
The final strategy is fine-tuning exclusivity for Rewards Program members, which Conti says has had one of the biggest impacts on loyalty program performance.
The loyalty program works on a tier system, starting at member, then bronze, then silver, then VIP gold and then VIP platinum, each attained by level of spend.
Conti says that Country Road no longer runs any public offers outside its mid and end-of-season sales, with the only way to access ‘spend and save’ or ‘spend and earn’, or even its Cyber Week offers, is to be a member of the loyalty program.
“Last year was the first time that we made Cyber Week a member exclusive, which was incredibly successful,” Conti says. “Not only were we able to grow sales, making it our best event on record, but we also supercharged acquisition, and we've broken every record we had in the acquisition space at the same time.”
Conti says the growing acquisition rate and the growth in active members is reducing Country Road’s reliance on discounting, with no more public discounting at its base.
“It also means that the rewards program has become a real draw card for our own sales channels, our most profitable channels, and, I'd say, the purest brand experience that we can offer to our customers.
“You can't access Country Road Cyber Week offer or other loyalty discounts on any of the marketplaces we trade on, and that's becoming a really important strategic differentiator for Country Road channels - our stores, our website.”
To buoy its plans in the digital customer experience, Conti says Country Road made massive team restructure. A few months ago, its customer and digital teams were merged, bringing together disciplines in insight, strategy, loyalty, digital experience, engagement and service.
“This means, for the first time, we're better placed than ever before to not only uncover that opportunity in our research and data, but also to collaborate across those disciplines and act on that opportunity directly - and with more speed,” Conti says.
“Similarly, my role as customer lead in the Country Road brand didn't exist before the last six months. And while most of the functions that I perform today sat within my remit previously, or were tangential to it, the ability to centre my focus on customer and bringing together all of those customer-related disciplines in brand has been a game changer for me.
Conti says as well as working with a wider group of digital and customer experts, it also allows him to ensure the value delivered is guided by and contributes to the brand strategy.
“This is irrespective of whether they stick within the confines of our rewards program. I get to pull the brand context into those customer journeys, which I think is really, really important.”