At the North Face, officials survey customers with two objectives in mind.
“The first is product feedback,” Ian Dewar, senior manager customer lifecycle, The North Face, told Loyalty360. “We can reach out to key product purchasers when we want feedback on performance. This has been a useful tool for us. Second, we use surveys to help understand overall customer behavior. That is how we know most of our customers are active, where they like to shop, and what categories they say they are most likely to buy from The North Face.”
Monica Paul, loyalty program manager, The North Face, talked to Loyalty360 that the primary objective of its loyalty program, VIPeak Rewards, is to use relevant content and experiences to develop a deeper relationship with customers.
“We are seeing our efforts reflected in our business as well, with an increase in same-year repeat purchase and year-over-year repeat purchase,” she said. “For example, the overall rate of repeat (same year) for VIPeak members is about 20 percent higher and the overall repeat (year after year) of VIPeak customers is 50 percent higher than comparable non-VIP customers.”
The North Face earned a Silver Award in the Loyalty & Rewards Program category of the Loyalty360 Customer Loyalty Awards held at the 10th annual Loyalty Expo.
“Our focus is to continue to build interest for customers by reinforcing the activities they are interested in while simultaneously surfacing new activities or products that we hope will be compelling to them,” Dewar said. “As we get deeper into personalization, we want to refine the right mix of exciting content alongside the best product for their next (or new) adventure. We are continuing to push personalization and relevance in our messaging and engagement with our customers. We’ll continue to improve on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. But overall, we are seeing that relevant messaging works to bring customers back more often. We’re also looking at more non-transactional behavioral data from events and other avenues which will help us develop this personalization effort.”
Channel preference is a notable shift, Paul added.
“Customers are shifting more of their time to mobile so we are continuing to adjust our mobile offering to accommodate that,” Paul said. “We have updated our TNF App to serve as a mobile wallet for VIPeak and made our rewards work with Google Wallet and Apple Pay. We are adapting to be where our most valuable customers are and expect to see us. We are leveraging social media as a digital extension to amplify our loyalty program’s benefits and perks and to drive acquisition and engagement.”