Customer engagement with millennials is such a vital topic these days to all marketers. Officials at The Finish Line realize this and thrive on it as this group is critical to the company’s success, resulting in brand loyalty.
The Finish Line’s Winners Circle loyalty program has been highly successful, so much so that company officials wanted to enhance the customer experience with the launch of a new app. Finish Line’s new Winners Circle mobile app is aimed at providing services and conveniences that reward its loyalty program customers with points and loyalty perks.
Danielle Quatrochi, Finish Line’s Vice President, Digital, told Loyalty360 that marketing to millennials is about being open to market differently.
“Millennials see through the broader marketing,” Quatrochi, a world-class marathoner, explained. “They want to better understand what a brand has to offer, why it’s meaningful to them, and how the brand is being relevant and timely with them. Millennials thrive on visual technology and expect you to connect with them anywhere. From a data perspective, it’s harder to market to them in a sense that there’s more to think about and manage–there’s no one-size fits all for millennials. They expect you to use that data to personalize your marketing approach to them. But, I’d say even outside millennials, the customer is going that way because information is out there to better understand them.”
The new Winners Circle app is available as part of the athletic retailer’s mobile commerce platform and it reinforces brand interactions, improves customer service and sales, and also provides timely information about customers’ favorite product releases.
“Our core customer is the millennial and, based on our customer research, we know that they want more than a transactional relationship from the companies
they buy from,” Quatrochi said. “We launched our Winners Circle app with that in mind and we will work to establish more relationship loyalty with that millennial consumer base. Our program will definitely continue to have a rewards piece but it will continue to evolve over time. The beauty of our Winners Circle app is that we built it to be simple, yet meaningful, to the shopping experience. Our sales associate is no different than the millennials we serve. They were also starving for a new way to engage with our brand. We utilized them early on during our research for the app. By bringing them along, it led to high buy-in when we delivered the app.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.