New Weis Loyalty Program Targets Top Shoppers

SUNBURY, Pa. — A new loyalty initiative at Weis Markets here is built around rewarding the chain’s best shoppers — and vice versa.

The Weis Gold Card, distributed last month to around 250,000 shoppers at Weis whose annual purchases exceed $3,500, is built around the idea of providing what Weis officials called “enduring value” for shoppers — a theme the company also intends to reflect as it celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2012.

The card further represents a renewal of the loyalty program at Weis, including an effort to finally capitalize on the shopper data it has collected since launching a loyalty program for the first time in 1996. This required the resources to invest in infrastructure and mine the data — and a project that Brian Holt, Weis’ director of marketing, has worked on for nearly a year.

“When I came to this company, they challenged me as the new marketing director to take over the loyalty program and really understand how we could use it to better drive sales,” Holt, who joined Weis in 2009 after holding a retail marketing position at tool and appliance maker Black & Decker, told SN in a recent interview. “We realized we had a goldmine of data available to us that quite honestly, we were doing very little with.”

Holt’s first project with Weis was to launch a gas-rewards program that he said has saved customers $20 million since its 2010 launch. A deeper dive into the data, with help from the loyalty-marketing firm Spire, helped Weis officials see the shoppers the Gold Card would go after, examining their shopping patterns and category purchases in greater detail than ever before.

The shoppers who qualify for the Gold Card in its initial distribution represent roughly 11% of Weis’ shoppers but account for 48% of its business, Holt said. They spend an average of $67 per week. Using data on the categories and products they tend to shop, Weis worked with suppliers to come up with a range of special offers this group would receive through a monthly mailing and email, Holt said. Such “personalized offers” are at the heart of the Gold card program.

“We worked really hard with the trade to come up with a program that will give that group a lot of value because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about,” said Holt (left). “We want to win, but we also want our customers to win. So we put together a really good value proposition that works for us and works for our customers.”

Weis was already seeing a strong response to the first mailing, which went out in mid-December, Holt said. It includes 16 of the most relevant offers to each cardholder, ranging from free products to buy-one, get-one to dollars-off discounts.

“We expect redemptions to be strong because these are very targeted offers, but the response has been very strong already.”

Although the program targets a set of shoppers at Weis that are already very loyal, Holt believes there’s ample opportunity to get more spending from the group.

“The thing that makes me believe there’s more dollars out there is that we know in general we have very competitive markets,” he explained. “The data tells us people are cross-shopping at a phenomenal rate these days. Even our most loyal shoppers are seeing two or three different stores in the course of a week. We think there’s a good percentage of the wallet we can still go after.”

Holt acknowledged the cut-off points for enrolling shoppers in the Gold Card program left some customers just below the threshold, but he doesn’t see that necessarily as a bad thing. The company hopes the program will encourage loyalty as a path to Gold Card discounts. It also contemplates using the offers to bump up purchases from members, thereby raising the bar for membership from one year to the next.

“We anticipate that people will be curious as to how to get into the program and what they need to do to qualify,” he said. “We built good instructions for our store-level associates to they can understand how to offer the same opportunity to people who didn’t make it this year. We see it as win-win. If people want to be in this program, we’d love for them to be there. Instead of 250,000 members, we’d love to see a half million. But we want to make sure they first show a similar type of behavior.”

Holt said his goal for growth of the program is 5% to 10% annually, comparing it to an airline frequent-flyer program providing periodic incentives to encourage participation.

The program is the fruit of a renewed commitment to investing in technology championed over the last several years by David Hepfinger, Weis’ chief executive officer.

“We look at the payback as building share of wallet, and building additional loyalty,” Holt said. “It was a massive undertaking for us, both in terms of the IT infrastructure and the dedication of time and resources to get it off the ground. It was our biggest loyalty undertaking ever.”