With its digital strategy slumping behind major competitors last year, Canadian Tire set about to revolutionize it’s loyalty and digital game.
Since then—along with digitizing it’s iconic Canadian Tire Money—the retailer has been working hard to make gains in the digital marketplace and create new ways of reaching, and rewarding, its customers.
Shawn Stewart, Canadian Tire’s vice-president of loyalty and consumer insights chatted with Marketing about how the transition has been going.
Canadian Tire’s loyalty program now has 7 million members. How have those numbers been received inside the company?
I would say it’s certainly exceeded our expectations, but maybe it shouldn’t have. We had a loyalty program before (the relaunch) and had a good legacy with it, and had a good brand associated with it.
Where do you see the program headed, in terms of goals?
If you look at the best loyalty programs in Canada, they start to cap out at about 9 or 10 million members, and then you start to get into lower-quality members. So our aspiration is to be right at 10 million in the next year or two, so we’re very pleased with our membership acquisitions so far.
There was the sense that Canadian Tire was playing catch up last year in terms of loyalty and digital. Has there been a big shift to close that gap?
The interesting thing about catching up is, you get to learn from other people’s failures. When I look at the loyalty program and the abilities we have (in terms of) instant redeem and cash lanes, targeted offers components, the ability to load offers to card—these are things that programs like Air Miles and Shoppers have just recently launched, and we were fortunately in the position to launch with a full feature set.
If you look at the research, marketers tend to be patient when it comes to new technology. Marketers in the past have been burned by big CRM systems and technology. Even in our experience, we went into ecommerce 10 years ago (with a since-scuttled website). We were ahead of the curve, right? So sometimes there’s a danger in trying to go too quickly.
Is there any piece of this new digital-focused strategy that you’re particularly proud of?
If you step back and look at how we think of digital, it’s not just a website or about our mobile app. It’s about our stores too—it’s such a critical piece. If I look at what we’ve done at our Edmonton Showcase Store, I think that’s a good example of how we can bring digital to life. At the store, you can shop for patio furniture, put on an Oculus Rift headset and actually view what it would look like on your deck. We also have a professional-grade driving simulator that lets you try different types of tires in different types of conditions. That’s not something you can just recreate on a website. You have to experience it in the store. So for us, that’s a huge part of our digital strategy.
So it sounds like you’re really leveraging the community aspects of actually being in the store as well.
Customers are omnipresent and using all of our channels, so we have to make it a consistent experience.
It’s been about a year since Canadian Tire money went digital? What are you learning?
We’re now getting into more specific marketing. We’ve typically been a mass-marketing organization, and loyalty is enabling us to speak to our customers one-to-one now. And now that we’ve got a bit of learning and data on the customers, we can change how we talk to them. As a loyalty member, if you log into your mobile app, you’ll see you’re now getting personalized offers every month. That’s not something we could do before. We’ve got a long way to go and we’re still building out a team here of data miners.
So are you doing things in-house or hiring experts outside of the company?
The analogy I like to use is that we’re building the brain. And I truly think that needs to be proprietary. So when we’re developing models and algorithms and how to communicate with our customers, that needs to be proprietary. However, where I see value in partnerships is when we need to augment the team and move faster. Our team is awesome, but if we need a little more capacity, that’s when I consider partnerships. I don’t think of them as strategic, but simply as a way of moving faster. Like caffeine, if you will.
I read recently Canadian Tire is looking to link weather events to store offers. Any movement on that goal?
As we speak, the team is just finishing scoring the data [around that strategy], so now we know if any given product is suitable for rain, sun, snow or what temperatures it’s suitable for. That will enable the digital team to serve up weather-based offers, almost in real-time, on our website and app. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re in a state where we can nearly do that—we just have to build the content out.
