This retailer had long relied on employees to drive referrals with a unique offers program to friends, family and to legions of the company’s fans. When they realized that physical cards just weren’t cutting it, they turned to Vibes and its Mobile Wallet solution to digitize and re-energize the program.
The retailer continues to roll out its program globally across the company. In its pilot, they found "encouraging results” that had 60% of the company’s employees distributing Mobile Wallet passes to bring in new customers. Because the company’s offers in this program are redeemable for up to a year, they’ve built in the flexibility to continue to see revenue from the program scaled throughout the year, increasing as more offers and passes are shared by employees.
The company is now tracking how many new customers it’s bringing in and providing bonuses and rewards to employees based on their individual referrals, and they’re excited that they can easily attribute and track this within the Vibes platform. In the coming months, the retailer is looking to link SMS, push notifications and their Vibes Mobile Wallet, and seek to launch this functionality more broadly across their consumer base.
A major retail apparel company had been running a longstanding employee referral program that allows them to share their employee discount with friends, family and legions of the company’s fans. The offer has been extremely compelling; ½ off a purchase of 3 items of clothing.
Unfortunately, the company found this program, while relied upon physical cards, to be extremely cumbersome. They’d print thousands and thousands of cards that were expensive to produce. Distribution proved to be slow, and even when cards did make it to employees, they often sat on desks, unused. The company’s Director of Digital Marketing said that it was often the case that if an employee didn’t have a physical card present with them at all times, they’d often miss a great chance to build loyalty with a fan they might encounter at a restaurant or on the street.
The company wanted to digitize these offers for easy distribution, and easily roll it out to all employees, “like a boarding pass”. They turned to Vibes and its intelligent mobile engagement platform for help.
The retailer had explored several other Mobile Wallet solutions in addition to Vibes, but found that they were targeted at much smaller businesses, and didn’t run as a managed service. Pricing wasn’t tiered, either, and was instead priced on a per-pass basis, making these solutions potentially more expensive. The company’s internal SMS vendor wasn't able to help them either.
The company therefore selected Vibes, deciding to completely digitize their employee referral program using Vibes’ Mobile Wallet solution. After running an initial QR code-based pilot with a subset of employees, what became apparent right away was “how much people wanted to send the pass to other people”, says the Director of Digital Marketing. The company’s marketing team worked closely with Vibes to quickly add in an SMS “text to share” component to the pass, so they wouldn't have to rely solely on a QR code.
“We were really impressed with Vibes and the company’s ability to customize to our needs”, the Director added. “The Vibes team was very hands-on, which was great, since I really didn’t have the time or resources to do manual set-up. With Vibes, it was all seamless, smooth and easy”.
The retailer continues to roll out its program globally across the company. In its pilot, they found "encouraging results” that had 60% of the company’s employees distributing Mobile Wallet passes to bring in new customers. Because the company’s offers in this program are redeemable for up to a year, they’ve built in the flexibility to continue to see revenue from the program scaled throughout the year, increasing as more offers and passes are shared by employees.
The company is now tracking how many new customers it’s bringing in and providing bonuses and rewards to employees based on their individual referrals, and they’re excited that they can easily attribute and track this within the Vibes platform. In the coming months, the retailer is looking to link SMS, push notifications and their Vibes Mobile Wallet, and seek to launch this functionality more broadly across their consumer base.
