Poundland is feeling pretty chipper after its new Perks rewards app became the top free app on the Apple App Store and Google Play in the 24 hours after its launch last week.
The discount chain became the latest retailer to roll out a loyalty scheme, offering customers up to 100 exclusive member deals, the chance to collect points on their purchases in exchange for vouchers, and earn extra prizes through a ‘spin to win’ wheel.
The retailer’s director of digital Tom Hill says its been a “very strong start” as he explains its aim is to make “shopping with us even more fun, and even more amazing value”.
It’s been a long time in the making. Poundland Perks has been in test phase for the past year as the team fine-tuned its loyalty offer to deliver the best value to customers.
“We’re one of the one of the last retailers to get to a loyalty programme, but probably one of the first multi-variety discount retailers,” notes Hill. “We’ve been able to have a really good look at the market, look at what works, what doesn’t work, lots of customer research etc to help us understand what they want and what they like.”
Test and trial
There are three parts that make up Poundland’s Perks proposition, says Hill.
“One is the offers themselves, one is the ability to earn perky points on the pounds you spend in store, and then the final one is the Spin to Win, where customers can enjoy a bit of gamification to win a whole multitude of fun things.
“Whether that’s points or some really awesome prizes that our suppliers are working with us to provide,” he says.
Poundland head of digital loyalty and engagement Emma Collins adds: “The gamification side of things is where we can differentiate ourselves and work with our suppliers and potential partners to grow that and explode that.”
However, the app started much simpler when a pilot trial was launched last February in all four of the retailer’s stores on the Isle of Wight.
“It was called MyPoundland at that point,” says Hill. “We have played with the language from customers around points and the currency, so we’ve tweaked that.”
Collins say the business tested “with about between 20 and 25 offers on the app”, but admitted the data was somewhat skewed since “there’s a lot of tourism” on the Isle of Wight.
“That’s why we wanted to extend and have a bigger data set to test and learn even more,” she explains, with the scheme launching across the whole of Northern Ireland last November when it introduced the gamification element.
This proved a hit and the team saw engagement “double” on Wednesdays as customers rush to play to win extra prizes.
Poundland Perks later went live in Scotland in June of this year, before a nationwide rollout last week.
Perky response
It’s been well received by customers as more than 300,000 of them signed up to the scheme on Saturday alone.
The app will have on average “about 100 offers at any one time”, says Collins, which will be updated every two to three weeks.
The offers include discounts on household products such as Domestos, Lynx, Pot Noodle, TreSemmé and Dove.
While the offers see Poundland Perks users get access to lower prices, Hill argues: “I wouldn’t describe it as members pricing.”
“What we’ve got is genuinely amazing value products already that we’ve already worked really hard to get to that price. What Perks offers us the chance to do is give even more amazing value products for customers on the Perks programme.”
She says the scheme has been created based on what its customers want. “We made all these alterations to the proposition based on multiple touch points with customers. We set up focus groups, both in person and online, and they really helped us design and land on what we think is the optimum proposition.”
However, it will be constantly improving its rewards app.
“Loyalty doesn’t stand still,” states Hill, explaining the team have “lots of UX improvements we’d like to make in time”.
Hill and Collins are also looking into how Poundland can partner and link its loyalty card with organisations such as Blue Light Card to deliver even more value.
“We’ve got tons of ideas around how we can start to use our app to enhance the colleague experience…so we can link that to our colleague discounts, for example,” says Hill.
Poundland does digital
The Poundland Perks launch comes just over a year since the retailer relaunched its ecommerce after acquiring Poundshop.com back in 2022.
“We’ve been on a bit of a journey digitally in the last sort of two years,” says Hill. “Migrating into Poundland.co.uk and making that transactional just over a year ago was a really important moment for us.
“It’s given us the opportunity to enter new categories that we frankly wouldn’t do in a Poundland store and a different price point, but it’s still really amazing value that’s really exciting and something for us to build as a business.”
Hill explains the acquisition of Poundshop.com and its distribution facilities helped “expedite our plans” as the retailer was able to build on the existing infrastructure.
The loyalty scheme is another chapter in the retailer’s digital journey and will provide it with streams of customer data.
“We get around 5 million transactions per week [but] we don’t know exactly who those customers are, what they buy, when they buy it, and how many other Poundlands they go to,” says Hill.
“Starting to understand a little bit more about our customers helps us put the right products in front of those customers when they need it the most, and it makes the whole thing a bit more relevant.”
Hill describes the retailer as still fairly “infant” in its digital journey and admits that even click and collect is not on its radar just yet.
“It’s something that we might look at in the mid- to long-term, but right now we’ve got plenty of other opportunities that we would prioritise above that.”
For now, Hill and Collins are focused on the roll out of Poundland Perks – the loyalty scheme guaranteed to perk up its customers shopping trips.
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