Circle K is Ireland’s largest fuel and convenience store brand with nearly 450 service stations across the country. Circle K promise is to provide drivers with quality fuel (“Circle K fuels take you further”) alongside a high quality shopping experience, called Re-store, which offers coffee, lunch and other non-food items, from the company’s forecourts.
Alongside the forecourt operations, Circle K is also Ireland’s largest branded Fuel Card network, offering companies more effective fuel management for their business drivers, which includes one invoice for all transactions and one weekly fixed price across the entire network.
The Challenges
Increasing customer lifetime value.
To increase customer lifetime value (CLV), Circle K made the decision to ‘gamify’ its loyalty programmes with the introduction of the mobile centric ‘Play or Park’ loyalty scheme. The scheme allows customers, both private motorists and business drivers, to accumulate points for every cent spent with Circle K on either fuel, or convenience items. The aim of the loyalty programme is to incentivise customers to return to a Circle K store to gain more points.
Management, reporting and flexibility.
In addition to a Circle K smartphone app that features ‘Play or Park’, customers receive regular SMS messages from Circle K encouraging them to ‘Play or Park’. Customers also receive personalised offers, point totals and even locations of the nearest Circle K service stations. This is based on real-time customer data when the customers’ text in their current location to the Circle K dedicated freetext SMS short code, 50456.
After initially using a number of third party providers, Circle K wished to deploy a single party framework for its SMS messaging services. In addition, the company required better management reporting and increased flexibility, specifically the ability to design, edit and publish highly targeted SMS campaigns using content rich mobile landing pages.
The Solution
A powerful customer engagement solution.
After a competitive tender process, Circle K selected Engage Hub as the company’s sole mobile messaging provider for all marketing and operational mobile messaging communications.
Engage Hubs strategy was to utilise its cloud-based customer engagement solution, which enables businesses to send highly targeted communications to their customers, at multiple touchpoints, throughout the customer journey. Circle K customers continue to receive the monthly ‘Play or Park’ message, but thanks to the ease of use of the Engage Hub solution, a variety of other promotions have now been introduced, such as ‘gift a free cup of coffee to a friend’ which asks recipients to forward on an SMS message with an embedded QR code.
The success of the campaigns was measured using Engage Hubs comprehensive performance dashboards, enabling Circle K to track redemption rates in real-time and glean valuable consumer insight.
Targeted marketing campaigns.
Circle K also used Engage Hubs Synapse technology to segment and personalise offers and communications to corporate users of the fuel card – offering free, value-adding information such as the latest fuel prices at their local petrol station.
Most importantly, the Circle K marketing team now has the ability to quickly design, edit and launch engaging marketing campaigns that are delivered to the right customer, with the right offer, at the right time.
