Waving goodbye to inflexible methods and untapped data, Spinx worked with Rovertown to ramp up mobile engagement and contest reach.
A basic app delivered basic results.
Spinx, a convenience store chain in South and North Carolina, found that its previous white-label app was too narrow in scope and capabilities.
Speaking on the “Supercharge Your App” panel at the 2022 NACS Show, Hayley Thrift, director of marketing and advertising at Spinx, said the company’s CluckaPalooza contest for a year’s worth of free chicken had once struggled to register customers. For two years, the marketing team tried different strategies to drive entries with mixed success, attaching stickers to food boxes and printing codes on receipts. But customers still had to remember to enter the codes online after qualifying purchases, and team members found the processes cumbersome.
Meanwhile, Spinx was only using its app for loyalty and pay-at-pump programs. The app also had the considerable drawback of lacking registration capabilities for the loyalty program, Thrift said.
Held back on multiple ends, Spinx sought a new solution that could keep pace with its marketing ambitions.
"Our previous app was pretty basic and limited with what we could do. We had a lot of loyalty program users, but we didn’t know who they were, so we couldn’t communicate with them.”
Enabling a better way to run contests
“We engaged with Rovertown to develop a new app for us, and that really opened up a lot of doors.”
Since working with us, Thrift said Spinx has used its new app to collect user registrations, gather meaningful data, and tap into new avenues of customer engagement. Today, Spinx is able to run ClukaPalooza through the app. Customers are entered automatically by simply scanning their mobile rewards cards at the point of qualifying purchase—no codes or extra steps needed. And, Thrift said, entering the contest through a smartphone feels like a natural step forward for a marketing campaign already promoted by social media and mobile sharing. In the first year of implementation, Clukapalooza’s number of entries increased by a factor of five, exceeding 10,000 entries in total. With all of the data in one place, Thrift also said picking a winner was the easiest it’d ever been.
Spinx’s new app made big gains in user adoption, recording a 35-fold increase in users in its first year alone, according to Thrift. Behind the scenes, she said her teams were learning more about their customers than ever before, and parlaying their growing knowledge into better services.
“Increasing our app usage was huge for us. We had customers really appreciating the features that we were giving them. They were buying into the program. We were able to see what they liked, what they didn’t like, and we’ve learned so much since the app launched.”
An app with room to grow
Spinx now operates a popular mobile app with over 75,000 users. Thrift said there’s a lot to love about our platform, including the support for legacy offers like pay-at-pump QR codes, the eye-catching displays of monthly specials, and the easy customizability of the home page—allowing retailers to take a coupon live with the click of a button.
Spinx can elevate its mobile services with a variety of integration options, including push notifications, location services, and in-app donations for charitable campaigns. Unlike white-label apps, our platform wraps multiple integrations into one interface. Spinx’s loyalty program, mobile payments, and CPG offers are streamlined through integrations with PDI Technology’s Excentus, Zipline, and Koupon Media, respectively.
“Everything is fast, efficient, and it’s in our hands to customize it. We just log into our portal to do that. It really allows us to work with our vendors and merchandising team to make sure we’re sending relevant offers, but then we get to collect that data and see what our customers are responding to.”
-Hayley Thrift, SPINX
As for what’s next for Spinx: Thrift said they’re now exploring offering online ordering through their app. With our versatile system, changes to mobile operations can happen quickly, easily, and on their terms.
In a crowded field of convenience retailers vying for the digital consumer, Spinx shines as an example of what a dynamic mobile app can do for customer reach and loyalty. We offer a c-store app platform that’s customizable and agile, ready to take on your goals today, and evolve with you into tomorrow.
