#LEAwards 2021 highlight: FedEx's loyalty strategy takes flight with brand awareness push

FedEx Express Asia Pacific has been a leading express service provider in the region for more than three decades. Engaging B2B customers through a global rewards programme is uncommon within the industry, and uptake of its loyalty programme had been slower than FedEx’s strong revenue growth in the region. With room to grow, FedEx reached out to the Epsilon Asia Pacific team to strategise and execute a revamp of its My FedEx Rewards programme.

With their combined efforts, FedEx Express and Epsilon won bronze for Best Loyalty Programme – Launch / Re-Launch at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2021. It was also listed as finalists for Best Regional Loyalty Campaign and Best Engagement Strategy – B2B. Here's the secret sauce behind its success.

Challenge

FedEx Express had four main things it wanted to achieve:

1. Acquisition – enrol new and eligible customers to the My FedEx Rewards programme;
2. Recognition – drive positive ROI through programme econometrics;
3. Adoption – drive existing My FedEx Rewards members’ engagement and earn/burn; and
4. Expansion – implement the My FedEx Rewards footprint to more markets within the AMEA region.

The target audience in this challenge was programme-eligible SME customers that had not yet accepted an invitation to the My FedEx Rewards programme. The loyalty programme was reorganised in 2015 to a centralised approach after recognising inconsistencies of a localised approach and effectiveness across the region.

It is a by-invitation programme, where some of the thresholds and criteria were relatively high for the targeted SME customers to achieve. Some processes were also manual which impacted the customer experience, hence, resulting in a lower engagement rate.

In August 2020, the revamp of the rewards programme included two aspects. First, power up the back end. Deployment of Epsilon PeopleCloud Loyalty gave drill-down visibility into customer patterns. Epsilon PeopleCloud Loyalty was integrated with the FedEx proprietary internal systems, and with its vendor platforms for marketing campaigns, marketing communications and fulfilment.

The Epsilon PeopleCloud Loyalty solution serves as the engine behind a comprehensive, data-driven toolkit for mining and responding to customer insights. This infrastructure further supported FedEx to drive its member acquisition strategy.

FedEx worked with historical data on members’ performance, enrolment, logins and redemption within the loyalty programme to evaluate programme threshold and criteria. The Epsilon PeopleCloud Loyalty solution platform then enabled customisation to fit the revamped programme mechanics.

Second was the analysis and improvement of the customer journey from “shipper” to active “My FedEx Rewards member”. A single sign-on experience for the ordering portal and rewards portal was implemented. Epsilon also took over management of the rewards catalogue from the previous vendor for efficient rewards life cycle management from earn to burn.

As customers move towards a digital-first experience across the globe, there was a pressing need to modernise the My FedEx Rewards customer experience. The global rewards programme based in the US set a baseline for Asia Pacific, and tested best practices were ready for adoption in the form of the Epsilon PeopleCloud Loyalty solution.

In further considerations of market nuances in the region, the platform allows customisation to fit the revamped programme mechanics, and the localisation of data attributes was needed to enable future data analytics. The platform also allowed seamless single sign-on integration so FedEx customers can easily enrol as members and engage with the programme without the hassles of using yet another login credential.

Strategy

The core principle around My FedEx Rewards’ revamp is focused on customer-centricity. In the past five years, FedEx had launched various initiatives to support small and medium businesses going global with FedEx as their partner. The three tenets to support this principle were around: easier to use, faster to join, and more to offer.

By understanding the earn and burn behaviour of more than 72,000 current members (as of June 2021), current shipping habits, and target customer segments, the team redesigned the programme’s eligibility criteria, earn and burn rates, as well as the go-to-market tactics.

The programme revamp also required massive investments from local and global teams, involving technical resources from FedEx internal teams in the US, Epsilon US and Asia Pacific, as well as the programme leads in Asia Pacific.

With its scope covering 11 APAC markets, the coordination between building and testing was managed solely by the APAC team to ensure clarity in deliverables, an eye on timelines, and a single source of truth for all dependencies across the project.

Post-launch, the team continued to use data-driven insights to develop a multi-market acquisition strategy in two phases – via a brand-led awareness campaign leveraging on FedEx global campaigns across APAC; and via a theme-led rewards campaign in five markets.

Execution

The programme launch was communicated through a series of targeted communications and demand-generation activities pre, during and post-launch. It was also the first time rewards communications had used a multi-channel approach, including using personalisation through Adobe Targeting and Adobe Audience Management.

To execute a timely and effective launch plan required communications to both customers and internal audiences, including awareness of the new My FedEx Rewards mechanic among members; interest to participate/engage with My FedEx Rewards through shipping more to earn rewards points, logging in, and redeeming from the catalogue.

Each target audience group had a specific approach before, during and after the launch, including teaser and launch emails, redemption drives, acquisition “double welcome points” campaigns, and a paid media campaign to drive awareness and sustained traffic post-launch. Go-to-market/go-to-sales materials, including a digital brochure and sign-up guides, were also developed for customer-facing teams.

Learning from past activation campaigns for small and medium customers, the programme team was able to identify primary contacts within customer accounts to increase contact-ability and improve personalisation in targeting.

Adobe Targeting and Adobe Audience Manager also supported the team’s efforts in applying audience insights to acquisition drives; and finally, using phased emails to drive awareness and engagement throughout the programme launch ensured a paced communication approach, and not over saturating customer touch-points during the launch period.

Results

The integration of FedEx CRM and marketing communications systems with the Epsilon PeopleCloud loyalty platform made it possible to locate eligible members based on different revenue and behaviour-based criteria.

With the back end powered up, FedEx and Epsilon continued the programme revamp by streamlining the front end customer experience. The single sign-on login, and the points accrual structure was made more aggressive, and the rewards catalogue more directly managed, in keeping with the FedEx member acquisition strategy.

FedEx used the integrated data systems to identify more customers eligible for My FedEx Rewards and to coordinate and track invitations. Within months, FedEx was able to turn a slowdown into a revival. New members have joined My FedEx Rewards at a rate unseen in many years.

Following the success of the programme revamp, FedEx and Epsilon are now undertaking a further deployment of the power of Epsilon PeopleCloud Loyalty solution to segment according to value, attrition and potential. Dialling into the deeper levels of visibility into customer types and patterns, Epsilon’s VAP exercise will underlie the redesign of the member acquisition and retention playbook for even more spectacular results in 2021, and beyond.