Loyalty members' favorite locations for your specific brand can vary greatly depending on their preferences, geographical location, and individual experiences. Some customers may prefer a brand's flagship store or a location that offers unique features or services. Others may favor a location that is conveniently located near their home or workplace.
Paytronix Favorite Store attribute gives you flexibility on how to gather and track this information for each one of your members and use it to create location-specific segments and personalize communication with store-specific information. Favorite store functionality is usually configured as part of a loyalty implementation, however, it can also be added to any loyalty program after go-live.
Creating a Favorite Store Group
Create a store group that includes all eligible locations that should be considered as a favorite stores. This should include all of the locations that a member is able to visit and place an online order at. This store group generally excludes virtual stores like Corporate, eGift, text, etc. The store group should be type: Other and behavior: Auto-Add. Auto Add will automatically add new stores to the group as they are created. You will need to provide the store group code to Paytronix which will be available after the store group is created. For more information on how to manage store groups, see Store Group Maintenance.
Gathering Favorite Store Information
To determine a customer's favorite location for your brand, a popular option is to ask the customer directly. You can work with Paytronix to configure the favorite store field to be required on member sign-up, and account information edit. You should consider all channels through which a member can join (Website, Mobile App, 3rd Party Integration, etc) or modify their account information to ensure the favorite store field is rolled out everywhere. Communicate this information to Paytronix support when requesting this field to be added to sign-up and account edit channels.
An alternative to asking for a member's favorite store is to create a new trigger to systematically assign the next store at which the member transacts as their favorite store if their favorite store field is empty. This is a good option for clients to keep their sign-up form shorter, and to back-fill favorite store info for existing members that might not be likely to login and edit their favorite store preference. Another possibility is to assign this field after every transaction, effectively using the Favorite Store field as the 'last store visited'. You will need to reach out to Paytronix support to request this configuration with a description of how you need this to work.
Some clients use a combination of both approaches by making favorite store an optional field on registration and account edit. If the member does not choose to provide that information on sign-up, the favorite store is assigned on their next loyalty transaction.
Using a Favorite Store
You can create custom segments by favorite store, or a group of favorite stores to create store-specific communication. An example might be if you have a geographical region of stores testing an LTO, you can create a segment to target members that have specified those locations as their favorite stores. You can also include store specific information like store name and address for easy reference in the customer communication.
See Account Filters for more information on how to use the Favorite Store condition to create a segment.
See Substitution Parameters for more information on how to add Favorite Store parameters to your customer communication
FAQ
Question: One of my stores has closed, what happens to the members who had this location set as their favorite store?
The members will maintain the closed location as their favorite store. You can target these members with a campaign requesting a call to action to login and edit their preference, or continue to market to them with information about other close-by locations.
Question: What is the difference between an enrollment store and favorite store?
The enrollment store is the store of activation. This will be the physical location where a physical loyalty card is activated, or it could be 'Corporate' if the member signed up online and didn't specify a favorite store. Enrollment store can never change once it is assigned on activation. Favorite store field can be assigned via the methods outlined above, and can be changed throughout a member's lifecycle in the program.