Kohl’s CEO Kevin Mansell is supremely confident that the company’s Yes2You Rewards loyalty program will be a key factor on the Greatness Agenda, which launched in early 2014.
“As our Yes2You loyalty program matures, I become more confident than ever in the impact that it will have on strengthening customer loyalty and increasing sales,” Mansell said during the company’s May 14 first-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “When we launched the program nationwide last October, we had 10 million customers enrolled in the program. After one month, we had over 17 million customers. Today, almost 29 million customers are enrolled in the program and it grows every single day.”
Mansell said Yes2You members tend to be younger, female, and from more affluent households with children.
“They tend to be from our most engaged customer segment,” Mansell noted. “During the first quarter, over half of transactions were loyalty transactions. We continue to see that loyalty members are shopping more often and spending more with each trip. This is especially relevant as we saw a sizable decrease in shopping behavior for customers that are not part of the loyalty program. It’s important to note that we’re seeing consistent results for customers that were part of the 2012 original pilot, the 2013 expansion, and the 2014 nationwide launch. Despite the early success of the loyalty program, we continue to design program enhancement. We're testing exclusive loyalty strategies, including mystery point offers and loyalty days and rewarding customers for referrals along with social media interaction. And we’re looking forward to the October anniversary of the nationwide launch and developing a national anniversary launch plan.”
Mansell pointed to the company’s new multi-year strategic framework known as the Greatness Agenda.
“Easy experience is about creating seamless experiences often driven by the launching of new technology,” Mansell explained. “We continue to have a lot of traction in our efforts to be world-class in mobile. We now have seven million app downloads and continue to enhance our tablet web and app experience. In the first quarter on tablet, we optimized our pages to be more search engine friendly, enabled multi-select filters resulting in better conversion and improved our big data algorithms to provide more relevant product recommendations. Utilizing our wallet in our app we are now able to deliver personalized messages which can be scanned and redeemed in-store. We also launched voice-based search on Android and image-based search on both Android and iOS. The pace of development will actually accelerate in the second and third quarter across the mobile platform. Localization and personalization efforts continue to mature and loyalty exceeds our most optimistic expectations.”