During the session, “Leveraging Loyalty Insights to Drive a Mobile Channel Strategy,” the executive discussed how the retailer learned how to leverage the reach of its PowerUp Rewards members to maximize engagement, drive revenue and increase loyalty. The revelation underscored the importance of offering shoppers choice and convenience across their multiple retail channels.

The Mobile Marketing Summit: Holiday Focus 2014 was organized by Mobile Marketer.

Basic principles
Reaching mobile customers requires both an understanding of how they are engaging in mobile and an embrace of basic, personal business principles to deliver meaningful, relevant, content and services.

“At the end of the day, strategies are broader than a channel,” said Jason Allen, vice president for multichannel strategy, GameStop. “For GameStop it’s how are we driving our buy-sell trade model? How are we differentiating ourselves? And that might be different on each channel,” he said.

“We might talk to consumers one way on the Web, one way on mobile and another way in the stores. But mobile is just a channel.”

The key to the company’s mobile renaissance was the discovery that it had to understand its customer.

“We sat everybody down. We said: “We don’t care where the sale happens, we don’t care how the customer wants to engage with us,” he said.

“All we want is to provide them with an easy, accessible way to engage with our brand. Ultimately we want to maximize loyalty, engagement and revenue by offering our customer choices.”

Now four years old, the PowerUp rewards loyalty program at GameStop is one of the most successful loyalty programs with more than 36 million members nationwide and around the world.

But like many retailers, GameStop faced both challenge and opportunity to determine how it could leverage the reach of PowerUp members to maximize engagement, drive revenue  and increase loyalty. It sought to offer customers choice and convenience when shopping across their multiple retail channels.

Affordable and simple
Mr. Allen emphasized how GameStop, a family of specialty retailers that makes the most popular technologies affordable and simple, uses its PowerUP Rewards program to help  leverage insights from loyalty programs to build and grow a mobile channel strategy that builds sustainable revenue growth and a positive ROI.

The video game retailer, which has 6,600 stores, more than 40,000 employees and 2013 revenue of $8.8 billion, realized it had to broaden its thinking from an organizational standpoint.

“We had to get people thinking more broadly about what they were trying to accomplish,” Mr. Allen said.

“We wanted to get our leaders, our associates and our field organization thinking more broadly about how it affects the customer and how it affects our business.”

Final Take
Michael Barris is staff reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York.