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Shopkick Proudly Re-Creates Black Friday Foot Traffic, But Did It Deliver Revenue?
That said, Shopkick’s objective is to deliver the customers, and then the retailer takes over. But does the Shopkick system undermine its own goal? By offering double-clicks on a single day, is the shopper incentivized to hang out at that first store or to move to the next as quickly as possible, to rack up the maximum points?
At the end of this kick-collection scavenger hunt, however, the shopper is likely to actually shop and might just do so at one of those Shopkick partners. Then again, now that the incentive is gone, the shopper is just as likely to shop at some store in the mall that is not a partner. The winner is more the mall than any individual retailer.
Getting back to the CEO’s “less than a dollar” point, why did those customers go to the mall on that day? Clearly, the “less than a dollar” was likely less than the fuel cost of driving to the mall and back, let alone and the time and effort. Let’s also remove people who had planned on going to the mall that Friday anyway.
To get those kicks, the consumer had to have the Shopkicks app launched as they walked into the store. Did those partner stores actually receive that much increased traffic, or were these shoppers they were getting anyway but the promotion prompted them to launch their app?
Were these shoppers who wanted to shop and they were putting it off, but the Shopkick promotion pushed them to shop? If so, that’s great. A much worse scenario: Were these not shoppers at all, but people who enjoy playing the kickbacks collection like a game?
This is why it was so critical that Shopkick released sales figures—to the extent the company can piece them together—from its partner stores. Shopkick has a linked payment-card program, too, which would reveal to it specific sales figures that come from those registered cards.
Shopkick also awards kicks for activities inside the store, such as scanning specific barcodes. Releasing those figures would reveal how far into the stores these Shopkick shoppers went. Given that the Shopkick statement only referenced “a dramatic increase in foot traffic”—with no reference to sales or inside-aisle barcode scanning—it raises the question of what the retailer return truly looked like.
-Marc
March 15th, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Aaron from shopkick here.
The inspiration for “Black Friday 2” came from seeing the success our individual retail partners have had driving dramatic increases in their foot traffic using special incentives for shopkick users to walk into their stores. This inspired us to wonder what would happen if the power of the entire network of shopkick partners could be harnessed together.
The results exceeded our expectations. Not only did we see the remarkable increase in foot traffic from our users that has already been reported — more than 3x a typical Friday, and higher even than the “real” Black Friday — but we also saw a corresponding increase in sales. Evan astutely points out that the effect of this program can be seen immediately as increased purchases at those retail partners that offer rewards for credit card purchases through the shopkick “Buy & Collect” program. Although I obviously can’t share the exact revenue numbers, we saw irrefutable results in the Buy & Collect activity, as well as our other measurement tools, that showed irrefutably that our users not only visited stores more because of the promotion, but bought when they were there. We drove over $110 million in revenue for our retail partners last year, and Black Friday 2 was a great illustration of how that happened.
Bottom line: Black Friday 2 was a real success, because it provided yet more proof that marketing money spent through shopkick translates directly into sales, with great ROI, and most importantly, because our partners and our users all benefitted from it.
March 20th, 2012 at 11:18 am
I think that this is an example of the need to have clear goals with any marketing plan. From what I can read the goal was to increase the foot-traffic to be the same as Black Friday. It sounds like the error was in calling in Black Friday 2, which implies Black Friday sales, which this program was unlikely to reproduce.
Black Friday is built around offering a series of promotions that drive the customer to the store. They are there to save money on purchases (purchase intent) and hopefully purchase more than they intended while they were there. Black Friday 2 was built around getting them to the store, NOT with a purchase intent. Two completely different marketing goals.
What would have been more interesting, and I hope Shopkick tries again, is working with their partner stores to offer in-store promotion tied to the Shopkick event. Hopefully they can convince their partners to try different promotion strategies to see which worked best. What happens when a similar event is tied to an existing promotion? Can Shopkick magnify it?
Santa and the Easter Bunny bring people to the mall too. Do we measure how much they impact sales? Which has a better ROI? =)