COLLOQUY: Will 'Get Fit' Incentives Work for Walgreens Rewards?
Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from COLLOQUY, provider of loyalty-marketing publishing, education and research since 1990.
In April, Walgreens' 75 million-member Balance Rewards program added "get fit" incentives for walking, running and other activities. Called the "Steps with Balance Rewards" program, it grants points to members for logging individual activities, which they can then redeem at any of its roughly 8,000 stores or online.
In addition, it offers a social component that encourages people to create a community.
"Steps with Balance Rewards" came just about a year after Walgreens entered into the loyalty space with Balance Rewards.
"When we originally thought about positioning a loyalty proposition, we had what I call the 'late-mover' advantage," Graham Atkinson, chief marketing and customer experience officer at Walgreens, told COLLOQUY. "So we looked around at immediate and not-so-immediate competitors, and then at what spoke to the DNA of Walgreens. We sought from an early stage to tie the program demonstrably to what the brand stands for, and that pretty quickly brought us to health and wellness: live well, stay well, get well."
At the same time, he said, Walgreens wanted to build on one of the pillars in its brand arsenal, which is a unique presence in the community.
"For instance, we had developed two years ago a regional program called Walk With Walgreens, for employees, which inspired a national campaign," Mr. Atkinson said. "Companies like Disney were interested in partnering with us on it. So when we committed to launching Balance Rewards, we decided to integrate the Walk With Walgreens concept into it to serve our customers, and also as a logical value-add for the program. We see it as a foundation of what you can do in that space, in terms of motivating consumers to pursue better health."
Members earn 20 points for each mile they log and 20 points when they log their weight at Walgreens.com/balance-steps (subject to daily and monthly limits). Members can also sync fitness devices from FitBit, Withings, and BodyMedia to log activity automatically. A balance of 5,000 points must be reached before rewards are gained but walking points can rack up quickly.
Members can also log their goals and track their progress, as well as earn badges and share stories with the Balance Rewards community to keep motivated.
"We have a lot of people connecting who didn't know each other and actually started to walk together," Mr. Atkinson said. "The more functional part of it involves setting walking goals and you get a reward for that, so you hold yourself and your friends to account but you also earn points as you go. These points go seamlessly into your rewards balance and you can use them for pretty much anything in the stores — though not for subscriptions or dairy products, for regulatory reasons."