Hospitality group Norths Collective has seen its membership base grow by 7000 following continued digital transformation work.
The Sydney-based hospitality group with six venues and two fitness centres now has 65,000 members.
It has been on a digital transformation journey which so far has seen it generate user engagement by building out personalisation and analytics under its focused 360 customer view.
“At the start of this journey, we had 58,000 members,” chief marketing innovation officer Robert Lopez told a Boomi World Tour audience in Sydney.
“We’ve now got over 65,000 members.
“The more members we have, the more actively engaged they are with us, the more we can give back to the community, so the more we can close that community loop.
“We give back about 13 percent more today than we did the day before we turned the lights onto our ecosystem.”
Through the transformation, membership engagement email open rates have gone from 20 percent to 60 percent, but “beyond that” click-through rates have gone from about 1.4 percent to close to 12 percent.
The organisation is using “hyper personalisation” across its digital channels, a change from what it did a decade ago when every member received the same email outreach.
Now, each member “gets a unique message and unique communication that is based on not just demographical data but also ethically based on their behavioural data,” Lopez said.
“We look at how they’re transacting, how they’re engaging with us, what departments and products they’re purchasing from.
“We’re looking beyond just those demographical attributes.
“We use the last 90 days of engagement data that comes through to allow us to send [communications] at the right minute of the day for each of our 65,000 members.”
By improving engagement, Lopez said that customer lifetime value had also increased across the group.
Lopez noted that one factor that contributed to the success of the digital transformation was “clearly defining a vision” for it.
Change management, he added, had still been a challenge for the organisation.
“Certain staff at some of our venues have been working for us for 35 years, plus they’re customer-facing. They’re used to certain processes,” he said.
“When we told them we’re getting rid of the membership forms that someone hand-writes in front of you, and then you type into the membership system and we’re going to be giving you tablets, there was shock on their faces, like it was never going to happen,”
Lopez said that frontline feedback on the digitisation had been “fantastic”.
“We’ve created advocacy around what we’ve done. We turned what was our biggest challenge around,” Lopez said.