Magnetic Mobile and Speedway
Case Study
7-Eleven Experience
Celebrating Over a Decade of Partnership, Success, and Innovation.
THE CHALLENGE
Create an Engaging Digital Experience for the World-Class Speedy Rewards® Loyalty Program
CLIENT
7-Eleven’s Speedway Brand
PROJECT
Speedway Mobile & Website
TIMELINE
Over a Decade Long Partnership
STRATEGIC DESIGN PILLARS
- Create an Exciting and User-Centered Design Approach to Making Loyalty Program Easy and Personalized for the Consumer
- Digital-First and Mobile-First Approach, that Creates Consistently Optimized, Quality Content That’s Delivered Quickly for Today’s Tech-Savvy Consumer
- Enterprise Focused, Secure & Scalable Approach to Achieve Best-in-Class Reach to Millions of Customers Daily
- Build Up Digital Innovation in a Scalable Way, that Connects the Customer and Speedway, while creating Value on the Website & Mobile Apps for both the business and the consumer
ABOUT 7-Eleven & Speedway
When Speedway came to Magnetic Mobile over a decade ago, their loyalty program, Speedy Rewards®, was already an industry first. An early pioneer in understanding the value of loyalty programs aimed to create and retain customer lifetime value, it didn’t take long for other companies in the convenience and grocery spaces to follow suit.
As innovators in the loyalty space, Speedway recognized the vast potential of connecting its customers in the digital world. Wanting the best for their new mobile native application designed around Speedy Rewards, they partnered with Magnetic because of our deep connection to consumer loyalty and our offer automation.
Having previously worked with our founders to create their AMS loyalty back-end, which was then sold to NCR in 2003, Magnetic’s history of utilizing offers for loyalty and combining them with unprecedented digital experiences opened up the next progression of our history with Speedway and 7-Eleven.
Making Loyalty Easy and Personalized for the Consumer
Why? According to SalesForce, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services
We created the first Speedy Rewards® mobile application in 2012 and found instant success with a stunning 25% growth in 2013 and an additional 50% growth in 2014 in early digital adopters.
In 2014, we worked with Speedway’s loyalty and technology teams to build a more dynamic user-first, front-end experience, including image-based offers, couponing, push messaging, and targeted offers. This dramatic digital transformation radically changed how users interacted with Speedway’s loyalty program and was widely praised resulting in a 67% adoption-rate increase on only one year.
For over 10 years, consumers have raved about the app, giving it a 4.7 out of 5 star rating with thousands of reviews and over 10K perfect 5-star reviews from Speedy Rewards® customers.
Taking a Digital- and Mobile-First Approach
Why? Consumers will abandon digital experiences that are not optimized or take too long to load. Kissmetrics ran a survey and found that 47% of consumers will not wait longer than 2 seconds for an experience to load, before abandoning the experience altogether. Optimization and fast-loading content is critical to customer engagement.
We took over the website property and immediately focused on a digital- and mobile-first approach to all design and architecture decisions. This work culminated in a scalable, fully-integrated architecture that is fast-loading, secure by design, optimized to mobile and desktop usage, and earned Speedway a coveted award for best Digital Presence in 2019, by Convenience Store News.
Our technical teams created asynchronous content loading that mitigated caching issues while delivering an instantaneous experience to the consumer. The app and websites delivered real-time data coming from the POS and store operations, making it as reliable and accurate as in-store transactions. Additionally, we maintained a 99.99% system uptime along with a 24/7 support structure which built trust and deepened our partnership and continued to grow the properties along side them.
5-Star App Development
Secure & Scalable Approach to Reach Millions of Customers Daily
Speedway’s customer base grew from 1 million to 4 million loyalty users in a three-year-time period as they acquired new companies and expanded their reach from a regional Midwest company to a national chain with over 4,000 stores. This unprecedented growth, along with the consistency they saw from their digital properties, allowed us to continue expanding with them which led to one of the largest contributions we made over the last decade to the digital Speedy Rewards® program: From 2012 to 2022, there was a 17x increase in app downloads.
Our plan for scaling included planned regression testing, new feature expansion that could dynamically be changed based on an influx of new data and/or customers, load balancing, and the monitoring of assets.
The result was a scalable digital property that kept up with rapid expansion and proven, quality production releases every quarter and the constant delivery of fast-loading content to the app and the website while supporting millions of customers daily and 10s of millions of transactions on the platforms.
Why? Today’s digital savvy consumer expects immediate results and immediate responses. We know that consumers have little patience for slow loading apps. In fact, TechRepublic found that 80% of consumers will eventually delete or abandon slow-performing applications.
Creating Value for both Speedway and the Consumer
Why? The largest growing consumer group in the US are either digital natives (Gen Z and Millennials) or innovators (Gen X), and they are 206M strong. Their expectation for excellent digital-first experiences is table stakes and essential for business, and their desire for digital innovation will only get stronger.
Both the app and website needed to scale on demand while also growing in both customer acquisition and retention, with this all culminating in an increase in customer lifetime value overall. What surprised everybody was just how much of that value would differ between digital users (web and/or app) compared to physical card users.
The Gross Merchandise Value between the two audiences was nearly 38% higher in basket size and 36% more store trips for digital users. These numbers validated our hypothesis that engaged mobile users not only spend and visit in-store locations more frequently, but they are also more brand loyal to Speedway overall. The results were a 2X value per year for digital vs. non-digital consumers.
The app and website had proven that when built on the rails of a highly successful loyalty program like Speedy Rewards®, quality mobile and website experiences were like rocket fuel to customer lifetime value and it was the partnership between Speedway and Magnetic that helped us deliver this value.
Consumer-Focused Design
Our deep history with offer management combined with our cutting edge design and technical teams, led us to create the first Speedy Rewards® mobile application in 2012.
Speedway’s incredible back-end loyalty system, combined with the expertise and an investment with Magnetic created a digital brand for Speedway that consumers continue to love to this day.
Digital > Physical
After launching our app, we began receiving feedback from customer service that users were becoming 100% reliant on the mobile app and were no longer carrying their physical card. This was the by-product of early innovation collaboration with Speedway to create a sustainable digital coupon and wallet delivery system that could scale and also prevent fraud.
Forward-Thinking Feature Innovations
- In-app Gamification
- The first AR Conference app (in 2014)
- Choose your own offer – Monthly Perks
- Speedy Deals
- In-store digital experiences
- Personalization of the customer profile
- Targeted messaging
The Benefits of Strong Architecture
The planned architecture support combined with our presentation layer allowed Speedway IT, Loyalty, and Marketing to focus more on innovation of their own processes while delivering best-in-class service to customers. This also gave us an opportunity to help them innovate with gamification, in-app offer systems like Speedy Deals, and expand the Speedy Rewards® program with digital only features from the website and app.
Using Innovation to Create Value
The app and website had proven that when built on the rails of a highly successful loyalty program like Speedy Rewards®, quality mobile and website experiences were like rocket fuel to customer lifetime value. It was the partnership of Speedway with Magnetic that helped us create and deliver this value.
Each time Speedway came to us, our creative and technical expertise, along with our institutional knowledge helped us provide a winning solution to their millions of customers, at scale.
CONCLUSION
We have built a successful partnership with Speedway that has resulted in more topline revenue and more brand loyalty while building reliable digital channels for their most valuable customers, all during a time of tremendous growth and scale. These results combined with contributing to innovation in digital and securing them happy customers and industry praise, has made our partnership successful.
