An interview by Adam Posner with Rosie McFarlane – Head of Loyalty at MECCA Brands.
If you have not heard of Beauty Loop – the membership program of MECCA , then you have been hiding under a rock for way too long!
A loved rewards program for many (could be million+), the Beauty Loop membership program of MECCA delivers “access to some truly beautiful rewards”, connects a passionate community and from what this interview reveals some results that may bring tears to your eyes.
I have been waiting for this Loyalty Leader interview (#28) with Rosie for many moons now and to have had the opportunity to have a chat with Rosie was a pure delight or to use a word I heard, was “MECCAmazing”!
This Loyalty Leader interview with Rosie is a box of beautiful insights (sorry!) and meaningful quotes (worth quoting).
I hope the written word(s) brings out the passionate energy, and thought-provoking insights that Rosie provided (in a UK accent).
Enjoy!
1. So, who is Rosie McFarlane (outside of work) + a little on your work biography
I started my career in the UK, probably much more as pure marketer 15 years ago working in London where I was on a graduate scheme for a big corporate company. I then worked in publishing for a bit and in luxury retail all over Europe and then in China.
And then I came to Melbourne in 2016 on a bit of a whim, visiting a friend. I was the world's oldest backpacker, staying in hostels in my late 20’s!
Then I moved into advertising where I worked as a planner with a few amazing world class creative agencies on great brands. I worked for a year at a start-up and then I landed at MECCA in 2020.
Oh, and as of early Feb (2024), I became an Australian citizen!
Australia is beautiful, I love it. I’m now settled into life here and have even committed to a dog with a flat face that can’t fly back to the UK.
Her name is Gracie and she is a French Bulldog Chihuahua or Bullhuahua!
(That’s the second unique breed of dog the Loyalty Leaders have revealed)
Gracie’s actually been in quite a few ad campaigns as well, because when I was working in ad agencies and there was a script and it needed a dog, they would call it Gracie. And so she appeared on some out-of-home billboards for a well-known bank campaign. Gracie is a bit of a celebrity dog, but no Insta account – I am not a stage mom!
Besides Gracie, I love life and the usual socialising and the friendships I have.
2. Tell us about the MECCA Beauty Loop membership program. Any stats you can share?
MECCA has had an amazing growth story over the past 26 years, but particularly in the last few years.
At MECCA, it's understood that Beauty Loop really is one of the levers at the heart of that incredible growth. It’s a huge driver of footfall into stores, a huge driver of traffic to the website and app plus a major contributor to positive customer sentiment.
The program rewards the beauty loving community with product rewards, sampling, free makeup applications, exclusive access to not yet launched products and VIP events.
One thing that we're really proud of is more than two thirds of our members are active Beauty Loop members. So that means they have not just clicked on an email, although no disrespect that's obviously important too, but they've actually, taken a trip into store off the back of the program.
We give out millions of rewards every year and that's something that we're really invested in.
We want as many people as possible to experience the magic that is Beauty Loop.
And some stats to share with you are; the average click through rate for Beauty Loop emails is 389% higher, and conversion rate is 836% higher than the MECCA email engagement benchmarks, which are already industry leading.
Organic social media activity with Beauty Loop consistently outperforms even MECCA’s extremely high benchmarks. Instagram Beauty Loop posts achieve around three times more engagement compared to other posts. TikTok posts featuring Beauty Loop achieve 573% more total impressions than our benchmark.
Our paid digital marketing delivers a Return on Advertising Spend of $51.38 on META, versus the Nielsen benchmark for the category of around $2.82.
Also, our campaigns deliver up to 250% in performance growth for participating brand partners.
While I can only give you results on uplifts, these are the numbers that we see day in and day out.
In MECCA, we talk about the whole business strategy being orchestrated around a flywheel, based on the Jim Collins's flywheel concept (“…the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn by turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond”)
For Beauty Loop we have our own flywheel. And we're seeing these kind of results really take off and these numbers are just continuing to grow.
Beauty Loop box campaigns alone of which there are only a few of those a year deliver 1.6 million visits to stores or our website each year.
We support these campaigns with bespoke packaging, personaliszed landing pages, written and video content that educates customers on their rewards, introduces them to new brands.
And we treat Beauty Loop box campaigns how you would treat a product launch campaign.
We go above the line and we're really, really proud of them. We don't just keep them reserved to talk about via email.
These further cement MECCA’s position as a curator of the world's best brands.
It positions us as building a community of people. I think that's helped deliver some of the crazy numbers that we see.
We’re also a finalist in the ALA’s Asia Pacific Loyalty Awards.
Well, that’s about it that I can share!
(The numbers shared are impressive!)
Can you share a little more about treating your Beauty Loop boxes as a campaign across multiple channels and not only email?
Yes, so often loyalty marketers, and this might be a little controversial, will only use channels such as email and maybe in-store collateral for a loyalty program campaign. You know, maybe push.
Whereas we treat a Beauty Loop campaign as a wider advertising campaign as a way to build, MECCA business more broadly rather than just keeping only to email.
And I think that working with other marketing teams here has been a big lever to our success.
I think that loyalty marketing marketers can be myopic on owned channels and moving metrics a quarter of a percent. But actually, if you have something extremely compelling to say to your best customers, why don't you say it to everybody else as a way to build your whole business and your brand more broadly.
If you have an amazing offer to existing customers, why wouldn't you want to use that to draw new customers into your business?
I've worked in other industries before where a huge complaint with customers was that new customers get more than existing customers, but they might not. But we just don't seem to tell the world about all the good stuff that we do for existing customers.
That’s really a mindset that we have here at MECCA. Our customers truly are the most important people to us
We use our rewards program to make sure we’re always front of mind.
3. What is the most unique element of the program?
I think that the fact that Beauty Loop has become a cultural phenomenon. It brings customers together like nothing I've honestly ever worked on before.
So, I think it’s our community.
During campaigns, our community organically goes to TikTok, to Instagram, to Facebook.
They're sharing their haul. There are these beautiful unboxing videos. Tiktok alone drive views of over 5 million per campaign.
And I think this sense of community that we have, has been created by our customers and we're just riding the wave with them.
They tell us when they don't like things. They tell us when they love things.
As an example, if a member doesn't like one of the rewards, or is confused about the program in some way, other members will come in and help, they literally do our job by moderating for us. That for me is so unique, in terms of what we're doing.
It’s authentic and it's not necessarily a dot point on a strategy that we dreamed up ten years ago.
4. If you had to choose the most important measures of success for your program, what would they be?
There are two that we look at.
NPS - we track NPS for the brand and for the program. It is a very important measure for us.
The second one is redemptions. How many of our members were we able to delight with rewards.
It means you make different decisions, because you put a lot more energy into making sure the rewards are compelling and amazing and delightful.
It ensures that you prioritize operational excellence, because you need to make sure the customers can access these rewards and it pivots your mind to be more member focused.
It also makes decision making easier.
We have a saying here at MECCA - ‘doing the wrong things for the right reasons’. So, this means, should I invest extra $ into this beautiful piece of content or, whatever it might be, and with clear metrics or objectives that you're trying to achieve, it's much easier to make decisions.
Decision fatigue is real when you get to a leadership position and so it does mean you can empower your teams as if they already know what the answer is to the decision making.
5. What are some of the challenges you face on an ongoing basis to keep the program relevant/fresh/thriving (internally and externally) and how do you overcome these?
Our program has become so big and so above the line that everything that we do is really examined and instantly responded to by customers.
I think this is a blessing and a challenge. It's maybe a bit of a humble brag, but it really is the thing that keeps me up at night.
While I appreciate it's a position I'm sure lots of loyalty people would love to be in or are in themselves, we challenge ourselves daily to constantly deliver newness at a scale that I don't know is really done anywhere else.
You have to keep ahead of growth with innovation and in a MECCAmazing way!
We don't just do stuff averagely at MECCA. So that’s a challenge.
We also want to make every single reward feel special and not repeatitive. And when you are delivering almost 50 campaigns a year it can be quite difficult.
A challenge I set the team is to innovate, even in a small way for every single campaign.
That doesn't necessarily have to be member facing. It could be how we operationalise, how we engage our retail teams or across traditional marketing activity.
Our team have been blowing me away with some kind of innovation for every campaign in a way that ensures that we're not constantly pivoting, confusing, and changing things, but trying to do something interesting each time to keep one of our many stakeholders engaged or improve their experience in some way.
A big challenge the size of the program. If you think about how many millions of people are in the program in a country the size of Australia it is quite difficult to operationalize at the scale that we are at now with the quality levels not slipping.
It’s interesting that even though I look after Beauty Loop, it's not just like the strategy and the marketing delivery. It's everything from procurement to inventory management to allocation to forecasting to retail engagement. It’s all the end-to-end supply chain as well.
We're a little business. A business within a business.
6. What advice would you give to brands thinking about a loyalty program?
You probably don't need one!
I'm sorry, Adam, at least in the traditional sense.
Think back to the objectives of what you're hoping a loyalty program will deliver your business and customer. Are you trying to foster a repeat purchase or higher basket value or actually engender real brand love?
Because I believe, often people think that they need a loyalty program because they need a loyalty program, but actually that probably wouldn't be the most cost-effective way to deliver on the objectives that their business most needs.
I think if you still want a loyalty program, then think outside the box of traditional points as currency or a nudge through discounting strategy - to me, that's not real loyalty, it's a margin-eroder and there's already major players in the market that are super established, so you probably won't be able to have the impact that you need, and you probably won't be able to do something meaningful without really thinking outside the box.
I think Beauty Loop, when it was created 12, 13 years ago, was really thinking outside the box (literally) and it was something different. And so that's probably why we've been able to ride on the shoulders of giants, as it were.
Our success now is because of the success of the teams 12, 13 years ago coming up with it.
With Beauty Loop we try and see it as a way of rewarding customers and introducing them to the joy of new products.
We love to see the rewards as gifts. (WOW, love this mindset!))
We always take extra special care and attention. How we package everything up, how we create content, how we make it feel really generous and beautiful every time a customer collects them.
In-store they do the most amazing job.
Loyalty programs need to break out of just offering (say) a 5% discount if you jump through 57 hoops, especially new programs.
7. What’s your biggest frustration with loyalty programs in general?
When a program isn't synergistic with the wider brand experience of the business.
I see it differently at MECCA. Beauty Loop is generous, MECCA is generous. Our hosts are generous.
8. What do you think is creeping up on programs that could disrupt them for better or worse?
Yes, data and security.
More importantly, I think is customer apathy and attention.
9. What’s the most underestimated force behind a program’s performance?
Data, but not customer data in a creepy way. We have amazing research access to our customers. They talk about us organically. We just learn so much about our brand and so much about our customers and what they do and don't like.
Having access to customers attention at a lower cost is also a force behind a program’s success.
10. What are three most important skills a loyalty program marketer needs?
Same as any other marketer. And if you don't follow these, that's where you're going to go wrong.
- Customer centricity
- Strategic creative thinking and
- More important really, an understanding of the commercials and the financials.
As a discipline, like in any other marketing role, broad or specific, understand what you're trying to achieve, who you want to go after, what differentiates you, communicate it consistently and creatively, done! That is my answer. In a box and a bow.
On financials, we have to get better as an industry understanding the commercials and the financials. Being able to talk confidently about the commercials of your role within the business and then the business more widely, is the only way to be taken seriously.
Your job as a leader of a loyalty program is to be working with your CFO to educate them that your role and your team and your job is a profit centre and not a cost centre.
Your program is a business within a business.
You need to have every single offer of value to customers under your program umbrella because a discount should be a luxury that you don't just give out willy nilly.
I think you need to hoover up all the value and keep it in your one program.
11. Leave us with a lasting loyalty thought
Summary
This Loyalty Leader interview was, to quote Rosie “MECCAmazing”!
With so many insights shared, I have only picked five as quotable quotes:
1. Open up to more opportunities to promote your program
“I think that loyalty marketing marketers can be myopic on owned channels and moving metrics a quarter of a percent. But actually, if you have something extremely compelling to say to your best customers, why don't you say it to everybody else as a way to build your whole business and your brand more broadly.”
2. Community is not a dot point on a strategy
“ I think that sense of community we're building…is so unique, in terms of what we're doing. It’s authentic and it's not necessarily a dot point on a strategy that we that we dreamed up ten years ago.”
3. Be realistic about the position your program is in
“While I appreciate it's a position I'm sure lots of loyalty people would love to be in, however our program has become so big and so above the line that everything that we do is really examined and instantly responded to by customers. So, we constantly have to keep stepping up and delivering newness at a scale that I don't know, is really done anywhere else.
You have to keep ahead of growth with innovation and in a MECCAmazing way!
4. Make rewards special
“We want to make every single reward feel special and not iterative.”
“With Beauty Loop we try and see it as a way of rewarding customers and introducing them to the joy of new products. We love to see the rewards as gifts.”
5. Our loyalty program is a business within a business
“It’s interesting that even though I look after Beauty Loop, it's not just like the strategy and the marketing delivery. It's everything from procurement to inventory management to allocation to forecasting to retail engagement. It’s all the end-to-end supply chain as well. “
“We're like a little business. A business within a business.“
Thanks Rosie!
Have a happy loyalty day.
