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Sweetgreen is on the hunt for its most loyal customers. After piloting a subscription program earlier this year, Sweetgreen is debuting a new rewards offering today.
The deets: Called Rewards and Challenges, it enables customers to opt in to participate in weekly challenges, like spending $20 to receive $4 off toward their next purchase, adding a side item to receive a free beverage, or ordering delivery to receive free delivery on their next order.
- The feature is also meant to see what personalized elements consumers respond to as part of its future loyalty program.
- Throughout the past year-plus, Sweetgreen has been “testing personalized and cohorted offers” and iterating depending on the type of customer and their needs, Daniel Shlossman, Sweetgreen’s chief digital officer, told Retail Brew, with Rewards and Challenge being the latest.
“The beauty of something like Rewards and Challenges is that…you can give someone a challenge that is very different based on who they are as a customer versus someone else,” Shlossman said.
Trial and error: Shlossman said he hopes Rewards and Challenge will work in tandem with something like Sweetpass—the $10 subscription service the company tested for a month earlier this year. (It offered customers a $3 credit on certain orders once a day.)
- Sweetgreen sold just under 17,000 passes over the course of the pilot, according to the company. It found that 90% of customers surveyed said they were interested in purchasing a pass again after the trial, Shlossman said.
- And, as a bonus, 60% of subscribers were new, lapsed, or low-frequency customers.
“We’re gonna test our way there. We’re gonna continue to talk to customers about what they want, and this is that kind of next step in the process,” Shlossman said.
Looking ahead…What does the future of Sweetgreen’s broader loyalty program look like? Shlossman didn’t share a timeline but said it could feature a subscription and personalized promotional capabilities.
Sweetgreen is also very much about targeting digital customers: Those sales accounted for 66% of the company’s revenue of $102.6 million in Q1. “That’s really important for us to have that strong digital base,” Shlossman said. “We believe that [by] layering on things like Rewards and Challenges, we’re going to be able to up that value—especially as we’re heading into these tough economic times.”—KM