Slurpee.com Rewards Web Application
7-Eleven, as you may have heard, has a rather famous frozen beverage known as the Slurpee. They wanted to increase the revenue from Slurpee sales while increasing loyalty among their customer base. 7-Eleven went to one of our partners to administer the promotional piece and we handled the e-commerce website. That’s what we call teamwork.
Situation
Tic Toc, a Dallas, Texas-based marketing services and promotions agency (and long-time partner of ours), came to us for help with a consumer loyalty program for the world-famous Slurpee frozen drink from the even more world-famous 7-Eleven convenience store chain.
The Slurpee program needed to reward loyal customers with points they could redeem for merchandise. Some of that merchandise was 7-Eleven-branded, but most was third-party merchandise from the Amazon.com award collection. This was a big assignment with huge stakes. We didn’t blink.
E-commerce Website
As part of the promotion, each Slurpee cup carried a unique promotional code. When the consumer registered their codes at Slurpee.com, the codes and associated value/size of the Slurpee were uploaded into a database for validation. Once validated, the codes were converted into point values and deposited into each user’s account. The user was then alerted through the app of total points earned, redeemed, and the amount of points available for use. Codes could only be entered one time and we included the ability for 7-Eleven to set an expiration date for any specific marketing campaign they wanted to run.
By connecting Slurpee.com to Amazon’s merchandise awards platform, users were able to browse their potential points-enabled purchases without ever leaving their Slurpee.com account page. We also created a Slurpee Boutique that offered branded merchandise, gift cards (for Fandango, Starbucks, GameStop, etc.), or items from “the vault,” which were limited releases of old school Slurpee-branded merchandise. We also included thousands of award choices (media, books, games, etc.) with lower price points so that the user had the option to feel immediate gratification for their Slurpee points. The price value of each award was dynamic, consistently updated by the API we connected to Amazon.com. Because of Amazon’s logistics, users received their awards as quickly as possible. That partnership was a big win for 7-Eleven.
Outcome
At first, the project appeared daunting, as any high-profile assignment would be. After all, creating an e-commerce website for millions of transactions worldwide, that has a crazy amount of back end development, along with API- and logistics-related challenges – for a world-famous (did we mention this was for 7-Eleven?) brand no less – couldn’t be anything but. In the end, however, success was quickly in our grasp and we ran the website for about seven years. The ultimate testament to its success was that we enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Tic Toc and 7-Eleven. Not to mention the Slurpee-specific revenue boosts 7-Eleven saw from the program.