EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Lowe’s puts customer at center of promotions
Lowe’s Companies Inc. is developing a highly tailored shopper experience to increase frequency of visits and spend.
Chain Store Age sat down with Amanda Bailey, Lowe’s VP of customer loyalty and marketing, at the recent Shoptalk 2025 conference in Las Vegas to discuss the home improvement giant’s initiatives in loyalty, personalization, and AI-enabled customer service.
What made Lowe’s decide to launch the MyLowe’s Pro Rewards and MyLowe’s Rewards offerings?
Loyalty is a big part of our total home strategy. Those programs are a way to identify more of our customers, give them rewards and drive repeat trips.
Loyalty at Lowe's was previously just focused on our pro customers, because those are the customers that you know are coming every week. When I came in a few years ago, the challenge was that the homeowner customer is 70% of our business. So we had the opportunity to expand and rethink and reimagine what loyalty could mean for the homeowner customer.
Lowe’s first launched the MyLowe's Rewards homeowner loyalty program in March 2024 with good success out of the gate. It set the foundation for the loyalty ecosystem at that point. Fast forward to just a couple of weeks ago now, we relaunched our previously existing MVPs Pro Rewards & Partnership Program as MyLowe’s Pro Rewards, taking into account all that we learned - what worked, what pro customers liked.
[READ MORE: Lowe’s rebrands, adds new benefits to rewards program for pro customers]
We simplified the experience and then we also used the backbone of MyLowe’s Rewards, which was simpler and easier to use. Now both programs are on the same currency, with some discrete benefits for our pro customers versus our homeowner customers.
The whole loyalty ecosystem is in-house-built. Lowe’s developed the back-end platform in close partnership with our technology team. It’s all homegrown.
What kind of response has Lowe’s received from homeowner as well as pro customers?
On the homeowner side, the response has been great. Lowe’s has more than 30 million members in the program for MyLowe’s rewards. Early results indicate members are spending 50% more than non-members.
We have also seen engagement in our app start to pick up more and have seen members coming in for our free member gifts, which is a new thing that we were able to introduce through loyalty that drives reasons to come to our store outside of typical home improvement needs.
On the pro side, there has been a lot of great feedback from pros on how this program is so much simpler. It prioritizes things they need most and save time and money. That’s what the pros want. They just want to be able to get the job done, and we want to help them and support them in doing it.
What is Lowe’s personalization strategy?
Now all the customers walking through the store door have a reason to enter their phone number before they check out, meaning we can start to capture more behavioral and transactional data so we understand what did a shopper buy or not buy.
Lowe’s is using that data to start to inform product recommendations and member deals and ways that we can provide more relevant content and experiences for those shoppers. In addition to that, we are also collecting zero-party data. When a customer joins our loyalty program as a homeowner we ask things like do they own a pet or enjoy gardening.
This gives us preferences, the things that that people do in their home or need in their home. For pro loyalty customers, we are finding out what type of professional they are, such as a landscaper or plumber.
By getting that opt-in information, we then deliver a more curated experience and offers that they really need. Lowe’s personalization strategy is really about keeping the customer at the center and using that information to tailor the experience, content and the offers that we deliver.
What type of technology supports Lowe’s marketing efforts?
Lowe’s has a broad marketing technology stack that we're continuing to evolve. The core database and core marketing technology tools are in-house-developed, but we work with a lot of third parties to automate different parts of the personalized customer journey.
Does the customer loyalty and marketing team work with the Lowe’s tech hub?
We work closely with the tech hub, because so much of the innovation that we're doing is to help customers. Lowe’s is focused on thinking about technology as a way to help customers.
One recent example is MyLow, our new AI-powered virtual advisor. A customer can ask it how to fix a leaky faucet, or what fertilizer to use on their grass in the summer in their specific area.
MyLow has been an exciting innovation that gets the customer and our brand really connected incredibly well. Lowe’s also just rolled out MyLowe’s Home, a new innovation exclusively for loyalty members. It gives customers access to digitized warranties and information for products they have bought.,
Members can log into their loyalty account and load up the appliances in their home. MyLowe’s Home pulls all those manuals for the customer automatically and can recommend products personalized to their home and their preferences.
