Giant Eagle scales and optimizes loyalty program
A Pittsburgh-based regional food, fuel and pharmacy retailer has successfully replatformed its loyalty program for real-time personalization and future-proofed operations.
Giant Eagle initially launched its in-store targeted rewards program called myPerks in November 2020. In 2022, the grocer selected Eagle Eye's AIR platform to provide the advanced loyalty and enterprise-wide capabilities needed to drive Giant Eagle’s personalization and rewards strategy.
In 2024, Giant Eagle enhanced the myPerks program, giving customers the ability to earn rewards points called perks faster. Coinciding with the introduction of the enhanced, all Giant Eagle customers enrolled in the retailer’s fuelperks+ loyalty program were transitioned into myPerks.
[READ MORE: Giant Eagle enhances, expands myPerks loyalty program]
The grocer has leveraged Eagle Eye AIR throughout this process. Within nine months, Giant Eagle migrated its loyalty program to the Eagle Eye AIR platform, which uses Google Cloud tools including Compute Engine, Cloud Run and Kubernetes Engine to support a BigQuery data engine that stores reporting and analytics data, as well as the Google Looker Studio reporting/dashboard tool for visualizing and reporting on that data.
This system enables Giant Eagle to have greater control and flexibility over the types of loyalty promotions and campaigns it can create and deploy, enabling a more agile and targeted approach to customer engagement while also allowing it to use new promotion types.
Utilizing the AIR platform also allowed Giant Eagle to leverage the Eagle Eye Wallet, which creates an operational single-customer view by tracking all customer interactions across all touchpoints. This insight enables the retailer to understand its customers better and deliver more personalized marketing based on individual customer activity and preferences, increasing the program's overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Leveraging Eagle Eye’s solutions, Giant Eagle transitioned the myPerks loyalty program transitioned from a traditional batch process for points and rewards accrual to real-time cloud adjudication with POS integration. This helped future-proof the program so that the rewards framework, including membership tiers and earning rules, can evolve to meet changing customer demand and be optimized for maximum return. The program can scale as Giant Eagle grows, accommodating as many new members as the retailer can attract and retain with enhanced benefit capabilities.
In addition, Giant Eagle has been able to implement new functionalities, such as personalized pricing, gamification, supplier partnerships, and contextualized and behavior-based offers. Partnering with Eagle Eye to implement these capabilities has proven to be less labor-intensive and more cost-effective than in-house development.
"Eagle Eye has advanced and accelerated our efforts to bring our customers the most personalized and rewarding loyalty platform in the country," said Justin Weinstein, executive VP, chief merchandising & marketing officer, Giant Eagle.
Other results include:
- Loyalty households have grown by 53,000.
- Delivery of 20-25 million personalized offers per month.
- Offer types including single-use coupons, multi-use promotions, personalized offers and continuity promotions.
- Thirteen loyalty campaign types are live in production, while the retailer simultaneously tests 10 new campaign types that will launch during the fourth quarter.
"Giant Eagle’s fuelperks was a legendary loyalty program, and myPerks built on that success to reach millions of American shoppers," Jeff Baskin, chief revenue officer at Eagle Eye, said in emailed commentary to Chain Store Age. “A program of that stature deserves advanced personalization capabilities, future-proof functionality, and exceptional ROI. Our AIR platform gives it exactly those advantages."
Headquartered in Pittsburgh and founded in 1931, Giant Eagle Inc. operates more than 470 stores throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana.
