Avanti West Coast and Paragon DCX
Exceeded their target by 50.5% with 99,000 member sign-ups
Background
Avanti West Coast (AWC) has been at the forefront of British public transport since 2019, operating nine trains per hour from London Euston, offering services to destinations including Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.
The company also provides services to North Wales, extending routes to Bangor and Wrexham.
The challenge
AWC recognised the need for a fresh approach to customer loyalty. Their coalition scheme with Nectar no longer provided a return on investment or meaningful customer rewards.
AWC sought input from its travellers, creating Club Avanti, a new loyalty programme designed to offer instant, high-value rewards.
This loyalty scheme offers immediate benefits such as a free hot drink upon sign-up (over £1 million in value), free first-class and standard premium tickets worth £5 million, early access to discounted fares, and exclusive offers like 10% off onboard food and drinks. Members also enjoy early platform updates at London Euston and those in their Platinum tier can enjoy the additional benefit of accessing the first-class lounge.
Watch the full customer story
Watch our video which covers the full impact of Apteco software on Avanti West Coast. Presented by Oliver Yaffe, Loyalty Manager at AWC and Matt Foord, Analytics and Apteco Practice Lead at Paragon DCX.
The Apteco Solution
The use of Apteco software was key to measuring the programme’s success. Working alongside Paragon DCX and leveraging Apteco’s data analytics, AWC gained a deep understanding of customer behaviour and optimised the programme’s benefits. Regular KPI dashboards ensured continuous improvement and kept Club Avanti at the forefront of rail loyalty in the UK.
Tracking uptake of the scheme was naturally important, but AWC were also eager to track both the level of engagement with the scheme, as well as the AWC brand as a whole.
Thanks to the power of Apteco, multi-tab Orbit dashboards were set up to drive the measurement of this engagement. A primary dashboard tab was built to track the main KPI’s such as registration volumes, tier thresholds and email engagement, as well as a secondary KPI’s tab to measure how well received the rewards of the scheme were with the end user.
Use of the Orbit dashboards ensured the team were able to constantly check that each reward was driving the expected engagement, but also kept the wider business reassured that the programme was driving incremental revenue rather than lowering the brand value proposition. The results were firmly proving the former.
Each reward has been tracked from initiation through to today, as well as looking ahead to those rewards still to expire in the future. This means that every single one of those is able to be measured for immediate uptake as well as understanding the breakage rate of each at the point of expiry to give a true measure of engagement among the loyalty members.
Through integrations with the AWC ESP data flags from FastStats, models and virtual variables are passed across to enable enhanced knowledge of the data to be used within campaigns. This includes the loyalty campaigns.
As the Club Avanti members started to transact more frequently, it was then easier to identify when their transaction behaviour was outside of the norm, enabling a churn model to be built in FastStats. With this, the status flags passed to the ESP to trigger reactivation and retention communications to the members at risk. Given the knowledge and understanding this provides the team, this model incidentally has also been made available to the entire database outside of just the loyalty membership base.
We're thrilled with the response to Club Avanti, with membership continuing to grow (and no signs of slowing down!). Members value the discounts and opportunity to earn free tickets. The data in Apteco underpins all of this and gives us great insight into how well the programme is working.
Mark Murphy, Head of Loyalty, Avanti West Coast
Mark Murphy, Head of Loyalty, Avanti West Coast
The impact on the business
Club Avanti has successfully transformed customer relationships with a brand-owned loyalty scheme that is customer-centric at heart.
Club Avanti achieved a sales penetration growth from 43% to 48% within the first nine months, showcasing the programme's expanding influence on customer engagement.
Club Avanti exceeded its membership target by 50.5%, enrolling 99,000 members in its first year, highlighting both the programme’s appeal and Apteco’s effective data-driven strategies.
The loyalty programme achieved an impressive 86% email open rate among non-members, demonstrating its effective communication strategy.
Club Avanti members travelled an average of 3.6 more journeys per year than non-members, highlighting a significant increase in customer retention and usage.
Orbit has really supported in bringing the numbers of the programme to life. We often spent a lot of time pulling numbers for reporting and that is now easily accessible within a few clicks of a button, providing the Loyalty team and the wider business that snapshot view at a glance.
Stephanie Lee, Account Director, Paragon DCX
Stephanie Lee, Account Director, Paragon DCX