What: Macy’s is increasingly making its customers loyal through its membership programme which represents now a sizeable portion of the business.

Why it is important: There is a race to increasing total numbers of memberships for all retailers of the world. This is the best way to combine customer knowledge and retention, by acquiring the data allowing to maintain customers’ loyalty through time.

The four-tiered Star Reward programme has become an important part of Macy’s business, as it represented 70% of the total transactions in 2021 (either by being already a member or becoming one while making the transaction). This represented an increase of 3.5m members for Q4 2021 alone and analysts believe that the main reason for enrolling is to guarantee a great instore experience (which is a different motivation than for Amazon, where customers enroll for fast delivery at no cost). This has important implications in terms of loyalty to the brand name.

The Start Reward project has been launched in 2017 and is opened to any customer, without any obligation to own a Macy’s credit card.

More than 70% of Macy’s 2021 transactions were tiered to its loyalty programme