Photos are extremely important to people. They have the power to transport us back to our favorite moments and, as a result, keep us connected to the people, places, and things that help make us who we are.
Since 2003, customers all over the world have been trusting Mpix with their personal memories. With the promise of “premium quality and personalized care,” the Kansas-based home decor brand has been turning favorite memories into irreplaceable works of art that focus on the people and emotions each photo represents.
This desire to connect their customers to their most treasured memories is largely responsible for the ever-growing community behind the brand. What started as a small lab in the Midwest is now an internationally-known printing powerhouse, but as they continued to expand they realized they needed to properly engage their existing customers if they wanted that growth to continue.
Paul Rotter (Marketing Coordinator at Mpix) acknowledged that this had been a focus for quite some time.
"Our number one initiative was bringing customers back. We needed to keep customers engaged and interested in Mpix beyond new product releases and social posts."
Rotter explained that with this goal in mind, the Mpix team quickly came to the realization that a rewards program was the best way to achieve this.
Encouraging customer engagement with rewards
As an extremely visual brand, Mpix had always experienced a lot of success with customer engagement on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Highlighting their products and their customers’ experiences with them, Mpix was able to prompt engagement by keeping the focus on the people behind each photo.
This community mindset played perfectly into their plan to initiate a rewards program. The Mpix team understood that their brand community was eager to engage and just needed the opportunity to do so in more meaningful, valuable ways.
With the launch of Mpix Rewards, customers began to engage with the brand on a more regular basis. Now, social sharing, referrals, and purchases carried more weight that not only enriched their customer experience but also helped them discover more value from a brand they already knew and loved.
This early adoption and excitement was largely due to the fact that Rotter and his team made it a critical part of the Mpix customer experience from the beginning.
"We fit the program in where it makes sense, making sure that our customers know what it is and what they’re getting out of it. We announced it and started to send emails that directed customers towards our landing page or gave them more information about it, working that messaging into places that’s logical within their experience."
Mpix’s passion for providing an outstanding customer experience meant they needed to work with a rewards platform that could respect and maintain it properly. After years of planning and research, they discovered Smile and were eager to get started on their renewed retention strategy.
Improving the customer experience with Smile
From the very beginning, Mpix was confident that Smile was the perfect solution to help their program succeed.
"We needed to find the right solution provider who knew where we were coming from, understood our business, understood the kind of program that we wanted to run and was also able to help us get there."
Part of Smile’s appeal was the all-in-one approach to rewards. Driven by the goal of increasing customer engagement, Mpix was looking to add more touch points that could extend customer relationships beyond simply making purchases. With VIP tiers and personal referral codes, Mpix Rewards became an opportunity for customers to dive deeper into their engagement with the brand, making the customer experience more exciting and rewarding.
"One of the things that we really liked about Smile was their track record. They boasted an impressive client list of lots and lots of brands that people have heard of and do business with on a daily basis. That holds a lot of weight when we’re looking for something that’s reputable and that will set us up for long-term success."
With experience helping other visual brands, Mpix was also extremely confident that a Smile program could help preserve their exceptional branding. Customizing their customer panels, cards, and launchers allowed them to integrate their program seamlessly into the rest of their online experience, putting the focus on what customers already knew and loved about their brand.
All of these pieces came together to complete the puzzle Mpix was trying to solve. Since starting their program, Mpix has seen a 55% increase in average order value on member purchases, a 26% increase in redemption rate, and over 70% in Instagram followers.
These significant changes in customer engagement rates are undoubtedly the result of a rewards program that customers have fallen in love with.
"We’ve seen that every quarter since we launched our rewards program there have been more and more people taking advantage of it. Our customers are engaged and interested in using the promotional codes we offer as rewards. We have seen the value of our members steadily increase over time, which is exactly what we were looking to achieve."
Mpix’s story is proof that rewards create engagement opportunities that customers not only find valuable but are also looking for. By playing to their strengths with beautiful design and personalized experiences, Mpix built a rewards program that fits in perfectly with their desire to be a brand “inspired by life” that customers simply can’t wait to experience.
