Across China, Starbucks expects to bring Starbucks Delivers to more than 2,000 stores across 30 cities by the end of this calendar year.
Delivery
Starbucks started testing delivery in Miami this summer and the results are “promising,” Brewer reported.
Internationally, Starbucks' delivery partnership with Alibaba began September, launching in Beijing and Shanghai. Delivery has been expanded to all Starbucks stores in Beijing and Shanghai, and 11 cities in China. Across China, Starbucks expects to bring Starbucks Delivers to more than 2,000 stores across 30 cities by the end of this calendar year.
Personalization
Starbucks has been working on “reframing” its marketing and technology teams, which has led to a combination of its consumer insights, partner analytics and marketing analytics functions into a “new center of excellence.”
“As we elevate our ability to understand customers and drive that understanding through all of our customer-facing functions, we see significant benefits in combining these groups,” said Brewer. “The opportunity to unleash and democratize information across the entire enterprise, to ensure our customer is at the center of our day-to-day decision-making is powerful. And by having a smaller team and an easily accessible single source of the truth, we are enabling faster decision-making and delivering more relevant products and improved experiences.”
Active U.S. Starbucks Rewards (SR) members grew to 15.3 million, up 15% versus last year, which represented the strongest growth in seven quarters. SR members drive nearly 40% of tender in the U.S.
Additionally, digitally registered customers grew from 6 million at the end of Q3 to 10 million at the end of Q4, as the company developed its digital strategy for casual customers.
“Currently, we're engaging with these customers directly via e-mail with offers like Happy Hour,” noted Brewer. “But as we get to know who they are and what they want, we'll tailor specific offers with the goal of converting them to our SR program.”
“We're just beginning to send offers to this group of people,” noted CMO Matthew Ryan. “We have not yet begun to personalize and that's something we expect to do later this year. Remember that we're not in the business of creating digital relationships for digital relationship's sake.
“They're an enabler for us to communicate and talk to our customers. It is a way that we go to market. And by building that capability, it allows us to be less reliant on media and to be more reliant on customers pulling information from us in the future.”