As 2022 comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to say thank you for your continued support, trust and partnership. 2022 was a year full of yay, and we are so thrilled you were with us on that journey. It simply wouldn’t have been the year it was without you.
At the start of the year, we couldn’t have predicted how it would unfold. However, despite lingering doubts around what effect Covid would continue to have, it turned out to be a fantastic year of progression and achievements, not just for us, but for the industry as a whole.
According to Inside Retail, the Australian Retailers Association (ARA) now expects Christmas spending to reach $66 billion in November and December – an increase of 6.4 per cent over last year! With ARA CEO Paul Zahra saying, “Retail sales are running at record levels at the moment, and our forecasts show sales will remain strong for the remainder of the year. There’s a delayed lag associated with rising interest rates and inflationary pressures, so there will inevitably be a softening of sales, but it appears that won’t occur until next year.”
With the ARA, Salesforce and Roy Morgan’s latest insights predicting:
- NSW will spend nearly $20 billion in pre-Christmas sales - an increase of 3.1 per cent over last year!
- 84 per cent of sales will take place prior to the week of Christmas
- 25 per cent of all the sales during the holiday period will take place during cyber week
- The average discount rate will be highest during Cyber Week, averaging 22 per cent
- 70 per cent of all traffic and 60 per cent of all orders are to occur on a mobile device during the holiday season.
While Power Retail’s Trajectory report #57 tells us shoppers are 69 per cent more likely to shop at an online store they have not purchased from before if there was a money-back rewards offer.
But what about us? What made our year so special - apart from working with you, that is? It has been an extraordinary year for Cashrewards, and, as an extension to your marketing team, we wanted to share with you the many wins, achievements and moments of joy we experienced along the way. Here are just a few of the things that put smiles on our dials.
New Brand Campaigns and activations
In 2022, we launched our new brand campaign, riding roller coasters and beagles through the clouds, and drove our ‘Yay to cashback when you shop’ message through always-on marketing along with focused activity during key retail moments such as Black Friday and Christmas, utilising TV, BVOD, Radio, OOH, Digital and PR, along with sponsorships and activations.
Our focus was on growing the Cashrewards presence in-market and driving positive, engaging and newsworthy media for both our brands.
If you missed it, you can check out our new brand campaign video here and our social experiment ‘Yay to free cash’ here.
Reaching 1.7 million members
Throughout the year, with your help, we continued to grow and scale, with our membership hitting 1.7 million Aussies. Not only did we surpass our goal of 1.5 million, we also deepened our relationship with both our new and existing members by offering more exclusive deals.
2000 brands onboard
But it wasn’t just our membership that grew, it was our family too. We’re proud to be able to say that we now have over 2000 brands on our platform.
So, a big welcome to our new family members! And to our existing brands, wow, what a year! Together, we’ve really shaken up cashback. What gets us even more excited though, is the many more exciting opportunities we’ll experience together in the coming year. We literally CAN’T wait!
Product development
We worked hard to make Cashrewards easier to use, more engaging and more intuitive, with some exciting product developments for our platform. We improved our search functionality, implemented a new UX design for the website and really focused on creating more engaging brand pages to excite and delight our members and put you - and us - in the best light possible!
Engagement
This year, Black Friday was Black FriYay for our members and brands. We had some incredible engagement over Click Frenzy, Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber weekend. In fact, what we achieved with our partners was OFF THE CHARTS and contributed to our BIGGEST MONTH ON RECORD! It looked like:
- November Traffic - Up 44 per cent vs SPLY
- November New Members - Up 83 per cent vs SPLY
- November Sales - Up 70 per cent vs SPLY
- Shopping kicked off early with customers taking full advantage of our Early Birds campaign which totally exceeded our expectations with a 343 per cent increase in Sales vs SPLY.
- And when we blasted into Cyber Weekend, we delivered a huge uplift of 64 per cent in sales vs Black Friday Cyber Month 2021.
Thanks to our partners and our incredible team for delivering a strong result! And congratulations to all our featured Brands, you kicked some serious goals in 2022!
Understanding our members in-depth
We wanted to offer our members a more personalised experience when they shopped. To do this we realised that we needed to understand our members better. So, we developed the Cashrewards personas. Through these personas we got to know our members better, giving us insights in how to better target our members and make sure that every shop was filled with joy, by linking them with brands we knew they’d love! That’s you!
We’re winners, baby!
2022 also saw all our hard work on both sides recognised with us winning some amazing awards.
At the Rakuten Advertising Golden Link Awards 2022 we won the Advertiser's Choice Award for Publisher of the Year, superstar Dom Ferguson won the Manager of the Year in the Publisher division, and for Campaign of the Year we received a ‘highly commended’.
We also won Best Loyalty Program 2022 at the Finder Customer Satisfaction Awards and Best stand and activation at the Online Retailer Awards 2022.
Starlight Children’s Foundation
As you know, we believe that doing well and doing good in business are not mutually exclusive. That’s why we continue to donate 1% of all redeemed cashback to the legends at the Starlight Children’s Foundation. As of this year, we have donated more than $1 million to the Foundation, brightening the lives of 30,000 seriously ill children and their families.
This year, however, we didn’t stop there. With your help and involvement, we took on a few other initiatives as well. So, we want to extend a big thanks to all those who were involved in:
- A very competitive - but friendly - Kick for Kids
- The entertaining Circus themed Star Ball in Sydney
- The beautiful Spring Gala themed Star Ball in Melbourne
- The SuperSwim - speedos and all
- Our annual Shop 4 Starlight retail campaign in May
- The artistic and creative Starlight Thank-a-thon
- And, our in-house Funfair, which saw us turn the office into our very own Luna Park
Events
Who could forget all the events we held throughout the year?! It was so great to see you at so many of them! As an industry, we’ve played catch-up for the cavalcade of webinars we endured throughout COVID. Zoom-fatigue, anyone? It has been amazing to see, host, chat and share a cold beverage with all of you this year.
A big thank you to you, our partners
So, thank you for being part of such an amazing year. We truly are honoured to be working with each and every one of you, and hearing your positive feedback has made us feel the warm-and-tingly’s.
- 91 per cent of you say we offer a great return on investment
- 94 per cent believe we offer marketing opportunities that are valuable to support business goals and customers
- We’re rated no.1 in engaged web traffic with lowest bounce rate and longest visit duration AND monthly and unique web visitors on mobile.
We can’t wait to see what 2023 brings and we look forward to finding out… together!
Thank you, and Merry Christmas!
Sources:
Inside Retail - ARA survey reveals consumer pre-Christmas spending intentions
Roy Morgan - Pre-Christmas sales forecast to reach $63.9 billion – up 3% on last year
Inside Retail - Monash survey predicts Australian retail Christmas trends