1-800-Flowers saw a significant bump in its Passport loyalty program on Amazon’s Prime Day in July, drafting on the mega sales event as it grew Passport enrollments 300% that week.
“The conversion rate of our Passport offering was up in the 250% to 300% range,” said 1-800-Flowers CEO Chris McCann in a fourth quarter earnings call with analysts. “Revenue from our Passport customer was up about 150% that week. So with things like that that it gives us the opportunity – it was kind of a test to show us there are other types of campaigns that we can and will run throughout the year to try and accelerate our growth in Passport.”
Passport offers member perks like unlimited free shipping with no order threshold, access to same-day delivery and exclusive offers for $19.99 per year. In 2016 it was $29.99 per year.
McCann said there was a coordinated, go-to-market strategy across the company’s brands to promote what it called Passport Day, piggybacking on Prime Day. 1-800-Flowers was one of the first retailers to fully embrace and seek to take advantage of Prime Day, which started in 2015. The company’s brands include Harry & David, Cheryl’s Cookies, The Popcorn Factory and 1-800-Baskets.com.
“We continue to get good robust sign-ups into our Passport program,” he said. “The customers in Passport continue to really show the same type of behavior metrics that we’ve been seeing for a while in their frequency of increased spend and increased retention rates, all of that is still holding up.”
For the quarter, 1-800-Flowers saw its revenue increase 2.2% to $239.5 million, compared with $234.4 million in the prior year. Same-store sales were up 2.9%. Earnings per share was $0.12, compared with a loss of $0.17 cents in the same period last year. For the full year, revenues increased 1.8% to $1.19 billion, up from $1.17 billion in fiscal 2016. Comparable sales rose 3.1% for the year.