How Asda runs its Asda Rewards app with Amplience CMS

Hello, everybody. I’m Tracey Burnett and I’m the product manager on the Asda Rewards loyalty app. And I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking today about sort of how we use Amplience within our app and how our journey has been with Amplience. And I’ve been listening around the room today, and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of partners of Amplience who’ve been with them a very long time. And we are quite a newcomer, really. We’ve only been with them about two and a half years. So I’m going to sort of take you through The journey that we’ve been on with Amplience and what we’ve done, why we’ve done it and sort of and take you through that process. Asda Rewards launched a pilot back in June 2022 and was very small scale pilot.

We went to our colleagues in our Yorkshire stores. So we really sort of did a very small scale, very basic pilot, and then we went full scale launched to all customers from September 2022. I joined after just after that in October 2022. So I very much been with Asda Rewards throughout the journey over the last four years. And once we went to full scale in September 2022, the Asda Rewards user base grew really quickly. We grew our weekly active users really quickly, and it became the one tool, the one piece of Asda, that the business really wanted to grow and really wanted to develop.

So how has the app evolved? The next slide was a little bit scary. This is where we started. So back in 2022. This was a trial app that went out to our colleagues in Yorkshire. And as you can see, the blue and yellow is just not Asda. And but this is where we started from. By September 2022, we very quickly got to the point that we’d started using the Asda green. And you can see the Asda logos, you can see the Asda green in there. We continued evolving. So this is some images from early 2024. And we had just about at this point started integrating with Amplience. So a couple of things you see on here are starting to be driven by Amplience. And I’m going to go into this a little bit more detail as I go through the slides today. And this is where we are today. So a totally different look and feel from the blue and yellow, three years ago.

And what you can see on the screen here, around 80% of our app is driven by Amplience. So again, as we go through this again I’m going to explain as we go. But there has been another evolution and one that’s a little less visible in the background. And that is our Amplience journey. So we’ve had this very much gone from blue to the green to the, we call it Asda blue, but it’s more like a greeny blue in the background. But behind the scenes, we’ve had another evolution. Everything was hardcoded in the app. So we wanted to change text. If we want to change colors, icons, images, banners, everything had to go through a dev cycle. So we had to create tickets, put them into dev sprints, put it through QA and testing. So the lead times to do all of this was really, really long.

Every change needed development, which just wasn’t a great place to be. We couldn’t be very reactive. Everything took a long time to get into, and it just really didn’t help us on our journey. This was a problem. I’m just going to talk through a couple of other things that where we really struggle, because I think it’ll really highlights of where we were and where we are now. So we had to implement Asda’s Christmas campaign within the Rewards app. So some of you probably remember that we had the Elf campaign, where we had the Asda Elf, and we were asked to implement the fur collar that you can see on the screen. There we were asked to implement elements of the Elf. We wanted to change the welcome screen in our app to be the Elf welcome screen.

But to do all of this, we had to use our dev team for a full two weeks sprint to get that live. And we only got the assets really, really late because everything was NDA. Because the Elf was a huge campaign for Asda, we couldn’t get the assets until sort of really later on. I think it was really late when everything got released, we then had to really quickly spin that around, and we then had to do an app release during the change freeze period. And for anybody who works in retail, change freezes like in the Golden Quarter are the things that you cannot override. And we had to do that to be able to do this. And then at the other end of that, at the Christmas when you want to take down those Christmas assets again, we had to do another app release and we had to do that on New Year’s Day.

So we had people working New Year’s Day to do app releases to take the content out, which, as from a team point of view, from a colleague point of view, is just not ideal. We had other features within the app. This is our Christmas Cashpot, and all the copy that you can see on the screen here was hard coded and or used our loyalty engine to drive it. We use the loyalty engine for some of the copies, so where you can see the grid in the middle, how the Cashpot works, that was driven through our loyalty engine. We do have some ability to change that, but it is an overnight process. So the day the Christmas Cashpot unlocked, at some point in November, we needed the copy to say how the Cashpot works until midnight. The Cashpot unlocked at one minute past midnight. We needed that copy to change, so we had to have colleagues working really late in the night to change that copy. Again, not great for my colleagues, and we really couldn’t be very reactive with it at all. And I think one of the worst ones that we had issues with games.

We introduced the capability to earn a turn on a game by making certain purchases in the store, and we worked with a game partner to actually play the game. But from our app we have to link it out to a game. So all of these sort of you can see them on the screen, we call them Call to Action as the CTA. You’ve got, an icon color. All of that was had to be done in Firebase by our support team. And all of that had to go through the change request process with a seven day lead time every time we wanted to do it. So again, impractical to manage as we all as we all know, things don’t get signed off very early.

Retail things take very much last minute.com. It was really difficult to manage and we could only have one game at a time, which meant that we couldn’t have multiple games running and we couldn’t sell the game space to suppliers because we could only have one game at once. As it says there, every change went into development, and getting sign-off generally at least a month in advance for copy, for colors, for icons was quite often a problem because retail is quite reactive, and actually things don’t necessarily get signed off that far in advance, or actually something happens and they want to change something.

So getting those signed off was just a real sort of issue for us. So the decision was made to use Amplience and that was quite an easy decision. We were already using Amplience within our grocery shopping website, so it was quite an easy decision for us just to say, do you know what? Let’s use Amplience to drive the rewards mobile app. Across sort of the first three months we were working with Amplience, we worked with a fantastic app development partner, Apadmi, who are based in Manchester, and Apadmi and Amplience worked really closely together across lots of workshops, across lots of, sort of conversations.

And we had a three month lead time from first having those conversations to our first use case being live in app, which I think was a really quite short timescale for what we were looking to do. And we were really focused on just driving that first use case. Our first use case was actually banners in-app, before Amplience came along, we used to drive banners through our loyalty engine. And if you imagine that we use banners across the top of the app to drive promotions, to drive supplier competitions, to drive whatever we want to drive. But within the loyalty engine they showed in the order that you uploaded them. So if we had six banners and we wanted to take out banner number three, we had to literally delete all six banners and load the five that we wanted in the right order.

And we had to do that every single time. We wanted to change a banner and we couldn’t schedule that at all. We literally were just doing it on the fly. And then we had to wait overnight for all of those changes to go through. So it was challenging and just an example of the form that we used to use with Eagle Eye. So our first iteration, we did two sets of banners. We did the small banner carousel at the top of the home screen, which is where you can see the delivery pass on there. And we also did stacked banners at the bottom of the home screen, which is the green ones and the right hand side. Yeah. So with it fully driven by Amplience, it was much easier for the proposition team.

It meant that we could use the scheduling functionality that was built in within Amplience. We can reorder them really easily with drag and drop. And we could do really quick changes on the fly as well, which made us much more reactive. From a banner point of view. We’ve continued to iterate those. So the second iteration was that our stacked banners turned into a carousel. And our third use case is that we’ve just gone live with this. In the last sort of 6 to 8 weeks, we’ve gone with new banner templates which open dynamic content screens. So we now have this much bigger banner, which is very much templated. So the top of the banner has the title, the copy and the CTA Call to Action button with the image below.

When our users press that yellow button, the Find out More button, it opens the dynamic screen, which is driven by Amplience underneath. And that really is where the supplier. Most of this is supplier-sold space. The supplier gets the opportunity to have more images, to have more content, more information. We can do bullet points, we can do numbers, we can do click out buttons to, the supplier’s own website or to a competition page. And we use that really now to drive that banner space. It allows us to have more content. It allows that initial banner to be really, really just graphical.

If I just go back and look at the green banners on there, how much information you have to try and cram into a tiny little space, the new banner just gives us the opportunity to be much more visual and much more impactful to customers, but give us the screen with the dynamic content screen underneath to then drive that content. And since then, we’ve never really looked back. We very much have an Amplience-first mindset. So whenever we are thinking about new features or new spaces within the app, it’s never a conversation. Shall we put it in Amplience? It’s always a conversation, why wouldn’t we put it in? And we very much work with the developers on And from the outset, when we go through our ticket writing and refine them with the developers, we make the assumption it’s Amplience. And as we go through, we’ll talk about, well, how often are we going to change it? What are we going to do?

What’s the business reasons why we want to put it in Amplience? And it very much informs the decision that, as I said throughout the beginning, I think that around 80, 85% of our app was driven through Amplience because we’re very much Amplience first. From an app point of view, just a few examples of some of the things that we do in Amplience. We run seasonal theming. So as everybody knows, we have key moments in retail Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s Day where you want to potentially change things up and do things. And we’ve introduced theming, so we can now drive the welcome screen. You can see the Asda 60th. So that was the birthday on the welcome screen.

The two in the middle would be much better if I could have gotten them to move? But I couldn’t get the slides to move as we were doing it. What should happen is the balloons should fly up the screen, and the snow should fall down the screen. And we use Lottie files within Amplience to drive that, that sort of functionality. So when the user first opens the app, they see the balloons rise or the snow falling or whatever we choose to do, and it’s just a really nice touch that lasts only about two seconds when you first open the app, but it really just adds a little bit of excitement, a little bit of sort of.

Oh, it’s Christmas or oh, it’s a birthday party. We can then use banners across the top of the screen. So we have the ability to do the bunting or the balloons. And what we can also do as well is change colors really easily so we can change the cash card colors. You can see on the middle one that we’ve got snow on top of the Cashpot, so we can have things that land on top of the Cashpot. We did some work with footballs for the World Cup earlier in the year, and we can use little icons. So next to where it says your coupons and offers just for you, those little icons that we drive through. And we also have introduced the ability to do a what we call a complete theme. We’ve only done this in 2 or 3 different, two different options, but the Valentine’s theme on the end is literally a single toggle in Amplience.

So we’ve basically built up behind that toggle. The ability that the cash card will change, the background will change, the icons will appear, whatever else we want to do, but from a user point of view, it’s simply a switch on the Valentine’s theme and everything appears. Whereas what we have done for the Christmas and the birthday theme is we’ve selected individual elements that we’ve chosen to apply to certain areas of the app, and that is how, the majority of the time, we do our theming, but we have got that ability to do that simple, quick theme if we wanted to. We use the forms within Amplience to do this. So we have forms which drive all the colors within the app. So we use primary and secondary colors within the app, which means that we can change the color once and it changes it throughout the app. And again, as you can see on the card customization field, you can see where we’re dropping in background images, overlay images, icons, etc. Into the app.

Onboarding and Coach Marks is, one of the newest pieces of feature that we’ve actually put in. We’ve only had this in a couple of months ago. We had a really old version of how you can introduce users to the app and how they can navigate around the app, which I’m going to be honest, it was awful. It had been in probably three years. And we’ve not had the opportunity to do anything with it. Well, we took the opportunity earlier in the year, and we’ve moved to very much. A coach marks as a process. So when a new user joins the app, they click on a certain area, the coach mark appears. We’re driving all the coach marks through Amplience.

We’re using the next gen forms within that to do So you can see that we’ve got home screen, tab, vouchers, tab, coupons, tab, etc.. Love the next gen forms. It makes it so easy for users to actually do what they need to do within Amplience. And we were driving all the content, all the colors etc. Through I talked right back at the beginning about how games was a problem for us, how we could only have one game, and how the CTAs were in Firebase. We’ve done a lot of work on games, so we have a play zone on the home screen, which we can change the color of, we can change the copies of, etc. That opens up into the what you can see on there, the your game screen.

And this is where we have the ability to host multiple games. We can host up to six games in that screen. Each one can have their own images, their own copy, their own content, and they link up underneath to our loyalty engine, but also to our game provider underneath. So we link them up behind the scenes and Amplience is the one that pulls everything together in the middle. Once the customer clicks on that see detail screen, we have another dynamic content screen that opens. And this is where, from a legal point of view, we put all the legal bits that you have to put on these days. So there’ll be Ts and Cs. And then it clicks out to the number that you got to show the number of plays the customer has got on that game and we use that play Now button to click out to our game provider.

Again. We’re using the next gen forms to drive this. So we’ve got game details images Ts and Cs. And our teams manage all the content within here. And it’s massively opened up the options for us to do multiple games so we can run supplier games alongside Asda-funded games, we can run multiple supplier games the same time, and all of that helped to drive revenue for us to drive exposure with brands. I’m not going to dwell on this one, but we can put videos in as well. So we have hosted the Asda Christmas advert. At times. We’ve hosted the Easter Rabbits. We don’t use it a lot because from an app point of view, you generally using the app to go and scan at the till to do your shopping.

But it just gives us something a little bit different for a little bit of time. We can pop videos in there. So how have we achieved all of this? We have improved our ways of working. We, I think, as I said earlier, during refinement we’re always Amplience first. I’ve worked with the same team of developers since we put Amplience in. It’s been the same partner that we’ve been working with. And over the past two and a half years, they’ve very much got to the point of it’s Amplience first.

Whatever we do, Amplience first is baked into our ways of working in all our sprints. There’s never a discussion about, do we use Amplience or do we use something else? It is just absolutely baked in there. And we quite often talk about how often were we going to change something. Is the business. Do we want the business users to have control? Should we give control? How do we cascade that out to business users? How do we let them do that? And but very much a it is Amplience first. Amplience is the way that we want to go. So to do that we are a product team. We work with a persona to hand this over because in Asda’s world we have almost a split where tech do the building.

So we behind the scenes do all the development. We do our work with development teams to build all of this, but I then hand the day to day use over to a business team. So to do that we have to provide really good documentation and When they first started doing this, the documents they were producing were really sort of really tech heavy, really couldn’t be used by the business. And we were like, no, we can’t do We need to be able to hand these over to business users. So we invented a persona and she’s called Content Claire. So when they when the developers are writing the documents and is the developers who write these documents, they’re very much thinking about Content Claire. So she’s very much a she’s an average business user.

She uses it once or twice a week, but it’s not part of her day-to-day job. But she needs to be able to follow the instructions through. And so when they’re writing these, they’re very much aim at those. So they have you can see what the property on the right which is the property bit. Then the value tells you what that means in English. They then they then screenshot the Amplience form and tells you which element of Amplience that relates to and what they also then do, which is really nice and they really like is there then include a screenshot of the app and say it’s this bit of the app that you are changing, and they do this for everything that we do, which means that once the development team have done that and we hand that over, I managed to hold their hand the first one to twice to do it, but then they’ll continue to use the Confluence pages.

And actually they are really self-sufficient. So what’s next? I think I wrote this slide before I was here today, and I think when I’ve been listening to everybody today, I think there’s been a lot of talk about the agentic and where do you want to go. And I think Asda is really, really early on that journey, we are very much at the beginning stage, the foundations of just starting to think about what do we want to do and what do we want to get, where do we want to go? And I think that’s been quite interesting to listen to you today, but in the very short term we are going to continue where we wanted to head, which is first of all into visualization. At the moment we have four, platforms.

I’m going to call platforms. That’s not the right word for platforms around Amplience. We have a development, we have a test, we have sandbox and we have a production environment is the right way. Everyone the right word, environments behind the scenes. And we do all of our the devs build in dev. Then we allowed the business users to create their content in a sandbox environment, and but then they have to manually transfer it across into production, which is just time consuming. Takes a long time. So we want to introduce content sync to be able to allow us to copy directly over. But alongside that they the visualization piece is going to be absolutely key for us because at the moment, not all of our business users have access to our Asda Rewards test app. So there will create their content in sandbox, and then they’ll have to email somebody or pick up the phone and go, can you just screenshot me what I’ve just put in this?

And can you then send me the screenshot back, which is just really time consuming. So I do want to we want to look at moving towards the visualization tool, where they can build their content and then instantly see it. And we want to continue on the next gen forms journey. We’ve been using next gen forms since Amplience introduced them. But we have got some content that is on the older versions that we need to transfer across. Because the next gen forms are just so easy for everybody to use. And I think really that on top of that is just to continue with the Amplience-first mindset. It’s really got us to where we are today in quite a short space of time.

So I do want to with the team, we want to continue to work in that way. I had the pleasure of working with Tracy and the team during the implementation of Amplience. Two and a half years ago when we started, one of my favorite things that about your implementation, which you showed today, was the concept of theming. And it’s not something I see customers use too regularly to the same extent that that you have.

I guess it would frighten some IT teams that you could change the whole app with just a few toggle buttons in the content form. So how do you manage that in terms of who can make that change? And is there something utilized within Amplience to kind of help with managing who can make that change? Who can publish that type of content? We use the user roles and the teams within Amplience as a general rule of thumb. So we set up sort of got half dozen teams set up with various permissions underneath them. And then the users obviously drop into one of those teams. What we can then do is add extra permissions on an A per user basis so that if we want if the proposition team generally cannot touch seasonal theming.

But if we wanted to give one member of that team seasonal theming, and then we’ll go in and add it with extra permissions on. But what we also do is we use repos really well for that as well. So the seasonal theming in particular has its own repo and access to It’s quite tightly controlled as to who can actually access And we continue to build various repos. So there’s some repos that are like the one that contains the banners, which we change half a dozen times a week. Everybody needs to be able to go in and amend those banners. That is in a repo that’s open to everybody. But the seasonal theming one, we absolutely control Who’s got access to that? So somebody can’t go in and bring down the whole app. But by wiping something out and that’s really how we do it. It’s a combination of the users, the teams and the repos.

Thank you. Yeah. It’s a good example of using repos to manage certain content. You often see customers managing like site navigation, potentially a separate repository, maybe legal terms, conditions that type of content could be managed by different teams. So yeah repos is a good way to go. You mentioned during your presentation around the process of deciding which content gets managed in Amplience and what doesn’t. Customers will often ask me. Can we manage this type of content and Amplience? And generally the answer is always yes because it’s just a data structure. You can model content in any way that you like with data, but it’s not always the best, the right decision to make. So what criteria do you use when deciding to create a new content type and Amplience for a certain new piece of content?

Yeah, I think the first thing that we would usually look at is how often are we likely to want to change that? So if it’s content that like banners, for example, that is changing on a regular basis, absolutely Amplience. But for example, we’ve just done a new proposition in the last couple of months called Rewards plus. And actually the view is that that won’t change. And if it will change we’d probably see a change once every 12 months. So we made the decision not to put that content in Amplience. We have certain elements of the copy which are driven by our loyalty engine, so we know we can change them from within campaigns set up within the loyalty engine, which gives the business the flexibility, the need in terms of, it drives values, really. But the actual copy itself is we’re just like, we’ve got a couple of examples of similar campaigns that we’ve done historically, and we know that they just don’t change.

So we made the decision that, you know what? That doesn’t change. And I think the other piece that comes into it ties into your previous question on like repos and teams is if somebody goes and changes that, how much damage can be caused. So we’ll also look at actually do we want, do we want the business users. Because I hand all of this over to business. We don’t control any of it from within tech. Do I want the business users to be able to change that, or actually, can they do a huge amount of damage to the app by changing it? So those are the key questions that we can work through. We still come to a conclusion that 80% is driven through Amplience, but there is a few things that we hold back.

Yeah. So you started your journey two and a half years ago. If you were in the room, about to start of a new CMS for the first time, what would be your kind of key piece of advice for someone starting that new project?

I think there’s two things, really is I think first one is the development team that you are using to work with Amplience, absolutely, they need to be driven to do this and actually want to do this because actually they our development team spent a lot of time literally changing copy, changing colors, changing text, which is just really boring for them to do. But actually it’s time consuming as well. And I think the other thing for me is very much and I think I said it 2 or 3 times, is that very much the Amplience-first mindset? So think as you’re going through this, think about what can I do with what can I introduce.

And yeah, grow gradually, but actually try and think about how much of your app, your website could you pull into Amplience, because that actually does the heavy lifting.