Tesco Clubcard Success Supported by Retailer Buying Strength

by Redfish | May 29, 2025 | Insights

As one of the most iconic loyalty schemes in retail, the Tesco Clubcard is one of the most enduring loyalty schemes in retail history as it is now over 30 years old.

What began as a quarterly paper-based reward statement through the post, it has now evolved into a globally integrated mobile app used by over 16.3 million customers.

As rewards apps go, Clubcard has not only stood the test of time but set new benchmarks in retail engagement and ROI. In the UK, approximately 23 million households are Clubcard members, representing over 80% of UK households and almost 50% of adult women in the UK. The mobile app’s adoption rate is 71% of Clubcard users, showing just how embedded the Tesco Clubcard is embedded into our society’s shopping habits.

Tesco’s loyalty success aligns seamlessly with the retailer’s strategic pillars:

Everyday Prices
Value Match, and
Reason to Repurchase.

Each of these pillars is supported by increasingly sophisticated data capabilities, personalisation, and supplier collaboration for various reasons…

1. Better Customer Response

With Tesco’s Customer Data Platform helping with their digital transformation, the company now achieves up to 98% open rates on app notifications. This level underlines the success of the app-first approach.

Personalised offers are now timely and relevant, significantly increasing their impact. In 2024 alone, Tesco delivered 289 million personalised vouchers to 7.6 million customers – an average of 38 per customer or an average of 3.2 a month.

These are not only personalised with the name etc, but they are targeted to meet their product interest. They use the customers buying history, which can be collected with the scan of the rewards card within the app, and the data is then used to surface timely and relevant offers and vouchers that the customer will actually be interested in and excited to use, resulting in a repeat purchase and visit in-store, as well as a strong brand affinity,

Transforming You Customer Experience with the Redfish Rewards App: Our ResponseWorks CRM system is our own unique product that is a go-to system in one. It collects data from the sign-up process and from customer behaviour every time they scan their rewards app.

That data can then be used to surface relevant offers and vouchers to your customer. These are delivered straight to their phone through high notification open rates and timely, automated emails that prompt customers to return and repurchase.

2. Richer Engaging Experience

Tesco’s internal CMS offers a powerful interface to manage real-time campaigns across its mobile and in-store environments. This means marketing teams can deploy creative, localised content that ties in with current campaigns – whether that’s a summer BBQ weekend or back-to-school promotions.

Tesco’s suppliers help co-fund and co-develop campaign content by tying supplier support into product-level promotions, meaning Tesco can amplify its brand experience with little impact on margin.

What Our App Can Do: Redfish’s CMS-driven loyalty platform gives retailers the tools to create engaging content and promote it seamlessly across mobile and in-store, improving customer experience and campaign agility.

We can integrate with third party booking systems, or other tools like Plant Finder to deliver a better experience for your customer, as well as integrate your social media feeds within the app too. That way your app becomes the go-to online platform.

Our ResponseWorks system allows you to create campaigns delivered through email marketing, app notifications and mailers, showing results against your sales data, so you always know how well a campaign does and what you need to repeat or change next time.

The CMS interface is easy to use too, so you can update app content easily, with automated drop offs for vouchers and content expiring.

3. Lower Email Costs

Many retailers rely on third-party platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Omnisend, often incurring significant licensing and implementation costs. Tesco sidesteps this with its integrated CDP and marketing automation framework.

All Clubcard communications are fully automated, removing the need for complex email service providers while delivering great targeting to segments of their data, with high conversion rates as a consequence.

Redfish’s loyalty app includes built-in marketing automation, eliminating the need for expensive external tools while ensuring targeted, impactful communications.

Automation takes away the need for high creative costs, meaning you can decide where your marketing budget needs to be spent.

4. App Revenue Transparency

One of Tesco’s key advantages lies in its ability to connect engagement with actual sales. This robust sales attribution is built directly into its CDP, offering granular visibility into what works and why.

With 82% of sales now attributable to Clubcard members (source: The Grocer), Tesco has effectively created a feedback loop between customer behaviour and revenue performance. It means Tesco can measure the ROI of each campaign not just in opens or clicks, but in actual basket size and frequency of purchase.

Our Response Works platform offers real-time sales attribution by tracking to card based transactions, giving retailers the confidence to link loyalty campaign performance directly to revenue.

Connecting with your till, we can measure sales against those that have interacted with marketing messages or used vouchers from their app, allowing you to gauge a much better idea of your customer responses to different marketing techniques.

You can then go on to contact those customers about similar products and even make this automated. If they buy a Christmas Tree from you in December, you can check in a few days later with an automated guide on how to care for their tree and make sure they’re watering it to get the best from it.

Our strategy like Tesco’s is to determine the lost likely next purchase for the customer and automate accordingly, increasing shop frequency and therefore annal sales.

5. Preferred Method of Interaction

Whether in-store or online, Tesco Clubcard offers a seamless omnichannel experience. Customers can browse weekly offers, view product recommendations, watch promotional videos, and redeem personalised vouchers – all within one app.

This unified customer experience reinforces Tesco’s brand while giving shoppers multiple entry points to engage and convert. Combined with strategic shelf-edge labelling, Tesco ensures that the same offers seen in-app are visually reinforced at point of sale.

Using Our Rewards App as Your Go-To Platform: Our app is personal to you and your customer. We fully personalise the interface and categories to what your customers want to see. We support omnichannel engagement, bringing in-store, online, and even video content into a single intuitive platform that customers love to use.

You can showcase products, events and the coffee shop can have its own free hot drink system similar to Café Nero or Costa if you so wish. With the customer’s individual reward card stored on there too, and the use of notifications to prompt repeat visits, getting customers to sign up to your app can be easy.

6. Low Implementation Costs

Despite the sophistication of the system, Tesco’s approach remains cost-effective. By investing in white-label technology and a scalable CDP, Tesco has managed to offer deeply personalised interactions without escalating marketing spend.

Retailers often assume that implementing advanced personalisation requires massive investment. Tesco’s journey shows that leveraging existing systems, partnering with the supply base, and focusing on strategic integration can deliver better outcomes with lower costs.

Working with Redfish Group: Redfish offers a white-label, fully customisable loyalty solution with low implementation costs, ideal for retailers wanting the benefits of Clubcard-style loyalty without the heavy upfront investment and if required provide you analytical support to develop innovative engagement strategies

We work on a 10x ROI basis, and love seeing your app progression as much as you will.

Clubcard’s Role in Tesco’s Financial Performance

According to Tesco’s 2024 Annual Report, retail adjusted operating profit rose to £2,831 million – up 12.3% year-on-year. This growth has been underpinned by consistent strategy execution and, crucially, the performance of Clubcard.

In the words of CEO Ken Murphy, Tesco’s ability to “help customers manage the cost of living through our powerful combination of great value and rewarding loyalty” is not just a business slogan but a “strategic engine”. The 82% of sales driven by Clubcard shows how critical loyalty has become to Tesco’s bottom line.

Now Is The Right Time To Get a Loyalty App

Tesco has demonstrated that a loyalty strategy doesn’t need to be flashy to be effective/ It just needs to be consistent, data-driven, and have the customer at the root of the experience.

By aligning loyalty with business objectives, and optimising it as a digital platform, Tesco has retained and deepened the loyalty of its customers.

Loyalty rewards may differ by retailer, and you can decide how rewarding your own customers works best for you, but the principles Tesco follows are applicable to all: mobile-first engagement, supplier-backed promotions, data-driven personalisation, and in-store reinforcement. These are the building blocks for long-term growth in modern retail.

Redfish Group provides retailers with an all-in-one loyalty solution, helping them replicate Tesco’s proven success with personalised, app-based engagement and measurable growth.

As we enter the summer months, now is the perfect time to get your loyalty offering up and running before we enter the busy run-up to Christmas.