Circle K Conserve Program
Design, marketing, and strategy for Circle K’s sustainability program.
Circle K Conserve is a sustainability program that offsets carbon emissions for every gallon pumped. To enhance the program and build additional customer loyalty and awareness I performed a UX audit on the program website, made updates, revamped the on-site collateral, and led the creation of new digital campaigns – adjusting messaging and adding additional channel to added customer touch points.
Circle K Conserve
Persona Building
Using Circle K’s corporate brand guide, I built out some additional Personas to help our team better understand what Circle K’s customer care about, how they behave, and what motivates them. This exercise helped us dig into our messaging and ad strategy and reposition our marketing efforts to have the most impact.
Circle K Conserve
Campaigns
To continue to raise awareness and support for the program among Circle K customers, I needed to optimize and test new digital assets to see what brought the most ROI. We expanded our digital channels to include more traffic-driving advertising streams to help drive Circle K’s main KPI – use the program to increase brand loyalty and increase fuel volume. Expansion into Waze, radio ads, billboards, and bus wraps gave us the opportunity to reach local consumers on the street where they are more likely to fill up at Circle K and could be a trackable conversion.
In additional to continuous optimization of digital ads, I led our project in in launching one-off campaigns to further build program awareness and drive traffic. One campaign I developed to drive customers to the pump was a reusable mug giveaway. This required planning out marketing channels and assets, then creating customer journeys that would map the consumer from ad to the pump and beyond. One major factor of this campaign was creating a ripple effect beyond the pump. The cup itself, social buzz, and refill reminders kept the word out there and continued organic awareness within the community.
Circle K Conserve
Website Audit & Upgrades
When I came onto the project the program websit had been live for about 2 years. I performed an audit of the website, calling out areas of improvement that we could update to help drive engagement on the site.
Audit results and action items:
- The hero section of the pages were not working hard enough – this is the first thing people see when they come to the site and we needed to make a better first impression. In the updated hero designs we mirrored messaging from our digital campaigns, refreshing them together, so there was a streamlined message from ad to site.
- Added a call to action to the hero section – giving users one click access to our preferred action – signing up for our newsletter.
- To further reinforce this conversion, I recommended adding newsletter sign up forms to the bottom of every page. This anchor on each page gave easy access for users to sign up.
- Our program and carbon offsets can at times be hard for consumers to understand, I recommended a video asset be added to the homepage to help consumers understand our mission and how the choice to fuel at Circle K is a better choice for the environment.
- Revamped the local community pages on the site. Based on our persona building and customer surveys, we determined the most impactful story for consumers was the local impact of their choice. Our program worked with local community partners in each area to plant trees and refurbish parks. These tangible impact stories were important to Circle K customers but were not being highlighted on the website.
- Added additional context to our carbon projects. Although carbon offsets are complex, we found that showing our carbon project portfolio helped users understand and relate to the mission. The problem was that the current site did not feature these projects well, in our revamp I redesigned our projects page and added project detail pages that would allow users to learn more information about a project and view verification information.
Circle K Conserve
On-Site Collateral
To tie the full story together I also designed Conserve program collateral to be displayed across the forecourt. The forecourt is an integral part of the user journey because once we drive customers to Circle K we want to make sure we drive home the overall impact of the program to ensure we build repeat and loyal customer. Offset fuel is only one piece of the program’s sustainability puzzle. Circle K also offsets their stores’ energy use and supports local projects. It was important to use our collateral locations in a smart way to make the most impact – for example, placing messaging about energy being offset on the refrigerator clings.