Virgin Red partners with M&S in Sparks loyalty programme revamp
Marks & Spencer has relaunched its loyalty programme – Sparks – with a raft of changes.
Most pertinent to you as a Head for Points reader is a new earn and burn partnership with Virgin Red.
First launched in 2015, the Sparks loyalty programme has been around for a while but was over-complicated and not particularly inspiring. Aside from a birthday treat and an automatic donation to your chosen charity every time you spent, there was little to get excited about and even less reason to remain loyal to M&S.
As a result, M&S has spent the last two years refining a new Sparks programme with the goal of making Sparks more personalised and easier to use. Thousands of employees have been beta testing the product and the new and improved Sparks app is now open to everyone.
I went along to the launch event in London yesterday to find out more.
How does the new Sparks work?
Earning:
Instead of the previous points-based system, Sparks now rewards member’s spending with cashback to use at Marks & Spencer.
It’s not exactly a straightforward earn rate. Members will be given personalised offers based on their customer behaviour which will change every Tuesday.
From what I can see on my own account, you get three offers.
My current deals are:
- Earn £10 into your digital Sparks wallet when you spend £30 on Fashion, Home & Beauty
- Earn £5 into your digital Sparks wallet when you spend £35 in the Foodhall
- Earn a £5 reward when you buy online flowers and plants
Each reward can only be earned once. If I spent £90 on clothes, I’d still only get £10 back. Whether I’d then get a new offer to replace the one I used is unclear but I assume not until the Tuesday ‘drop’.
M&S credit card holders will get additional perks and offers on top, but will need to connect their credit card to Sparks via the M&S website.
Spending:
Your cash reward is held in a digital Sparks wallet, which you can redeem both in-store and online. There are some restrictions but it appears pretty straightforward to use.
What is the Virgin Red / Sparks partnership?
Central to the relaunch of Sparks was the announcement of Virgin Red as the first ever Sparks partner.
Let’s be clear up front what you CANNOT do:
- you cannot convert the cash in your Sparks wallet into Virgin Points
- you cannot convert Virgin Points into cash in your Sparks wallet
If you were assuming that the concepts above should be central to any two-way loyalty partnership, I don’t blame you. It’s a bit odd.
This is how it actually works.
Earning opportunities via Virgin Red and Sparks:
Customers that are members of both Virgin Red and Sparks can earn money in their Sparks wallet when they spend with various Virgin businesses.
To earn Virgin Points via Sparks and vice versa, you’ll need to connect your Sparks and Virgin Red accounts via the Sparks section of the M&S app.
The current offers are:
- Up to £130 into your Sparks wallet when you book a Virgin Atlantic Holiday
- £80 into your Sparks wallet when you switch to Virgin Media
- £8 into your Sparks wallet for every £100 spent at Virgin Voyages
- £4 into your Sparks wallet for every £20 spent on Virgin Experience Days
- £100 into your Sparks wallet when you sign up to a Virgin Active 12-month membership
- £10 into your Sparks wallet for every £100 spent at Virgin Hotels
- £1 into your Sparks wallet for every £20 spent on Virgin Trains Ticketing.
However, only two offers will be available to a member at any time and these will be personalised. Presumably this means that not all offers will be made available to everyone.
It isn’t clear if these offers can be stacked with existing loyalty deals. Is the Virgin Trains Ticketing cashback on top of or instead of earning Virgin Points on your tickets? It makes a big difference to how attractive it is.
(We will find out. It only crossed my mind when putting this article together last night!)
Additionally, if you shop online at Marks & Spencer by clicking through from the Virgin Red app, you’ll earn up to 4 Virgin Points per £1 spent. This is not a new offer and indeed the Avios e-store is currently running a similar deal.
Spending opportunities via Virgin Red and Sparks:
You can redeem Virgin Points via the Virgin Red app for a selection of M&S food and drink items. A code is generated when you redeem and you scan this at the till in your M&S store when you buy the relevant product.
However, the only M&S options for using Virgin Points are a selection of six products including Percy Pigs (100 Virgin Points) and M&S Luxury Gold Tea bags (600 Virgin Points).
This is bafflingly uninspiring and somehow manages to feel like a loss for everyone. A typical small food store will sell around 3,000 items, whilst a large supermarket – admittedly larger than any M&S food hall – could sell up to 40,000. Only six items can be redeemed with Virgin Points.
The press release says ‘The partnership will see customers accessing more exciting benefits across both Sparks and Virgin Red over time’ so we can hope that a more fluid relationship between the two programmes will come in the future.
Without a direct conversion – in both directions, with no loss of value – between Sparks and Virgin Points, the partnership is never going to reach a fraction of its potential.
Conclusion
The new Sparks programme is far more user-friendly and easy-to-understand than the previous iteration. It has really embraced the personalisation standard that Nectar and Tesco Clubcard set some time ago.
That said, whilst easy to understand and use, Sparks doesn’t appear to be rewarding actual loyalty and increased spend, particularly when it comes to food shopping. Unlike Sainsburys or Tesco, where the more you spend, the more you earn, Sparks seems to offer quite a high return on relatively low spending and then nothing thereafter. We need to see how the personalised offers develop.
The weak spot is, unfortunately, the Virgin Red partnership. I can see myself earning cashback on Virgin Trains Ticketing – as long as its not replacing the Virgin Points I would usually earn – but the other earn options are niche. There is nothing available for Virgin Atlantic flight-only bookings.
The less said about the six grocery redemptions the better, I think.
However, the programme is clearly in its infancy and the buzz around the launch indicates there is more to come in the future. If you could transfer Virgin Points to and from your Sparks wallet, it would be a genuine game changer. We will watch this space.