Fans who frequent The Greene Turtle to follow their favorite professional sports teams gained even more to cheer about today with the debut of a new mobile app feature that lets them get more involved in the game and earn rewards for playing well.
All 37 franchise and corporate locations of the sports-themed casual dining restaurant in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, New York and Washington, D.C., are participating in the rollout of the new games component of the “Turtle Rewards” app, which allows both Android- and iOS-based smartphone users to earn Rewards that can be applied toward purchases of food and beverages at any Greene Turtle location.
Players can currently participate in any of three (soon to be four) different games using the app. Two of the games are traditional pick games: In one, a player selects five teams and if all five teams win their respective matchups that week, the player receives a $10 Turtle Reward on his or her Turtle Rewards account. In the other, participants pick five individual players and again, if they go five for five, the guest earns a $10 Turtle Reward. The third game pits app users against each other, with a trackable leaderboard and one winner from every Greene Turtle location: participants pick a dream team of nine players from any college or professional sport and earn fantasy points each time any of their athletes’ teams win. Point leaders at each location at the end of each week will receive the $10 reward.
The Greene Turtle has been steadily amassing a group of about 1,000 weekly gamers since quietly introducing the games through its Turtle Rewards app a few weeks ago. Now that the chain has made a few tweaks that early use revealed to be necessary, the games are ready for a formal rollout, says Marketing Director Nick Kegg, adding that he expects user counts to grow quickly.
“We have 37 locations across five states cutting across a long list of college and professional teams in a number of sports,” he says. “When you combine that with The Greene Turtle’s reputation as a home away from home for sports fans and the fact that the next few months include bowl games, the NCAA basketball tournament, spring training and more, we’ve hit on the perfect new feature to engage with our guests and the perfect time to introduce these games as an enhancement to our loyalty program. We’re giving the sports fans among our guests an exciting new way to connect with our brand and earn rewards for activity beyond buying food and drink.”
The Turtle Rewards program has evolved quickly since its introduction at the beginning of this year. It wasn’t long after that the company hit on the idea of adding a games component to its app. To bring the idea to life, The Greene Turtle collaborated with Newton, Mass.-based Paytronix, Inc. to develop the loyalty and payment components of the app, and Ashton, Md.-based Gamescape, which customized its mobile games tool to fit in with the existing Turtle Rewards app. Additional games and features are planned for rollout in 2015.
“We wanted to create something that was uniquely ours,” says Kegg, “something that boasts our name, logo, mascot, colors and fonts, and that speaks to our customers in our language. We want to be an overall lifestyle for our guests, not just a place to buy food or beer. In fact, while our goal is definitely to draw players back into their favorite locations, we built in the ability to access and play the games even when Turtle Rewards users are not on-site. We think that will make The Greene Turtle a bigger part of their everyday lives and will help us reach more people as they observe our participants playing the games throughout the community.”
