How to build Early Access within a multinational loyalty program.
Adding a new benefit to an E-commerce loyalty program has it’s challenges, here is my process to how I created “Early Access” for Zalando’s program, Zalando Plus.
Project Overview
At the start of 2020 a major goal of Zalando Plus was to build our member basis from 400K to 1 Million paying subscribers. To try and achieve this goal it was clear that Plus needed a new signup stream that would allow customers to get additional value other than express shipping.
The timing of this aligned with Zalando’s overall strategic push to get more streetwear savvy buyers on the site. With some early discovery and opportunities to sell exclusive items from brands, Early Access was born.
Key Contributions
Some of my key contributions to this project:
• Leading Product Design from discovery through to execution over an 8 month period collaborating and aligning with over 20 different Tech and Design teams.
• Facilitating design reviews with key stakeholders e.g SVP of Design, SVP of Product, and various Directors of Zalando Programs.
• Showcasing and sharing key learnings with the wider Zalando community within release demos and all hands to over 3k viewers.
• Design library contributions for new components, each one with specs for different devices and design libraries.
The Problem
Despite overall Plus satisfaction rates over 70%, only 30% of users feel rewarded, 23% feel special and only 55% feel that with Plus they have advantages other customers don’t get.
Plus members are some of the best customers at Zalando, they buy larger amounts of items, and most often these items are on the higher price point in comparison to other customers. What we discovered early on in our discovery research was these customers wanted to purchase items that were on the new or limited side.
Some of the major problems that we needed to understand better and solve were:
• How can we allow Plus members to get advantages that nobody else on Zalando is getting that go beyond delivery benefits.
• With Plus being an inclusive membership that allows anybody to sign up, how do we ensure that regular customers understand and access the new benefit if they want.
• Ensuring that this benefit can reward multiple audience groups from different genders, demographics, and locations.
How did we solve this?
The solution that was decided on was, “Zalando Plus Early Access”. Giving Plus members first access to weekly drops of hyped items that have a limited number of items. During a one-week build-up stage before the drop, members could set a reminder for when the product would release, ensuring they would not miss out and get the first opportunity to purchase the item.
Each release would have its own dedicated landing page. On this page, brands could fill it with different visual elements like carousels, videos, and editorial elements to help build the story of what makes these releases so special and give an opportunity to inspire.
On the product page is where we do most of the education on the benefit, we do this by providing a benefit banner that eligible customers can sign up for Plus so that they can access the item/s. For members, this banner turned into a section that would highlight the benefit as well as let members know how long they have to purchase the release.
When building this feature there were multiple complexities that we needed to manage, this included designing multiple solution states for Eligible customers and Members but also depending on where in the release timeline the product was e.g build-up stage, available now or open to the public. Now times that with native and web-based solutions and we had a lot of screens to manage.
What we learnt
Early Access User journey mapping
Throughout the 8 month period for this project we conducted 3 separate testing sessions. Each session was focusing on parts of the journey that we needed to gain more clarity on, these were:
• The importance of storytelling and building the narrative around the release.
• Expectations on Reminders and how customers stay informed.
• The effects of having purchase limits on hyped articles and what this means for the user.
Key things that we learnt across these sessions were:
• Storytelling instantly helped the user identify the releases as something more special, but did not make them feel pressured into purchasing. If the customer was interested in these items during the build-up stage they said they would google the item for even more information.
• A big learning during the reminders study was how many customers have push notifications turned off, by allowing them for the drop created fear that Zalando would spam them for other offers. On top of this Email was the preferred option although it was common that email was not checked.
• Having purchase limits on these items was seen as a bit disappointing especially if the customer was not confident about what size to buy, but all gave the correct understanding answer of why these applied. Customers knew that Bots were the reason and all agreed that it was the fair approach to try and give everybody an even playing field.