Tripling Customer LTV

Solving a gap in customer data problem, I prepared a vision for us to create a loyalty programme centred around a mobile app from inception to launch and beyond, increasing customer frequency, average spend and average lifetime retention.

Project Type

Mobile App, Loyalty

Approach

I often use the triple diamond approach, and this project was no different. I love its fluidity regardless of the micro/macro level problem you're approaching and it provides a clear structured framework to centre your process around, while still being able to be fluid between sections where necessary.

Understanding the Problem

For context, Sushi Daily is predominantly a sushi concession business, located within food retailers throughout Europe. That means that every single customer who purchases from Sushi Daily goes through a Retailers POS system, meaning from a customer data perspective, Sushi Daily sees none. Therefore this gap had several clear opportunities if it were to be solved:

The opportunity as a business to understand their customer better, from a demographic and behavioural perspective.
Allows the marketing team to run much more personalised campaigns both online and offline.
Gives the food product team much clearer insights on food trends by location and demographic
Allows us as a product team to create value for all the above by solving this problem and providing ourselves with important data to feed future strategic decisions.

So we have a clear problem of the business not truly being able to understand their customer, certainly not on a granular or real-time level and a clear number of opportunities to create real value both for customers and the business. Both on a macro level in terms of the data available and on a more micro level in terms of giving other terms more detailed insights to make better informed future decisions in their respective areas.

Figuring out a Solution?

So we went to work on how we best meet the needs of said problems and deliver on the potential opportunities. We looked at a number of ideas, including but not limited to:

Surveys

We decided this was too limiting in terms of the information we could get and didn't a long-term opportunity to give the customer value.

Parked

In-store interactive screens

Has the potential to deliver the customer value quickly, but is costly and not necessarily replicable and therefore scalable across all store formats.

Parked

Requesting data from Retailers

This can be a lengthy, costly process, is not close to real-time and doesn't give us the opportunity to deliver the customer value in turn easily.

Parked

Receipt-scan based marketing

Gives us the opportunity to deliver the customer value quickly, but is quite a cumbersome and clunky experience.

Parked

Implementing POS system

A costly option, and difficult to manage given the current store / business model that doesn't directly deliver the customer value.

Parked

App-based loyalty programme

This gave us the most confidence to be able to both deliver value for customers and gain real-time detailed insight from a much larger first-party data pool than we've ever had before and we can stand up fairly simple instances easily and scale.

Passed

Rolling forwards with an app-based programme may sound both complex and costly at first, but we soon realised, that we can stand up increments of this to test its validity as a long-term solution. This was initially supported by some user research in the way of a handful of surveys to our existing email based and segments such as those who already order through our own Click & Collect platform.

From Small to Scale

As I covered already, we kicked off our solution discovery stage with some user research via a number of surveys covering a number of topics ralting to customers appetite for a loyalty programme and how they would like this surfaced along with more importantly what they would perceive as a fair and generous value exchange i.e. what would their preference be in terms of rewards for their loyalty.

We then went through some wireframing stages which we placed in front of a small subset of survey respondents to get a feel for how they would use the programme and got a feel for their sentiment towards our initial ideas for rewards. Based off the feedback from these sessions, we then put together a small trial across 10 stores. Here's how it was setup:

Restricted to Click & Collect users only - points earned automatically online, for C&C orders.
We created a basic loyalty portal within the account section where users could see their points total and rewards total.
Customers were given a discount code via email for every £100 spent.

While this wasn't the perfect iteration - it was a relatively low cost, low effort way to deliver a usable and more importantly loveable experience - granted there were obvious friction points - but from our prior research, our customers suggested that this is something they can easily interact with, understand and navigate.

From this point, if we saw traction, we had a clear pathway to scale.

MVP Learnings

We learned a numbers of things throughout the trial, good and constructive. Most importantly we saw the traction we needed among customers showing there is appetite for us to build out our very minimal initial effort. We saw both improved customer NPS and improved sales at the trial stores - something we were hoping would be the case, but was not an initial key outcome, as initially our goal was just to gather more customer data at a consistent and frequent rate.

Instead, we hypothesised new metrics for the programme itself, and in turn set the customer data benefits as key outcomes. Over the following months, we trialled new versions across online and in-store, utilising new packaging labels which had unique codes for users to enter, by which point we landed upon our new and improved Sushi Daily Club, ready to launch across multiple markets.

Launching our Solution

The programme launched initially in the UK across all our stores, providing customers with a value exchange in return for their loyalty. The programme saw a number of iterations before launching but in its final form could be summarised as:

Users can order and collect stamps via the new Sushi Daily Club app or via the Click & Collect web platform.
One stamp per packaging label - this means for bigger products you get multiple stamps
Users get free sushi maki, every time they hit 6 stamps

Running the programme this way allowed us to be able to understand customer behaviour both in-store, through our owned Click & Collect channel and even the delivery aggregators (who are notorious for giving very little away about your customers!).

Looking back to what we initially wanted to achieve, it was twofold:

Create a great customer experience where we deliver a fair and generous value exchange
Build a broader pool of first-party customer behavioural data

Number 2 is easily tracked, in terms of volume and we massively exceeded the targets we set ourselves in terms of downloads, registrations and engagement - all of which suggest we also hit the nail on point 1. We also could now easily demonstrate that our programme - moreso through the app experience we prioritised, delivered double the average customer purchase frequency and spend.

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