Driving customer loyalty and engagement with a customer focused Beauty Club
Business Goals
Debenhams had a vision to develop an engaging and customer focused Beauty Club. After Boohoo had purchased the rights to Debenhams.com Cabiri enabled them to get the initial site up and running with a strong foundation ready for extension. The Cabiri team then integrated Talon.One into the platform introducing discounts across the site, on product pages and within the cart.
The next challenge was to develop a loyalty program. The Beauty Club was one of the key features of the original Debenhams site that generated a large proportion of recurring revenue. The Beauty Club loyalty program needed to be intuitive, engaging and focused on the customer. And crucially, it needed to be up in the summer of 2021.
The Challenge
The proposed beauty club was innovative, feature-rich and also needed to be flexible for changes in the business rules. Old loyalty programs were just based around points, now it is far more important to engage with your customer and gamify the loyalty process, encouraging them to return, get to the next tier and gain rewards. The beauty club contained a number of different elements to achieve this:
Different tiers allowing customers to attain new offers and rewards as they rise up the tiers.
Sign up bonuses
Earn points to redeem on future purchases.
Early access to new product launches
Exclusive member offers
VIP birthday discounts
Free delivery
Bonus point days
Free gifts for members
Another important feature was that the beauty club must be embedded into all aspects of the site. To encourage customers to sign up and to help with conversions.
The customer would be encouraged to sign up and join the beauty club. This was achieved by displaying the benefits to the customer through the site. How many points they could earn by buying this product or checking out with this cart.
Extensive changes to the My Account area, with clear indications about the Beauty Club and where the customer was on their journey, what they needed to do to get to the next tier, and the benefits they would receive when they got there.
Changes to both the product listing pages and product details pages, to incorporate the points a customer will earn to encourage them to buy. This was a particular challenge as it also requires getting the points info into the search index.
The cart and checkout pages need to be changed to show and display points and allow points to be redeemed.
All the extra promotions and free gifts also needed to be configured.
Finally the beauty club needs to be fully integrated with the fulfilment systems to allow reporting and accounting and to allow any adjustments or refunds to correctly credit or remove points.
Partner Selection
Talon.One was selected to enable the Beauty Club loyalty program. It was selected for a number of reasons:
Rich set of APIs and cloud native, so fitted in well with Debenhams existing composable architecture.
Flexible and scalable, to facilitate peaks like Black Friday.
The ability to create powerful and personalized loyalty campaigns.
With the Talon.One Campaign Manager marketers can create sophisticated promotions without developer interaction
The ability to offer customers any sort of gift, benefit or reward.
As you can see an all encompassing loyalty program like this can be a challenge, but by using Talons APIs and the Cabiri accelerators this project was delivered in 30 days with 3 developers. The project had to go live before the peak period, so the project had to be delivered on time.
The Talon.One APIs provided all the loyalty functionality required, Cabiri provided the integration knowhow. In a composable project data modelling is key to success, understanding how to map promotion, product, content and search data is important. This was crucial in delivering the Beauty Club project, understanding how to combine Talon.One with commercetools, Algolia and Amplience was key to the success of the project.
Project Successes
The project was a success, delivered on time and saw 1000s of customers sign up in the first week. These customers then went on to engage with the club and return many times to the site. Some of the key successes were:
How the sales and marketing team were able to take ownership of the loyalty and promotions process. Once the development was in place the Debenmas team were able to adjust and alter the program, this combined with detailed analytics means it is very fast to react to customers needs.
That the project was delivered on time, on budget and with the required functionality.
50% increase in average order value when incorporated with gift with purchase
250% increase in orders.
