membership site

Last year we tested out an app for members. The app we built allowed members to:

scan their ‘digitised’ membership card
check their reward balance on demand
choose a local cause for their 1% reward to go to

Listening to members

The feedback we got showed that people like the idea of having something on their phone rather than carrying a card around with them. However, lots of our stores don’t have tills that could scan the app.

We also realised that the features we’d included in the alpha weren’t compelling enough to launch as it was. However, feedback told us that personalised offers are something members really care about, and we felt we could improve them if we digitised them. At the moment, members receive their personalised offers on paper from the till, just before their receipt is printed. This means that to take advantage of money off they have to take, keep, bring back, and then remember to use the paper coupon next time they shop with us.

How can we help members benefit?

We wanted to find out if it’s possible to give members choice and control over the offers they get – this might be through an app or on the Membership website. We thought about how we could show members a pool of offers and then load the ones that appeal to them onto their physical membership card so they could redeem them at any Co-op store.

We worked with the Personalisation team in Food who look at members’ buying habits and match offers to members. Together, we’ve done a discovery to find out what’s possible with digital offers.

Asking questions

We looked at:

what our competitors are doing and where we think we can do better
if we made offers digital, how many offers would we give
how frequently the offers would change
if there’s a type of offer that works best in a digital format
who’d run the upkeep

Working quickly

Then we built a quick proof of concept, for what we’re calling a functional test. The page showed a group of offers and allowed members to choose 4 to load onto their membership card and redeem on the tills in the test lab in our head office.

It looked like this:

Screen shot of the page we mocked up. It shows a group of offers and allows members to choose 4 to load onto their membership card

This let us prove quickly and cheaply that we can build this for all members, on a website or through an app. The Membership team had already done a lot of research into digital offers in the past, so we were confident that this was something that our members would want and understand.

From a technical point of view, it’s looking promising

With a bit of tweaking, we expect the system that powers coupons at tills will also work with digital offers. It’ll be relatively straightforward to build the parts that the member interacts with, and it should be possible without needing to update our tills.

Testing our commercial assumptions

The more complicated part is figuring out which offers would be popular in a digital format. At the moment, we give paper coupons for things like dairy, bread and meat but we think that if we had the capability to switch offers in and out, offers on these things may get repetitive. So we’d look at giving offers on some smaller groups of products.

We’ll keep working in partnership with the Food team on this, but it might take a bit more time to make good commercial decisions.

What’s next?

We want to test this out with real members to prove if there’s a real appetite to use and keep using digital personalised offers.

To help us measure how many people want it, and help us build a pool of members to go to when we’re ready to test, we put a banner on the Membership website last week. So far, 21% of members who’ve seen it have indicated they’d like to help.

All being well, we’ll launch the first public trial on the Membership website and in an app this summer.

Joel Godfrey
Product manager

Completing the online registration

To get an online member account you have to register on the Membership site. If you’re already a member then it’s a case of registering your card (or temporary card) you bought in store.

When we looked at data, only 34% of people who started to sign up as new members, ie those who hadn’t got any kind of membership card from coop.co.uk/membership were completing the journey.

Improving things for this user group is key to achieving our target of a million new members this year. Someone signing up here is potentially a new member that we might never see again if they leave the site at this point.

Something didn’t quite add up

Google Analytics told us that we were losing a significant number of people at the point where we asked new members to pay £1. At first we assumed that paying £1 was too much for some customers. But the 34% successful sign up rate didn’t match well with what we were hearing from users we’d talked to. We found that although some people questioned why we charge £1, their reactions didn’t indicate that a massive 2 out of every 3 of them would be put off by it.

From this, we hypothesised that the poor conversion rate might be down to people who were already members arriving at the £1 payment page. They would have already paid to join, so they could be the ones leaving at this point.

There are over a quarter of a million members with temporary cards who haven’t registered them yet. We know that after 28 days the chances of a card being registered falls dramatically so designing a user journey that helps temporary card holders succeed first time and become ‘active’ is vital.

How we improved the user journey

To solve this we added in another step into the process for anyone wanting to join as a new member. The important interaction change we made was to ask the customer if they had a Co-op card, rather than asking them to remember if they were already members.

screen shot of the 'check if you're a member' page showing the three types of membership card

screen shot of the 'check if you're a member' page showing the three types of membership card

We included images of the old ‘honeycomb’ card, the new blue card as well as an image of a temporary card as visual prompts. From there, if they have a card we take their membership number and direct them to sign in or register. Now, they don’t see a screen asking them for another £1. We only let people who say they don’t have a card progress further.

It’s working

Our latest data shows that 58% people who are routed to join follow this journey successfully: they pay £1 and become members. That’s a significant increase. Those we now redirect automatically to register are completing their journeys successfully too – which in its own way is important.

As an aside we’ve also reduced the risk of members duplicating their membership by joining online when they already have a membership number. This reduces the burden on our call centre, which currently is the only way members can link their accounts if they have more than one.

Co-op Digital Blog

A discovery into digital Membership offers