The ALDO Group, a global shoe retailer, wanted to deliver a unique shopping experience and develop deeper, long-term relations with customers. They did it by launching the ALDO Crew - an omnichannel, data-driven loyalty program.
Here’s how they used Open Loyalty to create a fully omnichannel loyalty solution that went live in the US, UK, and Canada in 3 months.
ALDO, a leading brand of The ALDO Group, is well known for its product quality and best-in-class shopping experience. With a solid foundation of offline and online stores that operate in 65 countries, ALDO’s team decided to improve 2 key metrics: shopping frequency and customer satisfaction.
The fashion industry is extremely competitive, and it’s crucial to keep customers loyal to the brand in the long term. Nowadays, customers expect not only great, quality products but also seamless customer service, smooth shopping experience and truly engaging communication with the brand. Moreover, ground stores play the role of showrooms but are still an important component of the customer journey. ALDO’s experts focused on improving customer retention, including the frequency of visiting offline stores.
While working on these challenges, ALDO’s team developed a new data-driven loyalty strategy with the ALDO Crew loyalty program at the heart of it. The plan included introducing one, centralized loyalty program that will bond omnichannel data sources and allow ALDO to understand their customers’ shopping patterns.
ALDO’s team was looking for customizable loyalty software that could handle the massive scale and give them full control over the customers’ data. Because of the upcoming high season, the time-to-market was also a critical factor. It was important that the loyalty engine would integrate well with their existing infrastructure and reuse data already collected in a data lake.
Throughout two months of the vendor selection process, ALDO’s team investigated ten leading loyalty solutions. The most important selection criteria were:
During that time, the ALDO and Open Loyalty teams worked closely to verify all business and technological requirements.
Once the team saw that Open Loyalty has all the loyalty components and flexibility needed to build the desired solution, they decided to develop a quick Proof of Concept based on it.
"Our loyalty strategy has been to understand why our consumers like ALDO and develop perks, rewards and dynamics that enhance their experience of the brand. As a low frequency purchase, our category suffers from low brand loyalty, so giving people a reason to keep coming back, checking what's new and staying top of mind is crucial to our business goals. The Open Loyalty solution allows us a lot flexibility in building these dynamics and delivering a strong experience for our consumers"
Thomas Archer Bata
ALDO Group
The loyalty mechanics needed to support three main business goals: Â
ALDO decided to implement a loyalty program with spending-based levels, dynamically assigned offers and a wide range of constant benefits like free shipping or extended guarantees. The whole program is fully digital. To take advantage of ALDO’s Crew benefits you simply need to identify yourself with your mobile phone number — no physical card is needed.
The whole loyalty cycle is based on 12 months period and it’s closely matched with customers’ existing shopping behaviors. That results in more promotions that are much better crafted to individual preferences than in a typical 6 months period based loyalty programs.
ALDO Crew engages customers from the very beginning of their customer journey. In each tier, members can unlock various benefits.
ALDO’s team has put great effort into designing consistent marketing communication among all channels and media.
The existing eCommerce platform was enriched with new loyalty features. Customers can easily check the essential benefits offered in the ALDO Crew. The registration process is fast on both desktop and mobile. Logged in Customers get access to exclusive ALDO Crew Deals. It’s easy to check your current level, available benefits and the amount of spending needed to be promoted to the next level.
Introducing the ALDO Crew to offline stores was one of the most important milestones of the project. The loyalty program had to become a tool that would allow their marketing team to capture even more data and shape customers’ behavior, for example by triggering them to visit the store more often and, as a result, increasing shopping frequency.
ALDO Crew is highlighted throughout the whole store. Such a wide exposure was introduced to every store in the US, UK and Canada at the same time. Posters displaying different benefits of the program were placed in all key spots like windows or cash counter.
