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.
The process of joining ALDO Crew is quick and simple. Customers can sign up by scanning a QR code or by typing the URL from the poster directly into their web browser. Both codes and URLs are present on every piece of promotional materials.
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Every one of the ALDO staff members was onboarded into the details of the program. From day one, all of them became ambassadors of the ALDO Crew.
Throughout the years, ALDO has developed a mature and well-organized techstack. The implementation of the ALDO Crew started with planning on how the loyalty program will reuse existing solutions and how a new loyalty engine will complement the current infrastructure.
The loyalty program is built on top of existing technologies that contain a custom Master Data Management (MDM) system for normalizing and storing any customer data, Marketing Automation for communication and an eCommerce platform. This existing set was extended by Open Loyalty, as a loyalty engine. All the pieces were wired-up thanks to the API Gateway to ensure seamless integration.
A rich set of APIs and webhook-based connections between a new loyalty engine and existing systems, allowed ALDO to create a trouble-free omnichannel customer experience.
Open Loyalty fits perfectly into the existing IT infrastructure. The loyalty engine can easily handle 1500 concurrent API calls with a response time under 1 second. Thanks to an extended API and similar technological stack the implementation of the new loyalty component was quick and painless.
During the development phase, Open Loyalty’s team added a set of custom loyalty features and reduced the costs of infrastructure by half.
ALDO managed to introduce a true omnichannel loyalty program. ALDO Crew has just started, but it’s already bringing tons of value to new and existing customers, making their shopping experience even more enjoyable.
The new customer loyalty strategy with a multi-tenancy loyalty solution was successfully implemented on the three biggest markets: the US, UK, and Canada.
Thanks to a well thought out plan developed by our teams, we managed to finish the project before the estimated delivery date. It took only 3 months to launch a fully operational solution with high performance and good scalability for future growth.
"I appreciate Open Loyalty’s willingness to continue collaborating with us to further develop the platform to ensure that it meets our current and future needs as the ALDO Crew program continues to grow and evolve."
Sandra Martineau
Director of Loyalty & CRM, ALDO Group
The program is being well received by customers on their key markets and it has already become a great base for the upcoming seasonal sales.
From now on, ALDO is able to drive a true omnichannel and data-driven communication.
The ALDO Group, founded in Canada in 1972 by Aldo Bensadoun, is an international retailer specializing in design and production of quality, stylish and accessible footwear and accessories. With over 3,000 sales points around the globe, and 3 main brands — ALDO, CALL IT SPRING and GLOBO, it’s one of the biggest producers on the footwear market.
