Enhancing the Sainsbury's Loyalty programme to be intuitive, more rewarding & easier to engage with, to better resonate with loyal customers
Roles
Strategist | Product Designer | Researcher
Timeline
3 Months
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Claude
In a rush? Here's a brief overview of the project
Users find it difficult and confusing to locate where & how to redeem their Nectar points, leading to frustration, low engagement & missed loyalty opportunities. They also found it confusing to navigate 3 apps & a broken & confusing user experience.
We combined competitive analysis, secondary research & primary interviews to trace Sainsbury's loyalty problem back to Nectar's confusing points experience, then designed and user tested a multitiered concept that better resonated with loyal customers
We proposed a multitiered, gamified concept for Nectar, paired with a unified mobile experience that rewards customers instantly & and helps them track their progress visually.
Key Findings From the Research Phases
Loyal Sainsbury's shoppers found Nectar's loyalty programme made it hard for them to feel that their loyalty wasn't being recognised, with some reporting no noticeable in-store benefit from the programme
Tesco Clubcard and Lidl Plus offered simpler, more instant rewards, and unlike Nectar, kept point collection inside a single app rather than redirecting to a third party. Customers noticed the difference and compared the two directly and unfavourably
Users didn't know where to track, redeem points & were often unaware of other ways to earn. They were confused as to which app to use when & some participants stopped trying to figure it out after they were left a bit irritated
Points accumulated too gradually to feel meaningful, with little real-time feedback on progress or savings. This slow payoff was consistently linked to lower motivation to engage with the programme at all
Top-up / Low basket shoppers were usually less loyal to one supermarket and felt that using Nectar didn't really help them with savings & had less motivation to engage with it
What customers were asking for
Business Strategy
Membership Tiers & Rewards
Point Collection
Unified App Experience
My Takeaways
‣ Increased customer loyalty and reduced churn rates due to an enhanced program value and engagement
‣ Attracting new customers to
join Sainsbury‘s loyalty
program
‣ Motivating customers to spend more per visit (reach tier goals, use the personalised offers)
‣ Encouraging customers to visit Sainsbury’s more due to increased perceived value and instant rewards
‣ Integrating app functionalities can reduce technical maintenance costs and enable more efficient data and backend management
Roles that i took on
Took scattered research findings & insights into a clear actionable strategic direction, connecting threads between research, client conversations & design decisions
Advised the team to focus on instant gratification as the core problem, based on the research insights & discussions with the client, to help customers feel valued when interacting with Nectar
Took ownership of connecting research to our decisions at each stage of the design process, keeping our final concept based on the problems customers were facing and the client wanted to be addressed rather than working with assumptions
