Building a subscription service which gifts a free dessert with every online order
Zomato Treats
Goal: Build the Zomato treats experience which gifts a free dessert with every online order
Period: Q1-Q1 '18
Role and collaborators: Product designer Impact: 80,000 memeberships sold within the first week.
Introduction
As we grew the ordering food online business to 300 thousand orders a day, it was also important to bring our customer retention to speed. Zomato Treats was launched to make ordering food on Zomato a delightful experience and it was hypothesised that this would in-turn increase customer loyalty.
Value Proposition
For customers
Zomato Treats is a subscription service charged at Rs. 250/year through which members get a free Treat with every order placed online. The free Treat can be a drink or a dessert depending on the restaurant partners. Me and Aiswarya designed this experience.
For restaurants
The restaurants get an increase in the number of orders and get to expand their business. An increase in repeat orders would also mean growing customer loyalty.
Initial Research
We talked to about 15 people in our office building and told them about the new product. Most of them seemed pretty excited about it, but had some doubts like:
- Can I chose the dessert/drink of my choice?
- How much would be the actual cost of this free Treat?
- On days when I don’t feel like having the dessert, can I opt out of it?
Design Goals
Since Treats was a new product, the best way to understand the problems that could arise with it was to release it in the wild. To grow our member set quickly we decided to design the flow to maximise for purchases.
Buying Treats should be a Treat
At first we just had one purchase flow in mind. A nice juicy banner on our homepage as the entry point to our Treats page explaining the membership in detail.
However, we soon realised that this flow alone might not be the best in maximizing Treats purchases. Customers making orders on Zomato would be more inclined on purchasing the membership, once they realised that they could receive a free dessert or a drink with their order as well.This made us add us add the Treats subscription to the menu and the cart as well.
However, we soon realised that this flow alone might not be the best in maximizing Treats purchases. Customers making orders on Zomato would be more inclined on purchasing the membership, once they realised that they could receive a free dessert or a drink with their order as well.This made us add us add the Treats subscription to the menu and the cart as well.
Treats Members
The free Treat is auto-added to a Treats members cart. As simple as that!
Edge Cases
Adding the Treats purchase flow to the menu and the cart, gave rise to a lot of edge cases. This gave us the opportunity to think like developers and map out all cases before the mocks go to the devs.
When the member adds more than one Treats item to cart.
Try increasing the number of Ice Cream Sundae below...
When the member removes the auto-added Treat from cart.
Try removing the Treat from the cart below..
To share this logic of addition and removal of items from cart we represented the flows as pseudo-code for the devs. It was a proud moment when they complimented us on thinking through the flow completely and told us how significantly it decreased their dev time.
Moving the needle
We have been able to sell 60,000 Treats membership since its launch in August 2017.
To find out if Treats was actually a delightful experience for our customers, we looked at the difference in number of orders a Treats member made before and after becoming a member. It was encouraging to see a significant increase. A month after the launch, data told us that a Treats user was more likely to turn into a sticky user (customers who place at least one order per month) when compared to a non Treats member. Great Success!
Treats members sharing the love on twitter 😊
