NEW MEMBERSHIP
How do you get more members? Learn from the ones you’ve got.
My role
UX Lead
UX Researcher
Product manager
Engineering team
Team
UX Designers (4)
Project goals
Sam’s Club is a wholesale store where a paid membership gains you access to quality products at an exceptional value.
The initial goals of this project were to
Create a responsive new membership flow - the existing flow was desktop only which was a negative experience for the ever increasing mobile audience
Communicate the value of membership
Streamline the new membership form
At the time there were 4 membership types Savings, Plus, Business, Plus for Business. Over the course of the project, our business partners announced exciting updates to the structure and value of membership…we were able to quickly pivot and include those too. More details ahead…
Previous new membership page
Research
We started the project with research including a member survey, competitive audit and a persona review.
Member survey = Golden data nuggets
Our starting point was to learn from our existing members. Instead of us telling them what they should value, we thought it would be better to see what our members actually value. We used a survey to ask existing members what they like about their Sam’s Club membership. We wanted to make sure those top 10 values were well represented in our new design.
5 values to add from our Member survey
Competitive audit
We also performed an audit of other sites that offer memberships or different pricing tiers. This helped us define some best practices as we thought about our design concepts.
The big finding here was that we should not only be helping a prospective member decide between membership types but we should also be doing a better job addressing the question, Why Sam’s Club?
A few of the sites from our competitive audit
Persona review
At Sam’s Club, we were fortunate to already have personas that were based on many user interviews conducted by our UX research team. We reviewed what each of our personas would need from our new membership flow.
Concepts
Landing page
We explored a lot of different concepts. Each concept included modules that were based on our findings from the member survey, competitive audit and persona review. Those modules were:
Membership types with top benefits
A comparison grid
Overall value of Sam’s Club
Local club information & services
Member testimonials
Brand callouts
New membership form
Less is more, especially when it comes to form design. We audited our existing form fields to understand how every piece of data was used and when possible remove those that were not used. We were able to reduce the total number of fields in our form from 51 to 28.
Our membership form was designed to have a similar look and feel to our cart & checkout experience. This was an intentional decision to repurpose common components but also reduce the cognitive load for our members.
Form field audit
Testing
From the concepts we ultimately landed on 2 main concepts to test with some users.
Tabs - this concept created tabs for Individuals and Business
Modified 3 up - an updated version of the existing page
The goal of this test was to determine which structure more clearly communicated the differences between membership types.
The result was that the tabbed approach made a more clear distinction between membership types. People reported being able to better understand and decide whether business was for them. Additionally, they understood that Plus could be for either a business or an individual which was unclear in the 3 up concept.
Scope change
As mentioned before, our business partners had some exciting updates for membership and more importantly our members. The changes were
Membership going from 4 types to 2 - Moving forward, Sam’s Club would be offering only a Plus and a Base level membership. Business information could be optionally added to either of those memberships. Our solve for this change was to remove the business tab from the landing page and to create an optional section for business information in the form.
New value proposition - Free Shipping for Plus! Our designs provided a framework to easily include this HUGE new value for our Plus members. We were also able to use our new membership form to quickly create new Plus memberships from product pages so they could get Free shipping right away.
Final designs
New Plus memberships increased by 74% over the previous year
Landing page
New membership form