Optimising loyalty under
tight constraints.
Project lead for ongoing conversion optimisation across the IQOS Club members' portal — fast-cycle experimentation, behavioral economics applied to habit and retention mechanics, operating under limited traffic and shared resources.
A loyalty programme with a specific kind of complexity
IQOS Club is Philip Morris International's loyalty programme for IQOS users in Spain — a members' portal where users track rewards, access exclusive content, manage their devices, and engage with the brand between purchases. The programme sits in a category — tobacco alternatives — with significant marketing restrictions, which shapes what's possible in digital promotion.
The CRO challenge here isn't primarily about acquisition. It's about engagement and retention: encouraging existing members to use the platform more actively, progress through loyalty tiers, and remain connected to the brand over time. The levers are different from a transactional funnel.
Low traffic, high standards
Loyalty portals are structurally harder to optimise than transactional funnels. Traffic volumes are lower — because you're targeting only existing members, not the broader market. This means experiments take longer to reach statistical significance, and the risk of acting on false positives is higher.
In this environment, good CRO practice requires more discipline, not less. The hypothesis quality has to be higher because you can run fewer experiments. The design decisions have to be better informed because you have less data to course-correct with.
Behavioral economics in a loyalty context
The most relevant behavioral frameworks for loyalty are different from those that dominate conversion optimisation in e-commerce. Loss aversion still applies — the framing of tier status and expiring points is a powerful lever. But habit formation mechanics become more important: variable reward schedules, completion mechanics, progress visualisation.
As project lead, I was responsible for generating the experiment pipeline: identifying opportunity areas through analytics and heuristic review, structuring hypotheses, prioritising based on potential impact and implementation cost, and communicating the programme's direction to the client. The design work included experiment variant design, interaction specifications, and performance analysis.
"In a loyalty context, the question isn't just 'will users convert?' — it's 'are we building a habit, or just catching a moment?'"
Ongoing programme with measurable engagement gains
The IQOS Club engagement improved across the programme period. Specific figures are subject to client confidentiality and have not been published. The programme ran continuously throughout the Flat 101 engagement.
The more durable outcome for me was methodological: running CRO at low traffic volumes sharpens your thinking about what makes a good hypothesis and what constitutes meaningful evidence. The discipline of making high-quality decisions with limited data is transferable to almost any design context.