Savings.com's (SDC) Rewards program was not up to par with the competitive landscape and the areas advertising these Rewards on our merchant pages were unclear. The Rewards product needed to be revamped into a more robust offering with an improved user experience to match. For starters, SDC only offered $ amount rebates with a minimum purchase requirement on a few merchants at a time. Overall, the objective was to redesign and improve the Savings Rewards product and UX/UI. The primary KPIs were user sign-ups, incremental conversion rates, and average order value.
As part of my overall analysis on the existing Rebates experience, I performed a SWOT analysis to inform the direction of the redesign and identify areas of improvement.
Strengths: Motivates users to shop and spend more money to reach the requirement.
Weaknesses: Very limited number of rebate offers, no central place with all the offers, the minimum spending requirement is a possible deterrent, no regular placements advertising the program, no educational information on how it works
Opportunities: Offer cash back on a majority of merchants with no spending minimum, earn cash back on every purchase (but incentivize to spend more to earn more), redesign an improved UI/UX for rewards experience (make it easier to track rewards), advertise value props of signing up at Savings (landing page, homepage messaging, placements), create a Cash Back/Rewards category page to easily find all available offers.
Threats: Differentiation from competitors while also improving our experience to be on on par with them, increasing order value and conversion rate to offset commission sharing costs, must prove out to exec team and start with a MVP
I conducted competitive research to get a better understanding of where Savings.com was lacking in comparison to similar sites. I also gathered user research of online shopper's habits when searching for savings and where that fits in their purchasing journey that could help inform the product.
My research showed that cash back was the standard reward type across the board, and companies that offered cash back on majority of merchants were considered leaders. One major constraint in redesigning our Rewards program as Cash Back, is that it would need to be tested into and proven out before scaling, so we tested a refreshed Rebates design vs. a Cash Back MVP pilot.
In the original design, the percentage of merchant page visitors who engaged with the Rebate banner was very low. The hypothesis is that users easily missed the banner at top in search of better deals lower on the page, and were also unaware that the rebate offer can be activated in addition to other deals on the page, not instead of. In both the Rebates refresh and the Cash Back MVP versions, the redesigned top banner placement features a flipped layout, color, and more compelling visuals to draw more attention. To emphasize the fact that the rebate reward can be earned on top of other offers or promo codes, we added a banner anchored to the top of each deal card in the Rebates Refresh version and a "cash back eligible" tag in the Cash Back MVP version.
In addition to the merchant page flows, the transactional e-mails informing users of their Reward status and the Account Dashboard pages needed to be redesigned.
One of the main pain points users of competitor sites had is their purchases getting rejected from earning cash back and the long waiting process of going through customer service. One of main priorities of the design is to distill messaging of how the new Cash Back program works to the user as clearly and succinctly as possible. Special consideration was placed on our mobile experience since the majority (60%) of our traffic comes from mobile, but that traffic only accounts 30% of our revenue, presenting an opportunity to improve our mobile UX.
In order to properly test the new Rebates Refresh and Cash Back MVP designs, the Account Dashboard also needed to be redesigned for users to track their Rewards. The old design used cards, but this was clearly not the right UI element. The card layout was confusing and the card's content did not communicate or organize the information users would be looking for. The use of iconography was also not helpful in indicating the status of each Reward.
The Rebates refresh MVP design launched recently, but the preliminary results are already looking positive. The number of Rebate entries increased by 4.03%.