Client: A financial planning and investment platform, Ellevest offers automated brokerage, retirement, and banking accounts for a monthly subscription.
Role: Senior Product Designer - Growth and Engagement
Project timeline: Feb 2021 - June 2021
Owning the entire journey from sign up to activation, my PM partner and I reimagined the user journey for new Ellevest clients, launching in sections and AB testing key areas. We were tasked to improve membership CVR (a long stagnant metric) while also improving retention rates.
Convert quality leads that would go on to fully set up the product.
Increased lead to purchase by 25%
Increased product activation by 200%
>$25K monthly recurring revenue
Improved retention
The biggest impact we saw with this test was actually down funnel - payment conversion improved in the variant with these intro screens.
Ellevest offered 4 main services (banking, investing, retirement planning, and financial education, but the vast majority of users (~80%) activated the investing feature first. We matched the messaging from successful marketing comms to focus on the ease of starting investing.
Ellevest offered 3 tiers of subscription. We had high drop off on the tier selection screen, and over explaining the value props was a very heavy load for the user to digest. We simplified the key differences of each plan to a few words (cutting the full list of everything included) to make the selection easy.
Not only did this increase conversion on this screen (and overall), it increased subscriptions on higher tiers
This change, in isolation, doubled the amount of new users opening and funding an account.
Immediately after subscription purchase, we saw high drop off, with clients not setting up their investing portfolios. This lead to many clients paying for a service they didn’t use, and churn was climbing.
Instead of offering equal choice, we used info we collected earlier in the flow to direct the user to the appropriate product, and made it feel like a continuation of their sign up process.
Ultimately, we wanted clients to set up at least one additional product service - engaging in at least 2 product pillars (funding investing or banking account, attending a workshop, or meeting with a financial advisor) brought the clients likelihood of 3 month retention close to 100%.
Clients who entered the checklist were:
