Optimizing for membership and revenue growth

As the product designer for the growth squad, I focused on solutions that helped grow our user base. I designed and moderated interviews with teachers, ran AB testing, and iterated on design solutions targeting these areas:

  • Teacher activation

  • Memberships

  • Referrals

 

Team

1 Product Owner
1 QA
2 Developers

Time

6 months

Challenge

Prodigy’s membership page is student-centric and lacks the proper context for parents and teachers to buy a membership. When teachers love the product and want to share it, it’s unclear whether there is a referral program. There’s an opportunity to improve the product value and discoverability communication to impact Prodigy’s growth efforts.

Goal

Increase account activations.

Success criteria: Increase in teachers who verify and activate their dashboard accounts.

Increase membership revenue.

Success criteria: Increased page conversion rate and revenue per visit.

Increase teacher referral leads.

Success criteria: Increased page traffic and referral invites sent by teachers.

Business Impact

Our experiments led to new features and changes to make the interaction between parents and teachers with Prodigy more meaningful. We increased our collective knowledge of what’s important for those purchasing memberships. We learned that Prodigy doesn't have one selling point. Rather, teachers will highlight engagement, ease-of-use, curriculum alignment, and more when sharing Prodigy's benefits.

Increased teacher activations

Boosted the total activation rate of mobile registrants by 30%.

Increased revenue per teacher and parent visit

Increased the total revenue-per-visit on the pricing plan page by 20%.

Increased membership conversion rate

Increased conversion rate by 5% for parents and 9% for teachers.

Research

1. We set out to understand what teachers find valuable about Prodigy and how they share it.

Prodigy has 150 million registered users in more than 150 countries. We used social media and internal data to create user segments for each experiment.

  • Unmoderated AB testing and usability testing.


  • Session behaviour and analysis through tools like Full Story.

2. We set out to understand how teachers use the referral program in schools.

We visited an elementary school in Hamilton, Ontario, to conduct field research by interviewing teachers who use Prodigy in their classrooms.

  • 15-minute conversations about the product.


  • 15-minute prototype testing and feedback

 

1M

Users in the United States.

200k

Users per segments to achieve statistical significance.

25

Small scale tests aided by UserTesting, Domo, and FullStory

 

Insights

Activation

Previous data analysis showed that teachers who register with known education email addresses (.on.ca.edu) activate at a rate of 42%, whereas those who register with less well-known education email addresses activate at 50%. Far more users register with Gmail and other non-work addresses than education addresses.

Memberships

Teachers and parents, even those using us for years, had difficulty finding the membership page, which was game and student-centric. The page lacked the information to help teachers and parents understand the full scope of the product before purchasing.

Referrals

One of the most effective growth channels we have is our teacher referral program. Teachers trust when colleagues make recommendations about tools that work for them. Teachers won't hesitate to recommend Prodigy to a colleague. As long as they like it and see its effectiveness, they'll talk about Prodigy when the time is right.

Ideation

Solutions

Establish a baseline

To quickly experiment with the copy and establish a baseline, we ran Facebook ads and tested them to see which content focus generated the most clicks. Each ad focus has about three options. The format of the ads was based on a previously validated and successful ad. List of themes that resonate with teachers:

  • Prodigy is an engaging math game


  • How memberships drive game engagement up and, in turn, math engagement


  • The tools Prodigy provides to give student's performance insight

 

Keep it professional

We changed our Sign-up forms to change the label on the e-mail field. Asking for a school email address encouraged users to activate by associating Prodigy with professional practice and dissuading non-teachers from registering.

 

Making the content relevant

For teachers, we focused on the language and positioning of incentives. For parents, we iterated on using their child’s performance data as a motivator on the page’s Hero component. The hero component uses logical and emotional appeals, such as:

  • Authority: Prodigy is improving the child’s core math skills.


  • Entertainment: The child is learning math with Prodigy voluntarily.


  • Success: The child is doing great in their academic learning.

 

Useful nudges

We experimented with sending emails to users who attempted but failed, to purchase a membership. These emails needed to be relevant, informative and visually appealing.

Many parents and teachers start the membership flow by their child being logged in on the same device and poking around the membership page. In such cases, this email acts as a conversation starter between those with purchasing power and students.

 

Reimagine referrals

We conducted interviews to gather website insight, thoughts, and attitudes around the referral program. Our initial research findings determined us to redesign the referral system completely. Overall, users understood the new concept for referrals, where to go to send them, and the different options to share them. This concept follows a well-established pattern used on many other referral pages.

 

Learnings

Context can have a significant impact on research. By talking to folks in their work environment we were able to extract a wealth of genuine feedback from our users. I noticed that folks were more aware of the challenges they faced while using the product in class. Being in this familiar environment resulted in specific feedback and insights compared to remote tests or interviews.

Company

Ensuring all elements have proper tracking feeding to metric dashboards is an investment that greatly pays off.

Team

The smallest change can lead to big impacts. Don’t dismiss a “simple” idea, they can can revolutionize projects.

Personal

Most people are idealistic and optimistic in their responses. Keep an open mind to what people say but keep a close eye to what they do.