End-to-End Purchase, Subscription Upgrades: 2023-24
Role: Initiative owner, authored and maintained proposal and planning docs including overarching approach, timelines, resource plans. Led team of 4 product designers, 1 content designer. Partnered with Director of Product Management (+ 2PMs), Dev Managers (2 dev teams), Director of Data Science and Analytics (1 Data scientist, 1 Analyst).
Problem: Over several years we had inadvertently introduced complexity to our purchase paths, in many cases were not driving toward most valuable actions, and saw customer confusion due to inconsistencies in the experience as they transitioned between different target segments and regions.
Outcomes: Incremental revenue of ~4MM in 6 months from subscription upgrades. Additional opportunities identified for future execution.
In Q4 2023, I identified a key opportunity area in auditing and optimizing our core purchase experiences for iStock. With support from SVP of e-commerce it was included in our 2024 planning process and I was assigned as initiative owner.
Over the previous 2+ years, we had been doing a lot of testing of different experiences targeted to different customer segments and types. In isolation, these experience were driving value. The problem was that from a holistic viewpoint we had introduced a lot of unnecessary complexity and inconsistency as a single customer might transition between different states along their journey with use (e.g. first time single purchaser to a subscriber). Additionally, we saw a lot of experiences that were left as tests and were not yet fully productionized or rationalized to some of our newer capabilities.
Goals
As we kicked off discovery phase, I aligned the team around three primary goals.
Drive incremental revenue through UX and growth design based improvements to key flows
Reduce customer confusion/increased trust through increased consistency/predictability
Reduced system maintenance costs by reducing the # of variations of each experience (e.g. different versions of plans and pricing pages, product detail pages, etc.)
Targeting flows with highest opportunity for impact
I partnered closely with Director of Product Management, e-commerce and Director of Data Science and Analytics to align on overall approach and decide what data we would need and how best to look at it to target the biggest opportunity areas.
At a high-level we looked at regions, channels, and purchase paths where we saw lower conversion rates, higher drop offs, and larger customer support case volume.
Auditing the experience and past data
Once we had rough areas identified, I had some folks from my team dive in and do some auditing using test accounts to mimic different customer experiences. We looked at past UX research data and identified any qualitative themes related to friction or frustration in purchase paths. Additionally, we talked to our customer service team and looked at case volume for purchase related areas.
Approach/timelines excerpt from my proposal document:
Biggest opportunities
Let customers upgrade their subscriptions on site without having to contact support.
Bring key value props further up in the flow and make more prominent
Make purchase options more consistent for first time and returning customers
Subscription upgrade problem
The rest of this case study will focus on this problem specifically as it ended up delivering significant impact in a relatively short amount of time (~6 months).
Our audit showed that many of our existing subscriber purchase paths did not allow customers to self-serve upgrade to meet their needs, whether that was upgrading to get more downloads because they were out before their renewal period, upgrading to access premium content if they were in a basic, or gaining access to video if they were in an image only plan. We saw signal of some frustration around this in past qualitative research studies as well.
Our customer support data showed that we received a significant number of cases from customers asking to upgrade. This day in age, we all know, nobody wants to have to contact support to unblock their workflow. We worked with our BI team to model out the potential impact of allowing self-serve upgrades and the upside looked great. So we kicked off with a smaller team to go after this problem.
Typical flow for a subscription user
A subscription gives the user a certain number of downloads they can use to get the content they need. Some subscriptions are only for static images and some include both images and videos. Here’s a quick illustration of a happy path flow.
1 - Customer with an active subscription searches and lands on an asset detail page for an image or video they want to use.
2- They decide to download and can choose what product they want to use. Either downloads from their subscription or credits (if they have purchased credits).
3- Download is confirmed and customer can use the asset in their project.
This is the happy path flow for subscription customers. But what happens when they are out of downloads, don’t have enough credits or want to download a premium asset but only have a basic subscription?
We were blocking their flow.
Problems
Blocking them at a critical point in their workflow.
Creating confusion and friction by not making choices obvious and forcing them through a pricing page.
In many cases, not even providing a path to upgrade their subscription to either a premium or higher number of downloads.
Promoting credit purchases which drive lower revenue, lower CLTV and don’t set the customer up for future downloads.
Solutions - Images
Clearer notification to the customer when they are out or close to being out of downloads
Position two volume options to show that the higher the volume of downloads, the better the pricing per asset.
Clear choice and taking them directly to checkout vs having to go through a second pricing page.
Clear upgrade path and downplaying of credits option.
Solutions - Video
Based on some previous testing we found that a larger number of video customers purchase larger credit packs based on intermittent needs so we positioned the credits option and allowed that path to go direct to checkout.
More clearly position the upgrade path and talk about the benefits.
Again, removing friction from purchase path by enabling direct-to-checkout, so customer can get on with their workflow.
We launched each new upgrade scenario incrementally so we could monitor results and learn what could be applied to future scenarios to ensure success. By June 2024, about six months after kicking off the initiative we had seen the following accumulated results. (Note: PPV = Premium Plus Video subscription)
