Referral | Sharad Singh

Promoting organic acquisitions through the

ZEE5 Referral program

Designing the referral program for ZEE5 for both the referrer and the referee to reduce the cost of acquisition by more than 34%

Organisation

ZEE5

Role

Product designer

Timeline

10 Weeks

Responsibilities

Design direction

Research

Data analysis

Interaction design

Visual design
(post this stage the project was handled by my teammate Pranav)

Prototyping

User testing

Developer handoff

Overview

No referral program existed in Zee5 until April 2023. Initially it was noticed that capability of inviting friends to the platform did exists but without any incentives.

"Without incentives more than a 100 thousand users were inviting (referring) people to the platform. This made rise to the initiative to build a referral capability to incentives users for referring Zee5 to their friend’s and family. Both the referrer and referee will get a 15% off for Zee5 subscription. "

This idea required a lot of buy in from the business teams because while there was a possibility to be tight on creating room for incentives, it was necessary if we wanted subscriber conversions on the long run.

Redesigning For you

High Level Goals

To reduce the cost of customer acquisition.

To increase number of subscriptions

Questions from discovery workshops

I was working on this project with another senior designer called Pranav. We started this process by getting together the entire development team product team and data team that would be working on this project to conduct an early discovery workshop. some things that emerged during our discussion.

Would our users be interested in a referral program? What incentives would lead to subscriber conversions?

1

How could we help design a flow incentivizing both the referrer and the referee ?

2

How can we create entry points the lead to discovery of the referral program?

3 Some constraints that were highlighted

There was a dev and legal constraint in being able to access and save contacts.

4

This meant that we would not be able to identify and show to users which of their contacts already have subscriptions

5

Workshop

We go the team to create ideas on what they imagined the referral program could work like after understanding the constraints.

Incentives

We had several rounds of discussions with the business team to get approval for incentives.

We were able to get an approval spend of a certain amount per user, this spend would be used to incentivize both the referrer and the referee. This value was approved considering our current ARPU.

We had enough information to create our user flow and to have validation sessions with our stakeholders.
This user flow was continuously iterated upon post different versions of the flow that was presented to the teams.

User flow

User A - Referer

User B - Referee

Wireframes

We went through a process of creating several iterations of our ideas and combined with several validation calls with senior design team members and product team, we landed on the final screens and features.

Different versions of the flow were iterated, presented and pitched and the final user flow was modified in the process.

Version 1

In this version we highlighted the journey of the referrer to the referee and the other journeys that would be triggered in the process, like the payments and login journeys.

Version 2

In this version we added an onboarding flow, added an option to understand referral even if it is skipped, highlighted the option to refer/invite even more. We were also able to add the first cut of the copy. Landing page for the referee and completion page were improved further.

Version 3

By the third version we were able to accomodate for more states, differentiating between first time user, vs repeat user. Creating a journey for the referer to claim the reward after the referee has purchased a plan.

Referrer Referee

After several validations calls and discussions with stakeholders, we finalised the phase I design for the referral program. All designs were created with our design system.

Onboarding home page and referer flow

There were several entry points that were explored and created.
For a first time user there was a story style onboarding journey that was skippable.
This led them to the landing page that could be accessed any time. The landing page would have their rewards and also show how they can earn more rewards.

Referer

Referee flow and buying plan

The flow to refer a friend takes the user to the native sharing options where we handcrafted a message along with our copy team.
On clicking this the referee is taken to the ZEE5 web page where the subscription flow is triggered with the discount incorporated.

Returning users

Flows were also thought out and considered for returning users on both ends. as well so they could access their rewards, claim when needed and chase more rewards.

Current status

This flow did not go live completely, only a portion of the flow went live. By this time I was moved to other projects post the Visual design stage of the project. While I've been aware of the progress of this piece I haven't been personally involved in this and it has been taken up by other product designers of our team.