Best Buy was leaking revenue because users with auto-renewing subscriptions (MS Office, antivirus, etc.) whose payment methods had expired were not being reminded effectively to update their info.
In Product Design, we often glamorize the most coveted types of work while overlooking the work that generates deeper, more resilient value: the functional, day-to-day meat and potatoes – where incremental changes can inject a surprising amount of buoyancy into the bottom line. That’s because these mini but mighty achievements stand on the shoulders of established best practices and thus continue to prove their efficacy.
This is a story of how those fundamentals create daily growth for the largest consumer electronics retailer in the US.
CONTEXT
Best Buy sells and manages many subscription-based products for customers, including Best Buy Total™ Memberships, which require a valid payment method on file in order to facilitate automatic recurring payments at regular intervals.
PROBLEM
The payment methods of many customers who had purchased subscriptions through Best Buy were lapsing without the customer updating them in time for the next billing cycle.
WHY WAS THIS A PROBLEM?
An invalid payment method meant that Best Buy couldn’t automatically renew customers’ subscriptions, resulting in a considerable loss in revenue.
WHAT WAS THE CAUSE OF THIS PROBLEM?
The reminders that Best Buy was employing to drive customer action were found to be ineffective due to high fragmentation, no cohesive strategy, poor timing, lack of urgency in the content, and overall ignorable design.
OBJECTIVES
• Unify the payment update reminder tactics under a consistent strategy and tone of voice
• Create parity and consistency across desktop, mobile web and the Best Buy app
• Stop and reverse a revenue loss trend that was increasing QoQ
• Apply UX and Content Design best practices as the main validation for our decisions
Before
Best Buy had a grand total of four “engagement drivers” in play:
• A pop-over modal that only appeared on desktop
• A yellow “advisory” alert banner that only appeared on mobile web
• A toast message that only appeared in the mobile app (but not mobile web)
• Two reminder emails
The engagement metrics across all of these were low to non-existent – signaling a rich opportunity to overhaul the approach.
Mobile web banner:
PROBLEMS
• Wrong alert type lacks urgency
• Competes for attention
• Vague language
• Awkward, one-off instance
Desktop pop-over:
PROBLEMS
• Vague, awkward language
• Lack of urgency
• No visual hierarchy
• Only appears once
After
First, I worked with my designer and PM to assess the existing drivers and prioritize our updates. In addition to improving the content itself, I put the Design in Content Design by advocating the use of meaningful color, familiar icons and font weight-driven hierarchy.
✨Updated✨ mobile web banner:
IMPROVEMENTS
• Clear, urgent language
• Correct banner type
• Banner now appears elsewhere
✨Updated✨ desktop pop-over:
IMPROVEMENTS
• Simpler, clearer language
• Stronger, more impactful hierarchy
• Use of color, icon and font drive urgency
• Modal persists dynamically based on user activity
Bonus points
Next, we reached out to other teams to get buy-in for adding new drivers that would increase our reach:
• The in-app message center (owned by the Marketing Comms team)
• Push notifications (owned by the App Growth team)
• More strategic email pulsing (owned by the Digital Ops team)
Finally, we included a sticky homepage story on the app that would remind users to update their payment methods as the first thing they’d see after opening the app.
(The Personalization team oversees the app homepage, so adding this one felt like a no-brainer.)
✨New✨ app homepage card:
IMPROVEMENTS
• Clear, persistent reminder up top
• Consistent language, tone, design
• More engagement data for the Personalization Algorithm
✨New✨ in-app alert:
IMPROVEMENTS
• In-app messages were underused for utility until now
• Consistent language, tone, design
Results
A whopping 69% increase in payment method updates over five weeks, with 22% happening after just one impression.
The homepage card also gained a 38% increase in traction, which gave the Personalization Algorithm a feast of new engagement data to consider when carefully curating the app’s experience to each user’s tastes.