Social Nature Notifications
- jennyminke
- Nov 24, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2021
Background
Social Nature is a company on a mission to help more people #trynatural and help better-for-you brands reach their target consumer. We offer micro influencer marketing, product sampling and digital data collection through innovative software that allows them to run marketing programs at scale. Our platform has a community of members whom we engage as participants in our campaigns.
When I joined as the first Product Designer at Social Nature they already had a development roadmap laid out. It was based on hypotheses' and proposed solutions, but lacking a deep understanding of our community member's problems.
A reoccurring comment from our clients was that they wanted more engagement from our community on their micro influencer programs, in the form of reviews, social media sharing and user-generated content. However, we didn't yet fully understand the driving factors behind WHY our community were not completing these tasks.
Research Strategies
RESEARCH GOALS:
Why do our community member not write their reviews? Why do they not post on share their product on Social Media?
How can we remove some of the blockers stopping the members from reviewing and sharing?
Is there a way we can motivate them to be more engaged?
User interviews: The first step was to work with our Community Performance team to discuss trends in help desk tickets and to identify 5 active members with varying engagement level.
Community Survey: Next, we used the insights from our interviews to help us formulate a survey and validate the interview findings on a larger scale with the community.
Google Analytics: Finally we used Google Analytics to analyze how our members flow through our product. We identified areas where we had high drop offs or where we expected higher conversions. We also wanted benchmarks to measure our features for improvement.
The results were eye-opening.
KEY FINDINGS:
General lack of understanding of the Social Nature platform. For starters, we discovered there was definitely misalignment with what our expectations of the community members were, and what our community believed their role was. We discovered that our users did not realize that sharing on social media was an expectation.
Our current notifications system was flawed. We would get a significant amount of support tickets each week written from members asking where they should submit their review. This was especially concerning because in this flow it is difficult to find contact information for our support team.
This made it apparent that the current review reminder notification was not resonating with our members. Usability testing found that a primary area of concern was that traditionally a pencil icon denotes an "edit" function. Also if they are ready to review prior to the first review reminder notification being triggered, it is difficult for the users to find where to go.
Over 63.6% of our users were not aware that they would receive a contest entry for every review they shared on social media. Not having awareness around our contests is detrimental because we specifically run the contests to increase social media posts, and is an add-on that we sell to our clients. Additionally, we know that the email we send to educate our members about the contest has a click through rate is 4% resulting in shares less than 1.2%.We also knew that majority of our members were highly motivated by contests so we were able to identify that awareness was the primary issue.
Members don't wait for the social media share page to load. When we dug into our user funnels on our session recording software we could see most users didn't wait for the page that introduced our contest to load, and clicked away. This was especially prevalent on mobile where load times are slower. We saw over 53% drop off from the page which the member writes their review to the share page. Of that 47% who are making it through, we saw see 22.7% bounce. This tells us to that a large chunk of our community aren't even getting to the contest page, which is a problem because this is the primary touchpoint to communicate with our users that there is a contest and how to enter.
Emails are are losing effectiveness. Also, they may not check their email until hours later. We can see that share reminder emails have a 50% open rate with only a 4% click-through, and result in 1.2% share. We send the share reminder 15 minutes after they have reviewed and not shared, which means the user has likely left the site when they are getting the reminder. Additionally, we also hypothosized that this day in age, consumers are bombarded with marketing and transactional emails because we regularly see a drop off of up to 40% of users who never read an email.
Design
PLANNING
When planning our solutions it was important we kept our users top of mind. I developed a member persona to help the team stay focused on our customers while brainstorming.
We held a brainstorming session with 8 members of our team to get many potential solutions on the table. We weigh out the pros and cons of each feature and the effort vs. impact.
One of the hotly debated proposed solutions was the notifications system. Part of the team believed that a redesign of the system would improve member engagement while the other half believed that the system we had was good enough. We created a presentation to showcase our research findings and how a new notification system could help resolve many of the key problems our members were having.
SOLUTION
The top solution was to redesign the notification system to guide members through each step and stage of their program. We believed that this would improve understanding and communicate more clearly what our expectations were of our members.
Next, as the feature champion, I built out a press release which we used to pitch the concept to the stakeholders and executive team. Our press release process covers defining the problem, supporting evidence on how we know it is a problem, preliminary sketches of the potential solution, and how the success of the project will be measured. The press release was presented to the team for questions and feedback.
Once we had buy-in, we began mapping out the feature flow and functionality in more detail. Working closely with the development team we collaborated on building a solution that was effective and mindful of resources.
Next we created low fidelity prototype for team feedback than usability testing.
Team feedback was largely focused on copywriting and the debate of whether or not using a button would be a stronger call to action and improve interaction. Being a start-up we did not have resources or time to do further testing and the tough decision was made to move forward with buttons on the most important notifications.
Testing was an important part of the development process. A few key takeaways from testing were;
Members wanted to be able to 'snooze' a reminders if they were not ready to write their review -> We added in the ability to temporarily pause the reminder.
Members were still confused to how they might report easily issue if they did not receive their sample -> We added a link to the help desk from the notification
There was a lack of contrast between new and read notifications -> We increased the background opacity and added a title for 'read' notifications.
This user interface style was chosen because we know our community are active social media users and are familiar with the layouts the popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It is also a flexible yet robust tool that would be able to scale to support additional business goal and user goals. This also allows us to send multiple reminders to complete a task without spamming their email inboxes.
Successes
Our A/B tests of version one showed a 7% lift in reviews v.s the old review reminder system and a 2.8% (about 56 posts) lift in our social media shares. The whole team was extremely happy with this lift.
Future Iterations
Based on the success of the MVP release we expanded the notifications to support other user and business goals.
We notify users when;
New users join they receive a getting started guide
Program campaigns they were qualified for became available
They have inspired their social media friends to #trynatural
A promo code becomes available for a product they showed interested in
Additionally, we will built a CMS interface that allows our Customer Service team to build out custom reminders that are linked to a query. For example a campaign needs more User Generated Content, our team could set up a custom reminder that would reminder all users in that campaign to post a photo on Instagram specifically . This feature could also be used for other one-off reminders, like an address update or when we launch a new feature and want to educate our community.
Future considerations include adding push notifications to allow users to opt-in on Android or members using Google Chrome on Desktop.
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