Jason Guevara
Last updated November 2022
Jason Guevara
Last updated November 2022
Chime's referral program provides a rewarding way for members to share their love for the product with their networks. However, asking people to do something as personal as moving their money requires a high level of motivation. We built a more targeted, personalized experience to help incentivize members to benefit from referrals.
Responsible for collaborating on research, product strategy and end-to-end design of the personalized referral incentive experience.
Lead designer with input from other growth designers, 1 Content Designer, 1 Product Manager, 1 Researcher, 1 Data Analyst, 5 Engineers, 1 Product Marketing Manager, 1 Compliance Specialist, 1 Strategic Finance Analyst.
🔮 This is a simplified overview. To learn more,
get in touch →
Referrals has always been an efficient channel of acquisition. As a baseline Chime offers a double-sided cash bonus of $100 for successful referrals. In evaluating opportunities for growth of the referral program, the team identified great potential for certain member segments. These segments exhibited relatively high tendencies to refer people successfully. We believed if we catered to these segments, we would go a long way in acheiving a company level growth OKR.
People earning an hourly wage or gig workers.
Chime members of 1+ years.
People hearing about Chime from friends.
Once we identified promising segments, we brainstormed ways we could better motivate them. We landed on a set of levers we felt would be the most impactful:
Increase the cash bonus.
Offer the bonus for a limited time.
A peronalized referral experience.
We would go on to run controlled experiments for each targeted incentive to determine which would belong to the final set we would ship. Each incentive would have multivariate testing with various approaches to personalized messaging, visuals and details to help key in on motivations we learned resonated with each segment.
A journey map highlighting pain points for members who join without a referral link.
In the end, at least one version of each targeted segment incentive exceeded our goals and were slated to be shipped. The newly minted suite of targeted incentives led to big increases for each of the primary and secondary success metrics. The key result was our Northstar metric, members who switch their direct deposit to Chime in their first 30 days of joining, saw an average lift of 25.6% to control.
The Second Chance Incentive aimed at members who didn't join using a referral link but who attributed joining because of a friend.