MaxRewards is the only fintech company that offers credit card rewards tracking and automatic activation of credit card offers and benefits. At the end of 2021, MaxRewards wanted to create their first referral program.

MaxRewards is a free app to download, but their paid tier, the Gold membership, offers valuable features such as auto-activation of all credit card offers, a searchable benefits data base, and sign up bonus tracking. The existing referral program worked as such: existing users could access a referral code in their account, and upon their friend connecting an account, both users would receive 1 month of Gold membership for free.

However, this model relies on the user deciding, unprompted, to randomly refer people as the thought arose. We wanted to drive user engagement and branch into an entry level market of newer credit card holders.

From our company side, we had to prioritize what pieces of information we absolutely had to convey. We decided that there were 3 primary campaign goals.

Our first task came in deciding the actual rewards structure. For clarity, I will use the word ‘Referral’ to mean every new account that had both signed up their email AND linked one or more credit cards. Referral codes sent out without a linked credit card did not count. We decided that every new referral = 1 free month for both users.

Another tricky challenge arose when we considered how to effectively convey the status of each user’s referrals. In order to prevent scams, we would have to deploy code to verify each email to ensure that users weren’t using the referral program to scam money. This meant we would have to design a tracker bar that communicated two pieces of information:

1) An account that had signed up for the app (”pending”)
2) An account that had signed up for the app and connected a credit card (”posted”)

In order to convey the importance of Gold, we would need to explain what Gold meant. In Sprint 1, I explored different ways to design a collapsible component: upon first clicking into the reward program, the user would see the entire explanation. Upon a return to the page, the reward explanation would collapse above the fold. The user had the option to open it by tapping 'Learn more'. This would draw the user to the CTA to begin sharing.

The next step would be to reduce friction for the user to share. Along with the Sr. Developer, I designed a sticky CTA "Invite Friends" that would automatically stick to the bottom of the screen. By allowing the text above the fold to collapse, the user could immediately track their progress with a dynamic tracker. By keeping all the information on one page, we predicted we would see less drop-off.

The most difficult challenge was to convey the difference between cash rewards and free months of Gold. I knew that users would need to see that information front and center above the fold. To differentiate between the two types of rewards, I designed a card that tracked separate rewards.

Next, I knew from market research that users would drop-off if they could not easily access the rewards chart as a reference. I ran through over 12+ iterations of the reward tiers and finally landed on a design that explained the cash accrual between tiers.

After we achieved the primary business goals, I added emojis in the rewards chart that changed to checkmarks to indicate completion of a level, and I polished the home page with matching dynamic trackers accompanied with animations to convey a sense of achievement and encouragement.

After the marketing team finalized the copy, we passed the design off to the dev team and conducted numerous QA tests via Apple TestFlight. The app is available on both iPhone and Android, and after a few minor revisions, we launched the campaign. Originally, we had wanted more complex micro-interactions and animations, but given the time and scope, we were not able to implement them.

We launched the referral campaign the first week of January. It resulted in the largest sign-ups in one month out of the entire company history.

Pulling off the concept to design to implementation of the referral campaign in a two-week sprint included a lot of feedback. The greatest challenge I faced was how to convey multiple pieces of information while still making the referral campaign enjoyable. As users continued to share the app and complete referrals, figuring out how to mark their progress was also an interesting challenge. We were able to reuse certain elements but redress them in our design.

An example would be the tracker status bar. This tracker bar appears when users are tracking a sign-up bonus. However, we were able to repurpose it as a tracker for referrals. Colors played an important role in the referral tracker to allow the user to know when their referrals were ‘pending’ vs ‘posted’.