Stash – Growth Potential Graphs

↳ TLDR

Background

Throughout my year at Stash, I was the lead designer on the Auto-Stash squad, specializing in recurring savings and investing strategies. Auto-Stash is a suite of money-saving tools that allows users to save and invest automatically. One of the three Auto-Stash strategies, Set Schedule, invests your money on a schedule into investments and ETFs you choose. By automatically investing small amounts over a long period of time, investors are likely to save more.

Problem

The original prompt for this project was to increase engagement on the set schedule management screen. Specifically, I was asked to explore a way to get existing set schedule users to increase their recurring allocation amount and increase strategy retention.

OKRs

Increase average allocation amount for existing set schedule users
Decrease set schedule churn (get true churn below 10%)
Target users: existing Set Schedule users (300,000 total)

Supporting Data

Set Schedule engagement has the highest correlation to retention out of anything on the platform.
18% of Set Schedule users churn the same day as they turn it on
Majority of Set Schedule users have below 10 executions before churn, very few make it to 70
Majority churn before meeting $500 in savings
Avg. days using set schedule is about 4 months

Updated OKRs

Through data, research, and extensive A/B testing, this project evolved to become multiple marketing campaigns and modules on the Auto-Stash landing screen. We also pivoted the OKRs we were targetting with this project, as well as our target audience.

Increase average allocation amount for existing set schedule users
Decrease set schedule churn (get true churn below 10%)
Increase Set Schedule users to 400,000 (currently 300,000, out of 1.6 million total)
Target users: users with Set Schedule off (1.3 million total)

↳ KEY RESULTS

29.5% lift on new A/S enrollments (including Set Schedule, Smart-Stash and Round Ups)

66.4% lift on turning Set Schedule ON (both new and existing users)

33.0% lift on new Set Schedule Enrollments

41% conversion on Mixpanel

↳ HOW IT STARTED

Before starting iterations on the allocation modal, I had a conversation with the lead marketing designer and she mentioned that there was a Set Schedule cash potential graph on the marketing site that was performing really well with acquisition.

Taking a look at the graph, I realized that this design could be directly applied to the allocation tool, as well as investments.

My hypothesis was that users would see this graph and be motivated to increase their allocation amount, or motivated not to churn if that was their original intention.

Is it legal to show an investment potential graph?

Yes, as long as we show a potential graph based on historical performance (i.e. "you could have made x amount of money if you'd invested since x year"), not a graph predicting future performance. (As long as we have the right disclosures.)

Can we show a growth potential graph on the allocation modal?

Yes, as long as we treat every investment the same (i.e. if one investment has this graph for allocations, all investments have to have this graph for allocations)

↳ TEST #1

We ran moderated testing with 10 people in our target market, testing graph comprehension and reactions to different types of investment graphs.

Users were excited to see and interact with the graphs in our prototype, surprised at how much money they could have saved if they'd started investing earlier.

We found that there was significant confusion between the two lines on the graph for the cash graph (cash vs. generic 5% growth).

We also found that users understood volatility, and were drawn to Match the Market as the investment they were most comfortable with (Moderate gains, little volatility). Surprisingly, participants commented that safe ETFs like Park my Cash were "not worth it."

↳ CAMPAIGN #1

For our first Marketing campaign, we tested a guided flow with iOS users, made in Braze.

Question: Can we get users with Set Schedule off to turn it on for cash or for an investment by showing them a growth potential graph?

Audience: We sent a push notification to 60,000 users who had been inactive on the platform for over 30 days.

Results:

65.86% lift on set schedule on
36.98% lift on first set schedule enroll
31.86% lift on first auto stash enroll

↳ CAMPAIGN #2

Question: Is the growth potential graph or the Stock details page causing conversion? Is interactivity important in the growth potential graph?

We tested 3 variants:
A) Control push to match the market
B) Static historical graph
C) Interactive historical graph

Both B and C had significant lift over A, and B and C performed about the same. This told us that we could use a static graph or a graph with set price points and still get similar conversion (which was a lower dev lift).

↳ FINAL DESIGNS

While the original prompt was to add the potential graph to the allocation modal for existing Set Schedule users (with the thought that we'd show a graph for every investment), we decided that it would be more beneficial to put it on the Auto-Stash home screen for users with Set Schedule off (and show cash potential graph instead, as well as recommended investments for retirement).

The new value prop allows users to see the impact of turning on Set Schedule for cash or an investment before opting into the feature. This highlights the power of habitual saving and investing through the use of an interactive graph and slider component that the user can move up and down to see their Auto-Stash potential.

Existing users have less engagement. Users interviewed mentioned that they avoid checking often because if he sees he’s not doing well he’ll be tempted to pull out all his stocks, and he wants to invest for the long term. “I used to check every day and see if I’m up or down. Then I was like it’s a long term investment I shouldn’t be looking at this. I don’t check it anymore.”
The Set Schedule allocaiton modal in particular gets very few views
While we were originally hoping that this graph would be for investments, the dev lift to show graphs for every investment was extremely high. Also, from our previous research, it seems like some of these graphs might entice users to pull out their money- nto increase it.
88% of Set Schedule users who start out by setting cash deposits turn into auto-investors later.

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Contact

Phone: +1 929 293 7758
Email: sarahhayleyarmstrong@gmail.com