Milestones allowed couples to earn points to redeem for cash back in exchange for completing tasks focused on activation & retention, like funding their Ivella account, making a transaction, saving up towards a goal, etc.
Context
Fixing What’s Broken
Ivella already had an “Account Setup” section that asked users to take three core actions — connect with their partner, fund their account, and make their first transaction — but there lacked a strong incentive for people to complete them.
We released Points & Rewards a few months later, where people could earn points on their spending and redeem them for cash back, and wanted to leverage this feature to gamify onboarding and motivate new couples to complete certain tasks.
Registration had many hoops for couples to jump through — Split Account required both partners to sign up and deposit to split transactions & Joint Accounts couldn’t even be created unless both partners were approved. Despite this, we found that after someone made their first transaction on Ivella within the first week of joining, they’d continue to use Ivella consistently (~12 transactions a month) 90% of the time.
Solution
Meet Milestones
Every relationship has its own milestones but everyone knows the traditional ones — first kiss, saying “I love you”, meeting the parents, first anniversary, moving in together, and so on. With Ivella’s focus on couples, we named Milestones, well, Milestones to reflect our desire to highlight and celebrate meaningful moments on a couple’s journey with us & foster lasting relationships with them.
Milestones were separated into two categories: activation and retention. Retaining a couple isn’t possible without ensuring activation and offering both categories of Milestones risked distracting them so we made access to Retention Milestones contingent on the completion of Activation Milestones, allowing us to guide couples through the ideal journey. Gatekeeping Retention Milestones while also pairing them with a wider variety of rewards was done with the hope this would be further motivation to complete Activation Milestones first.