Converting members into active users by launching a mobile app: our work with PerkSpot

Name: TXI Digital
Price range: $

The brief

Double active users by expanding into mobile

Since its founding in 2006, PerkSpot has been empowering employers to deliver weekly perks to their employees. From discounted amusement park tickets to deals on electronics, restaurants, gyms, and more, these benefits have proven wildly popular.

How popular? Every month, about a million people log in to take advantage of PerkSpot deals.

Despite the ongoing success of its core model, PerkSpot’s leaders recognized, in 2019, that without a mobile app, they were almost certainly missing out on a segment of the market.

In fact, while a million members visited the site every month, many more never logged in – and the PerkSpot team realized this was an opportunity. They suspected they could get more users to engage with their offerings via a mobile app.

The question was: how?

Specifically, what features should the app have? Should it mirror the website or offer a streamlined, mobile-optimized experience? How would PerkSpot transfer its ad-supported revenue model to an app?

The team turned to TXI for guidance.

The challenge

Develop a mobile experience that inspires new users to log in and use perks

From the start, a key PerkSpot principle has been to deliver what users want, when they want it, in the format they prefer it. The team was convinced that, for a significant number of PerkSpot members, that format was a mobile app.

We agreed.

To answer the question of what that app should look like and how it should function, we started with user research.

We discovered that a big challenge would be one of translation:

How to condense a map of local perks (which users see on their desktop screens) to a mobile screen?
How to present weekly perks if not via email?
How to limit information so it isn’t overwhelming to a mobile user?

These questions weren’t just aesthetic: mobile users wouldn’t be interacting with perks through the popular weekly email desktop users relied on to discover new and relevant offerings.

In other words: the app had to find a different mechanism for connecting members to the offers they wanted most. What's more, it had to deliver an enjoyable experience and provide a smooth transition when members left the app to claim their perks on partners’ websites.

The Solution

Start streamlined and iterate

For the first version of the mobile app, TXI built an optimized version of what exists for desktop users. That version became available for beta testing in mid 2021 so the team could see how initial users interacted with the app and get their feedback on how to make it better.

But a funny thing happened during the beta launch.

For every invited mobile user, a desktop user who was not part of the beta test searched for PerkSpot unprompted in the Google and Apple app stores.

This behavior validated PerkSpot’s original hypothesis: the company has an untapped user base eager to engage via mobile app.

The outcome

Promising growth in stealth mode

As of mid-June 2022, the PerkSpot app has been live in a sort of stealth mode. And even without an official announcement, the company has seen promising signs:

167% month-over-month economic activity growth from April to May
167% month-over-month economic activity growth from May to June (projected as of mid-month)
User growth is on track to more than double from May to June
11% more leads per mobile user than email or desktop user

PerkSpot was built on an unusual premise. Now the team is figuring out how to get it in front of even more people who will love it.

Interested in discovering ways to increase your organization’s user base by tapping new digital channels? Get in touch.

Converting members into active users by launching a mobile app: our work with PerkSpot

The challenge

The Solution

The outcome

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