Paddy Power - Cross Sell
Objective: Introduce cross-sell functionality to encourage users of the free "Beat the Drop" game to become paying users, without disrupting the user experience.
Duration: 4 months
Squad: UI Designer. Product Owner. Offshore Developers.
Key Stakeholders: Trade. Marketing.
I was the sole UX/UI designer on the product.
Problem.
"Beat the Drop" is a popular free game on the Paddy Power platform, but the challenge was to increase the conversion of game players into active bettors.
The objective was to seamlessly integrate cross-sell functionality that encourages users to place bets without detracting from the fun, free-to-play nature of the game.
Insight Gathering
Beat the Drop was a product i’d worked on since my very first weeks at Paddy Power and therefore I was very familiar with it and its user base.
However adding in cross sell functionality ran the risk of causing issues with our loyal customer base that ran into the tens of thousands every day, therefore we had to be savvy before implement the concept.
The huge benefit of Beat the Drop when looking for insights is that their are groups on Facebook and Reddit discussing it, so what I did was create a profile and added in discussions around new features, this gave me the opportunity to covertly see what ours users felt.
Thankfully the general feeling was positive around the concept, but their were concerns around relevancy of the cross sell which would need to be bought through.
Competitor Analysis
As free to play games are quite the norm in the gambling industry, my next steps were to look at competitors to see how they were doing cross sell.
I looked at Bet365, William Hill, Bet Bull and Draft Kings.
What I found out was that most competitors did it by having very subtle prompts that blended in naturally to games experience, offering some value add ons. They were also heavily around events such as big football matches or horse racing.
Ideation Workshops
With my competitor analysis complete, and having clarity in my mind of what I felt the cross sell should be, I took advantage of our multi office policy and got the squad and wider stakeholders back together over in Porto to run an ideation workshop.
The main aim was to gather everyone’s thoughts and ideas on how best to achieve this, but to also align on the overall strategy for a potential visual redesign.
Participants:
UX/UI Designer (Me)
Product Owner
Marketing representative
Trade Teams
Below is the collated outputs in a Miro board
To wireframe or not…
Usually I wouldn’t jump straight into high-fidelity visuals, however due to my familiarity to the product and my relationship with the wider squad, I thought it best to save time and show them how the designs would look in a live environment.
Designs
These are the designs I created. From my learnings about what we wanted to achieve as a business, what competitors were doing and how our customers felt, I didn’t want to affect the existing journey through the main game, however, when user has made their selection, that was when I wanted to go full Paddy Power and shout about the cross sell opportunity by showing related odds within the product that would allow them to place bets there and then.
Testing
Obviously I would never put anything live without first validating this with our customers, but I didn’t think a controlled prototype would give us the data needed to be able to promote with confidence.
I worked with my colleague in the experimentation team to get an A/B test live. We ran it as a 50/50 test over a 14 day period so just under 400,000 sessions saw it.
We saw a click rate of 20% and from that an extra £1.5m revenue was generated which was a success even the product squad hadn’t imagined.
The designs were put live and have been widened to almost all questions.
Final Thoughts
Beat the Drop is like my first child, I have invested so much sweat and tears into the product.
I am thankful that the cross sell was a huge success and glad that I was able to validate the guy feeling product owner and myself had that we could generate additional revenue with out too much cost to the business.