Design by Asif Jamal

It’s Christmas time.

You’re walking down that crowded market street. After having saved money for a long time, you’re now hunting for presents for your loved ones.

You have narrowed down your idea of a gift and have decided to get them the best sweaters in town.

Your friend tells you of a store that sells these sweaters and they are all at 50% off. They are also gift-wrapped for Christmas so you can hand them out as presents. It doesn’t get better than this.

You reminisce about your childhood when your mother used to knit you one. This has to be the right present! So, you walk into the store.

Now, two things can happen:

1. You get the best quality of sweaters at a ridiculously low price. You walk out the happiest person in the world!
2. You get the sweaters at a ridiculously low price but the quality is somewhat below expectations. You contemplate whether your loved ones will still enjoy this gift.

In all probability, there’s a low likelihood of instance #1 taking place. There is little reason the store would give such amazing products at a ridiculously low price, given the fact it’s one of the busiest times of the year.

It seems things aren’t as perfect as you thought they’d be.

So here’s what is actually going to happen on most occasions — the quality is somewhat below what you expected it to be.

You have to make up your mind right then and there. Either you can live with this quality at such an attractive price or these sweaters aren’t for you and you choose a more expensive (but top-quality) sweater.

What caught your eye?

Let’s take a step back. What made you enter the store in the first place? Well, you saw that beautiful red woolen sweater at 50% off displayed on the shop window.

If the store had advertised outright that they were selling somewhat inferior products at amazing prices, would you still have entered?

What if they only said that you can buy slightly cheaper sweaters here to beat the cold. Would that have caught your eye?

It’s this concept of how to pull users to your product that I’m going to discuss:

Pitching Value (the absolute discount on sweaters) vs. Value then Effort(cheap sweaters but you have to buy in bulk) vs. Effort then Value (emphasis buying in bulk with a small mention of discounts) with the reference of the Grofers platform.

Breaking Things Down

The concept of a user interacting with a product is extremely simple. If she sees that the return on investment for the product exceeds the effort she needs to put in order to use it, she will happily perform whatever task is required.

The return here is labeled as “value” which could be in terms of money, social standing or some future benefit.

The investment here is labeled as “effort” which could be in monetary terms or a coefficient of time and difficulty of the task that the user needs to perform.

Ultimately, the user needs to be informed of both effort and value at various touchpoints. But to sell the user your product, there needs to be a specific order or way of communicating this.

For the sake of convenience, I’ve broken this down into matchups in which we look for clear winners thereby helping us establish which form of communication works best for our use case.

To demonstrate the impact of pitching things the right way, I’ve picked up the Grofers Referral Programme as an example.

The programme rewards users coins on every successful referral which can, in turn, be redeemed for free products. So in the context of this case, the value becomes the free products and the effort is sharing this with another user.

In this paradigm, the landings are defined as the number of visits on the referrals page. Conversion or Share Rate on-page are defined as the number of people who refer their friends, once they land on the Referrals Page.

Experiments

Only Value vs. Effort then Value

To check which concept worked better for us we ran an A/B test using two banners.

On one we simply declared that the user would get free items.

On the other, we asked the user explicitly to refer their friends in order to receive the reward as shown below:

Our hypotheses:

1. Only Value (Pitching Only Reward to the User)

By pitching simply value to the customer we expected that we would increase the absolute landings on the page for this variation. However, since we were capturing customers with lower intent to share, we’d see a large drop in on-page conversion

2. Effort Then Value: (Emphasising what the user needs to do before reward)

By pitching Effort then Value we expected a drop in page landings since we wouldn’t get any unintended visitors to the page. But we expected the share rate to also consequently rise significantly since most users interacting with the page were ones with the intention to refer

So the only thing left to determine was in absolute terms, was which would ultimately work better to get users to become advocates of the platform.

So what was surprising is how much better Only Value performed compared to Effort Then Value.

The Only Value iteration had 37% more landings on the page compared to the other variation and only showed a dropoff of around 5% in terms of share rates.

No-brainer here.

Pitching simply value to the user seemed a lot more effective than pitching Effort and then Value.

Final Winner: Only Value

Value vs. Value then Effort

So now we know that obviously value attracts users rather than telling them they need to work. Not really a surprise there in terms of a result. But we wanted to see if there was any point in pitching effort at all.

If we could capture the landings through pitching value, but also get users with higher intention to refer by mentioning the effort, would we truly get the best of both worlds scenario?

Let’s find out.

Thus we ran another A/B test with banners:

On one we simply declared that the user would get Free Items.

On the other we highlighted the reward of the free products proposition but also mentioned the effort of referring as subtext

What we expected

The Only Value variant would have slightly more landings whilst the Value Then Effort variant would have slightly better conversion on-page since the effort is stated upfront and the user would be ready to do the task before she goes in.

The Only Value iteration had 2% more landings on the page compared to the other variation. It also had a 3% better share rate on the page.

But the numbers were statistically insignificant. It appeared that in both cases users only noticed the value and disregarded effort

Final Winner: No winner

Takeaway

Through multiple iterations of design and robust experimentation across a range of features, we figured out that pitching “value” first to customers brings us the best returns in terms of conversions.

Whether we need to pitch effort in a secondary way is more dependent on the feature itself. However, it would be remiss of me to point out that we can simply isolate this part of the experience and optimize it.

The user should always know exactly what she is getting into i.e the effort cannot be completely hidden from the user. Click to tweet.

If we’re hiding effort on the entry banner the onus is upon us to deliver a richly detailed real estate on the platform that should offset any drop-offs of an unsuspecting user feeling cheated when she lands on a certain page.

You should never try to sacrifice trust in favour of visibility.

Additionally what hasn’t been covered here is how pitching Effort works versus pitching Value. But there is already enough evidence for Effort not working as well as value.

We noticed that simply changing the Text of a button to convey the Value of the Proposition as opposed to what the user has to do, gave us a 5% improvement in conversion for that feature.

It can be said that pitching Value first works. But the role of effort is subject to many things when deciding your opening communication.

It can boil down to many factors such as design, the criticality of conveying that effort or maybe something as basic as not being comfortable enough to provide the touchpoint for the effort later.

But then again, figuring out what exactly works — that’s the part of the job which makes it fun.

Sushant Krishnan is the Product Manager for Brand Monetization at Grofers. A former developer by trade, he tries to use his knowledge to find the best experience for the user.