Objective: Make Groupon Coupons a Contender

The coupons section of Groupon is an important way to drive new users to Groupon. It acts as an organic way into the core offerings of Groupon. Those core offerings are deals on local restaurants or events, Groupon’s bread and butter. The problem is Groupon Coupons isn’t a very heavily developed product at Groupon. It lags behind many of its larger competitors like Honey, Retail Me Not, and Ebates.

One feature that proved promising to activate more users, but needed better adoption, was the Groupon Bucks Back program. The program offered users Groupon Bucks, which was free money that could be used on Groupon’s core offerings. The trick was that they needed to be logged in to accrue Groupon Bucks, but they didn’t need to be logged in to access the coupon codes. The incentive was there, but we needed to make it more noticeable and in more places.

It normally costs Groupon a decent amount of money to acquire customers. If we are able to convert our coupons traffic into core Groupon users it would cost us much less money than our other ways of acquiring users. With the Bucks Back program we are also not only acquiring users, but hopefully retaining them with Groupon Bucks they can come back and spend.

How: Make The Program More Visible and Informative

We realized that one shortcoming of the program was that it wasn’t visible enough and people didn’t quite understand it. We developed a multi-pronged approach for making the program more visible and understandable. The first part of this way to make the program more obvious. The second part was to give our customers more insight into the program when they found it. The third and final part was to give our customers feedback when they did engage with the program.

We added modules throughout the coupon experience that briefly explain what the Bucks Back program. Each module allows the user to click into it, which brings up a modal explaining how the program works and its benefits.

The modules were also set to change depending on the state of the customer. we had modules for a customer that wasn’t signed in, a customer that wasn’t signed in, but had clicked on a coupon to reveal the code, and a customer that was signed in.

Finally, when a customer is signed in and uses a coupon we alert them to the amount of Groupons Bucks they have earned via email. We also show them their Groupon Bucks history with how many Groupon Bucks they’ve earned and how they accrued them.

Results: 20% Increase in Usage

With the new experience we rolled out we saw an 20% lift in users interacting with the Bucks Back program. Because of this lift we were able to convince leadership to make Coupons a more prominent part of the core Groupon experience.