Social Tip

Rewarding real brand love

Challenging a core product assumption to overhaul the onboarding experience and drive a +9.3% boost in first post conversion.

Introduction

Social Tip turns everyday purchases into cash rewards by enabling brands to reward customers for posting authentic content on social media.

Challenge

At Social Tip, success hinges on a single conversion metric — app download to first post. For months, we assumed pushing users to post about Social Tip first was the key to improving conversion.

Despite running multiple experiments to improve conversion, we just weren't seeing the results we needed.

Insight

I had a strong hunch — users don't want to post about Social Tip before they trust our app. To validate this, I used our data analyst to pull the data: of those who posted about Social Tip first, how many went on to post about our brand partners, and what was their post quality score?

The results were astonishing. Users who posted about Social Tip first averaged just 1.3 more posts in the first 12 weeks, compared to 9.7 posts for those who's first post was about a brand partner. Furthermore, their post quality scores were significantly higher than users who posted about Social Tip first.

Solution

Armed with this data, we overhauled our onboarding flow to focus on our partner brands — improving personalisation and offering smarter brand recommendations to users.

Building trust

We updated the login screen to build trust through social proof and credibility — showcasing real users and our most well-known brand partners.

Capturing intent

We added two onboarding questions to capture user interests and preferred brands — enabling better personalisation and smarter brand recommendations from day one.

Personalised recommendations

Using data from the new onboarding, we personalised the home page with smarter brand recommendations and overhauled our brand list components to surface richer content.

Enhanced brand profiles

We overhauled brand profile pages to build trust — letting partners upload cover images, feature their favourite posts, and share tips for users thinking about posting.

Impact

Over 3 months, we saw a +8.3% boost in first post conversion.

Furthermore, the newly personalised home page with better brand recommendations, drove a significant rise in posts from returning users too.

Learnings

Test assumptions early, even if it's an unpopular opinion.

Less steps doesn't always lead to higher conversion, especially when you're designing for behavioural change.