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PROJECT
A print rate solution, a back-end re-architecture & an $7 million day, internally referred to as Project Audible
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
TLDR
Print rate is a crucial metric closely monitored by the print team at Chatbooks. This metric is significant as it enables us to track revenue generated when a previously purchased book is sent for printing. Over time, we observed that users were forgetting to create and print their books. While we made several adjustments to improve this metric, we were challenged to adopt a more sweeping approach. After some careful brainstorming, we opted to transform our books into "credits," allowing us to set an expiration period and count the revenue, similar to the model used by Audible.
RESULTS
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Generated $7 million in revenue in a single day.
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Increased print rates among subscription users by 14%.
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Boosted customer lifetime value (LTV) by targeting customers who print their books, as they demonstrate stronger long-term engagement.
The Problem
How we turned $8.9 million in deferred revenue to a $7 million day
The print team (myself and my PM) were approached by the Executive team to come up with a sweeping solution to getting users to print their books.
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We knew that Print Rate has a direct impact on churn. The users that print their book churn at a much lower rate than users that don't which results in a better LTV customer.
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Working with our analytics team we found that there were 1.06 million paid for and ready to create books but they went unprinted.
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Bigger than that, we found that the $8.9 million in deferred revenue could become 16.1 million by the end of 2024 if we didn't take action.
Getting Started
I researched different subscription models in order to gain a better understanding of how they were handling deferred revenue.
Audible's model stood out as something that could possibly work for us. We had spoken about using a credit system in the past for our books to provide more flexibility to our customers but it had been tabled because of the back-end work involved.
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By applying a credit model to our subscriptions we could expire the credits after 12 months in order to count that revenue. We know that users that print their books gain more value out of the products so we believed that if we could apply a bit of pressure they would print those books. We were right.
I needed to come up with ways to handle the following:
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Decide how to communicate the change with our marketing team
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Relay to the user how many credits they had available and how to use them
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Come up with a system for how to expire them and inform the user of that
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Allow for users to extend their expiration dates
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Final Design
This video shows a high level overview of how we decided to show credits within the app. When a users book credit is 30 days out from a credit expiring we let them know and allow them to extend it an additional 30 days.
Results & Outcome
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We saw an 11% increase in print rate in the month following the first annoucement of credits
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When the first group of expired credit cleared we had a $7 million day