First of all, thank you so much for all this amazing feedback! I wanted to chime in and give you guys some context on this test …
This was the first in-app test we’ve run in Partnerships @ Monzo and we only sent it to 95 people.
Why did we choose Bulb for first test?
- Relatively good value
- Good customer service and happy customers
- Renewable energy focus and aligns with our values @ Monzo
- Good partner to work with (fast-moving, flexible etc.)
What was the purpose of this test?
- Get feedback if this is something people like and found useful
- If it is useful, then improve it based on the feedback we get (so thank you for all this feedback!)
What were our limitations for running this test?
- Bulb don’t accept prepaid cards, so we could only test with current account customers - this limited our pool of people to test with. We didn’t have enough energy data to target based on people’s transactions, so we just did demographic targeting (basically targeted a slightly older demographic as they’re more likely to pay for the energy bills). Very suboptimal, but we felt it was better to run the test and learn now rather than postpone and we limited it to only a few people so we didn’t create a potentially “spammy” experience for too many people.
- The plan of course is to do better targeting (e.g. if we see you are overpaying on your energy direct debits, assuming you are paying those through your Monzo current account, we’d send you an offer like this)
- We sent the offer via a feed item as that was the easiest way to send to people rather than creating a separate section of the app … but the long-term plan will probably be to have a separate section of the app for offers like this (although we may still use the feed to surface them, depending on the feedback we get) - we’ll see how it evolves! If you find this spammy and don’t want to receive future offers, there’s an easy way in the flow today to opt out of future offers.
- Results so far have been encouraging though and a few people have switched, so we’re optimistic about this product and will continue to work on it and improve based on the feedback you provide ( so keep the feedback coming!
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What are the next steps?
- Iterate and do further tests with Bulb
- Test with other energy providers and even an aggregator
- The current thinking is a couple of “Monzo-approved” suppliers that have good value, good customer service and easy switching in the Monzo app with deeper integration (e.g. maybe put meter readings straight into Monzo or use Monzo customer support to answer questions - all to be explored, so no promises!) … plus somehow surface the cheapest providers across the whole market for transparency (but these options would lack the convenience of a deeper integration into Monzo)
And I don’t mind if you guys share your links and bypass our commissions For transparency, we make £25 per conversion (we didn’t manage to make this transparent in the current test, but plan to for future tests) … you’ll also get £25 credit by signing up through Monzo if you get the offer … but it’s not as good as going via a friend link as you’ll get £50 that way!
Hopefully that address most of your questions, but happy to answer any more and I really do love hearing all this feedback - it’s super helpful, so thank you!