Thrive Market Growth

Thrive Market is a member-based online retailer. With $60 a year, members can access 7000+ organic or non-GMO groceries, frozen food, wine, and beauty products.

Let's Examine The Membership Conversion Funnel For The Past 30 Days.

We’ve has identified different user personas based on their demographics, preferences, and purchasing behaviors:

Lead Persona #1

• Profile: A younger (20s-early 30s), single female focused on building her career
• Lifestyle: Unmarried with no kids, rents an apartment
• Spending habits: Mostly spends money on clothes, food, and drink
• Occupation: Works in healthcare & medicine and media/arts/entertainment

Lead Persona #2 (developing)

• Profile: Female aged 40 and above
• Lifestyle: Drives 30+ minutes to nearby grocery stores, owns property
• Spending Habits: Allocates spending on kids products, business products, sports/outdoors, home/garden, health and beauty, clothing, food/drink, subscription services, and cooks daily

Understanding Thrive Users

We launched several surveys, unmoderated studies, and user interviews during the span of 2 months to better understand our users.  Here are a few key findings:

1. Visitors struggled to understand Thrive Market's offers
2. They often believe there are purchase requirements associated with membership. They expect to receive products right after membership payment.
3. Because visitors don’t have a full view of the product catalog, they feel disappointed in limited product selections
4. Once creating an account (visitors becoming leads), they are unsure about the membership value

• They do not understand the cost of membership at sign up
• They believe our risk-free period is actually a free trial

Increase Conversion With Experimentation

Our team strongly values experimentation design. We typically conduct 5-7 experiments per quarter. Here are our learnings:

What most helped increase lead generation and lead-to-member conversion

• Reduce onboarding friction
• Optimize copy and images
• Clearly communicate incentive value
• Add personalization based on member’s goals

Optimizing copy and images

We incrementally update the heading, subhead, and images to better explain Thrive’s services and offers. We first started off with 1 title then moved on to the subhead and hero image.

• Experiment 4: +2% conversion rate
• Experiment 5: +6% conversion rate

Reducing onboard friction

As the lead number dwindled, we also focused on lead quality. We notice the lead quality corresponded to authentication placement

• Visitors who authenticate earlier in the funnel are less likely to purchase a membership
• Conversely, visitors who authenticate later on the funnel are more likely to convert

Therefore, we ran 2 tests:

• By authenticating visitors later in the funnel and creating a perception of easy registration, visitors would be more inclined to create an account
• Adding social proof messaging to build trust and further reassure users of membership benefits