Making it easy to reward your peers for great work
Doing meaningful work can be its own reward—but it’s even more rewarding when your peers recognize you for it. That’s the premise upon which the Workhuman® mission rests.
The Dublin- and Massachusetts-based company provides employee recognition solutions for organizations of all sorts. Its Social Recognition® product empowers employees to recognize and reward one another for doing great work. As users receive awards, they can redeem them within Workhuman’s e-commerce Store for gift cards, merchandise, or experiences.
“It’s a tool available to employees within an organization who want to express gratitude to their colleagues,” explained Alan Stephens, a senior program manager for Human Engagement at Workhuman. “It could be as simple as you did me a favor yesterday and I want to call you out for that. Or something much bigger, like a team award at the conclusion of a large project or initiative. When giving recognition, you can assign a value to the award, which the recipient will receive and can spend in the Store.”
As part of its personalized in-product suite of guides, the Workhuman team leverages Pendo to target users who have a balance to redeem—typically nudging them from the customer’s recognition landing page into the Store.
To maximize these guides’ impact, the company began testing how different elements affected the guides’ engagement rate. “We do a lot of experimentation,” Stephens explained. “Over four years of using Pendo guides, we have accumulated a lot of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, but we’re also always continually learning as well.”
In the first half of 2024, Workhuman’s team conducted five different experiments with their Pendo-powered monthly guide reminders focusing on elements like page placement, images, and copy. Their findings would determine how these elements affect user engagement and guide effectiveness.
A test-and-learn approach to radically optimize guides
For its first test, the Workhuman team wanted to gauge the impact of images in guides. Their hypothesis was that a guide with an eye-catching image would drive a higher percentage of users to the target page than one that was text only.
After less than a week, they saw that while 34.6% of users who saw the imageless guide went to the CTA page, 36.2% of the image-containing guide users did the same—a statistically significant lift of 4.7%.
Next, the team wanted to test the impact of a guide based on its page placement. They hypothesized that placing the guide on certain locations of the page would drive higher engagement than others. Approximately 160,000 unique users saw one of three guides over the course of a month:
- A guide anchored to a user’s award balance (the default positioning)
- A guide anchored to the “Redeem” button located in the center of the page
- A guide in the bottom corner of the page without a backdrop
When the results came in, the Workhuman team saw that the “Redeem”-anchored guide was the winner, both in terms of the direct click-thru rate (24.2% compared to 23.6% for the balance-anchored guide and 14.4% for the bottom right-placed guide) and the percentage of users who reached the Store within seven days of seeing it (72.6% vs. 70.3% for the balance-anchored and 72.1% for the bottom right-placed).
To confirm their findings, Workhuman decided to repeat the page placement test with different content for another month, this time promoting a “Summer Weekend Event” collection within the Store.
Here again, the “Redeem”-anchored guide was the clear winner, both for direct CTR (23.7% vs. 20.6% for the balance-anchored guide and 7.8% for the bottom-right guide) and for users reaching the page within seven days of seeing the guide (25.3% vs. 22.2% for the balance-anchored and 10.5% for the bottom right). Given this confirmation, the Workhuman team decided to make the “Redeem” button placement their default for this type of guide going forward.
Another test examined how well different styles of copy within a guide moved the needle on user conversion. May’s Store-focused guide highlighted a sale collection within the Store coinciding with Memorial Day targeted to U.S. users. For this guide, Workhuman decided to test three different types of copy:
- A focus on the sale impact
- A focus on the user having a balance to spend
- A “playful” style of copy
After three days of deployment, the team found that the “playful” copy guide had the lowest click-thru rate and decided to drop it out of the experiment, rerouting its audience traffic to the remaining two guide options. At the end of the month, they found that the guide with the “sale impact” copy had a direct CTR of 26%, with 29.5% of users reaching the CTA page within seven days of seeing the guide. Meanwhile, the “balance to spend” guide had a direct CTR of 27.5%, with 30.7% of users reaching the CTA page within seven days, making it the clear winner.
“Emphasizing to the user that they have awards to spend was more successful than the other options in both driving users to the sale collection and ultimately to make a purchase,” Stephens concluded. “We’re planning to incorporate this into future copy where appropriate.”
The path to maximum effectiveness
With these and other Pendo-powered guide tests (for example, a set gauging the impact of modal vs. modeless guides), the Workhuman team gained insights that have helped them understand the best guide optimizations to undertake.
“We’ve seen notable differences based on page placement, the copy used, and the use of imagery—all of which will be key considerations for us in the coming quarters. We’ll continue to seize these opportunities to test and optimize as we move forward,” Stephens said.
