Building a Subscription Loyalty Experience
Overview
Sports betting customers often split their activity across competitors. This project explored whether a subscription-style loyalty program could create a stronger reason to choose FanDuel more consistently.
I helped shape the proposition and customer experience around a package of generosity, offers, and benefits that felt clear, relevant, and worth returning for.
Outcome: 9k+ opt-ins, ~58% participation, ~60% token usage, and ~34% year-over-year growth in premium reward engagement.
The problem
The business challenge was not simply acquisition. It was depth of relationship.
Customers could move between multiple betting products based on odds, offers, promotions, and habit. The opportunity was to understand whether a more durable value exchange could encourage customers to concentrate more of their activity with FanDuel.
The experience needed to make the program feel valuable without becoming complicated, administrative, or difficult to trust.
The three decisions that shaped the work
1. Make the value immediately legible
Customers needed to understand what they would receive, how it connected to their behavior, and why the program was worth joining. I focused the experience on tangible benefits rather than abstract loyalty language.
2. Design loyalty as a product, not a promotion
The program needed to create an ongoing reason to return rather than feel like another short-term offer. I helped connect benefits, tokens, and rewards into a clearer recurring experience.
3. Keep the mechanics secondary to the benefit
The commercial model could become complex quickly. I worked to keep the customer-facing experience simple enough that participation felt rewarding rather than like a system to manage.
The trade-off
Commercial sophistication versus customer comprehension
A richer program could support more targeted benefits and business rules, but each additional mechanic increased the risk of confusion. The design needed to preserve enough flexibility for the business while keeping the customer value easy to understand.
What I delivered
- Subscription-style program positioning
- Benefit packaging and hierarchy
- Reward, offer, and token presentation
- Participation and benefit-usage journeys
- Customer education and value messaging
- Engagement loops intended to encourage repeated use
Result
- 9k+ opt-ins
- ~58% participation
- ~60% token usage
- ~34% year-over-year growth in premium reward engagement
- A clearer model for connecting generosity, loyalty, and product engagement
Reflection
The strongest opportunity was to treat loyalty as part of the core product relationship. The design challenge was not simply to offer more value, but to make that value credible, understandable, and relevant enough to change behavior.
