Acorns Invest
Goals
1. Drive Upgrades to Gold Plan
2. Expand Onboarding Education
3. Addressing friction points
Strategic messaging placement
At this point in the flow, the user signaled interest in opening an IRA. That gave us a key opportunity to introduce well-timed messaging that encourages upgrades to the Gold plan.
We also A/B tested two versions—one with an emotional appeal and one with a strictly financial appeal—to determine which resonated more with users.
Educating customers
We created a landing page to serve both users entering the Later onboarding flow and those arriving from targeted ads.
I hypothesized that users needed to know three things:
This is an account to save for retirement (clarity around what the product is)
We match 3% of new contributions (our unique product offering)
What this account allows you to do and how (Benefit/functionality)
I created a messaging hierarchy based on this hypothesis and wrote all the copy.
Educational interstitial
Rather than dropping users straight into setup questions, we used this moment to deliver a quick, engaging lesson on what makes an IRA powerful: compounding.
By adding this bit of educational context, we increased completion rates by 20%, with nearly 60% of users choosing to set up automated, recurring investments.
Addressing friction points
One common user pain point was not knowing whether they qualified for an IRA until reaching the end of the setup flow.
Since eligibility hinges on just two key factors—employment status and earned income—we introduced content at multiple touchpoints to address this upfront:
Subcopy clarifying what types of work count (and don’t count) as earned income
A Help Center article offering deeper context on IRA eligibility
An error message that proactively stops the flow for users without earned income, explaining why they don’t qualify, instead of letting them reach a dead end
