Putting Martin Lewis in your pocket

You’ve almost certainly heard of MoneySavingExpert. It’s the UK’s biggest consumer website, with more than 16 million monthly users.

Proudly editorial-driven, MSE is staunchly committed to helping people cut their bills – a powerful cause during today’s unprecedented cost-of-living crisis. It wields journalistic research, easy-to-use financial tools and the power of a large, highly engaged community.

Now a part of MoneySuperMarket Group (a previous client), led by Martin Lewis, and with teams guided by an editorial code of impartiality, the project challenged our teams to operate in a complex environment.

The brief was clear: “We want to put Martin Lewis in your pocket.”

With an already hugely successful website, MoneySavingExpert was now searching for a way to connect more closely with its users.

It knew that a dedicated MSE app could take that engagement to the next level, improving user retention and content engagement. The company just needed guidance on how to bring it to life.

The app also had to meet the needs of a complex network of stakeholders, with differing priorities and desired outcomes.

And above all, the app had to stay true to the internal MoneySavingExpert mantra of “helping the consumer” first.

Although the brief was simple, there were still complexities to navigate.

As the MSE website is primarily a platform focused on journalistic content, we needed to engage MSE users with an app that inspired action.

To meet the brief, we needed to:

• Transform long-form, journalistic website content into a mobile-consumable format
• Align the desired goals and outcomes of a complex network of stakeholders
• Build user navigation and search functionalities to drive user action in an app environment

Discover

We needed to fully understand the challenge before we could create the right outcome.

Our product teams immersed themselves in the brand, making the right connections with the right stakeholders – from the MONY Group product teams to MoneySavingExpert’s editorial staff and Martin Lewis himself.

By researching the existing website user base, we identified opportunities we could address in the new app, such as search functionality and a lack of personalised recommendations.

Design

Early in the process we got to know key stakeholders, getting in front of Martin and understanding his passion points – as well as what drove the editorial team.

We identified a need for user-centricity, so focused our design on making the app easy to use, with notifications that remind users to take action and remain engaged. We also planned an approach that would deliver a return on the investment.

Deliver

MoneySavingExpert exists to do what’s right for the user, so we set high engagement as our goal. The easier the app was to use, the greater savings its users would enjoy. And within just six months, the mobile app was born.

The website content formed the core part of the app, but the app features were designed to engage and improve functionality. Now, it gives users their own personalised version of MSE, and a new ‘Bill Buster’ that tracks bills and recommends the best time to switch. With new features and improvements to search and notifications, using it is a breeze – which is why users are coming back on a far more regular basis.

At the same time, we helped MoneySavingExpert to acquire its first Open Banking agreement (which can also be used across all the MoneySuperMarket Group brands). Coupled with a true account experience, this now drives tools such as the ‘Regular Payments Finder’, which helps users find duplicate bills or repeat payments for providers they no longer use

Released in just six months, the MoneySavingExpert app rocketed up the charts. Over a million downloads later, the native iOS and Android mobile app has a near-five-star rating across both major app stores.

Plus, our work on personalisation represents MoneySavingExpert’s first step into becoming an ecosystem, with a full account experience built around preferences, content recommendations and our Open Banking savings tool.

Users of the app are four times more engaged than on the website – and we think that’s a win by anyone’s book.