UX Case Study: Reducing churn with successful user onboarding for an email marketing software
Project Background
Role: UX Consultant for a side project done within a week
Why I wanted to improve SendInBlue’s web app?
Few weeks ago, I was in the market looking for an email marketing software that could help me automate my emails and grow my list.
I’ve used tools like SendGrid and MailChimp in the past, but this time I decided to try Sendinblue because it provided generous automation and contact list capabilities with their free plan which the above two didn’t.
But after spending a 5–10 minutes trying to create an automation sequence, hitting dead-ends, being asked to repeat the same actions again and getting stuck because of confusing terminology, I got frustrated.
Started to feel bad about myself that I couldn’t even complete such a simple task even after being THE UX person who does this for a living.
This feeling of dumbness led me to go back to Mailchimp (something I knew well) and I quit SendInBlue altogether.
Most customers abandon apps after first login
Retaining customers is extremely important for any software company (specially product-led). In the email marketing space, it becomes 10x more important because there’s already a lot of competition, and new tools keep popping up every month.
To quote GrooveHQ here:
There are two key milestones that need to be reached before a customer can reach their full value potential:
1. The moment they sign up for your product, and…
2. The moment they achieve their first “success” with your product
A disproportionate amount of your customer churn will take place between (1) and (2).
How people research and decide to pay for software products
Signed up users have a goal in mind when they are looking for a product. In the words of Anthony Ulwik “they have a job to be done”.
To get the job done, they start researching online for the best tool that would get their job done, sign up to your software and to your competitors, try them and then compare them against each other to see which one is the has the best features that fit their needs, is easy and intuitive to use and have flexible pricing.
Why UX matters for web apps & software products
You spend all this money on customer acquisition, don’t let poor UX be one of the reasons for losing the customer to competitors.
When customers find your web app hard to use:
- They will email support and raise tickets
- They won’t use it even though it’s functionally sound and would switch to a competitors tool or find alternative solutions (in case of enterprise)
- They won’t recommend it to their friends or colleagues
Maybe lose them because you don’t have this one feature (yet) that competitors offered or because your price was higher than them, but never lose customers because of poor usability.
Why? because improving usability is directly within your control.
3 quick notes before proceeding:
- I am not affiliated with Send in blue in any way other than being a user. This is not a client project. My suggestions are not going to be perfect because of point #2 :
- I didn’t have access to user research or analytics. Neither am I aware of product’s vision or strategy. I’ve made suggestions based on secondary research and my own experience as a REAL user of the software.
- I understand design has constraints (related to time, budget, feasibility, viability) and sendinblue team must have made trade-offs when designing the current interface.
Therefore to make it a fair game I’m also going consider the above constraints and suggest changes that are plausible & also explain my design decisions in as much detail as possible.
Scope of this case study
The scope of this case study is limited to the onboarding and activation flow of the app. This happens after a user signups up and creates an account (as shown in the diagram below)
What’s activation?
Activation occurs when users first achieve the value you promised. It’s expressed as the percent of activated users out of total acquired users.
By getting users to reach activation (aha) moment of the product you can retain them and get them to keep coming back and ultimately pay for your product after they’ve made your product a part of their workflow.
Defining Activation Criteria
This varies from company to company: For Slack, the activation metric is 2,000 messages sent
As Stewart Butterfield (founder) says: “regardless of any other factor, after 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack today”
For SendInBlue, my hypothesis (based on research) is that activating the customer with auto-responder or drip campaign would lead to activation and get them coming back to the app.
When users create and activate their campaign successfully and see a high deliverability rate, they will most likely stick with SendInBlue.
Defining the problem
Here’s how I would define the problem if I was working with SIB team:
Our current onboarding was designed to get users to import their list, configure + design their email and send/schedule their first email campaign to reach activation with our product
We have observed that our current onboarding flow is only activating 12% of signed-up users (assumption based on industry average), which is increasing our acquisition costs and retention costs because users signup to the app and don’t come back.
Existing user-flow
Problems with existing onboarding flow
I’m going to outline three key problems below that were identified with the existing flow based on my own experience with the app:
- It is assumed in onboarding that the first thing user wants to do is create an email campaign
“I thought create a campaign meant creating a series of marketing emails and not just sending one email”
“Why am I asked to complete schedule my first campaign to complete onboarding when what I want to do is create drip automated sequence?
“Words send and activate make it sound like the campaign will start and send emails to my list”
2. Creating email templates early and then later in the flow, multiple times
“First I created it during my email campaign, now I’m doing it again while creating an automation flow, how are they different?”
3. Doing the same things— configuring email, designing etc. after creating campaign and then again during automation templates
“I want my sender email to be set as default, do I need to do this again?”
Solving the problem
How might we improve our onboarding so that our customers can reach the “aha” moment faster and in turn increase our activation rate
Suggested user-flow for faster activation
After signing up and completing required onboarding (like email verification and confirming sender IP address):
- User imports their existing email list or creates a signup form to collect emails or trigger to collect emails
- User is able to easily brand their emails with their business brand guidelines, set default email sender configuration
- User creates an email campaign or automation sequence, activates it and is able to get high-deliverability rate, low bounce rate and occurs no technical issues
Wireframed solutions
1. a) Current onboarding steps
The current onboarding steps allow you to either complete the onboarding by creating a campaign or skip it. This doesn’t help the user to get to activation or help them achieve what they were there to do.
1. b) Suggested onboarding steps
Solution explanation:
After user signups, verifies their email — take them through three necessary onboarding steps upfront. These are the steps that users will be met later in the journey and would be asked to complete, so it’s better to get them done early.
How new solution helps:
- User: Allows them to complete the most important tasks first like importing contacts, setting up sign up forms and branding the emails in their existing design style before proceeding with setting up email sequences or campaigns
- Business: Increased activation, faster time to value “aha moment” and all prerequisites required for creating campaigns completed in onboarding
2.a) — Current create an automation flow
The current flow asks you to complete a lot of the steps which could be done in onboarding such as asking user to create email templates, reconfiguring email settings again.
2.b) Suggested create an automation flow
Solution explanation:
After user completes the onboarding steps as suggested in 1.b) they’ll now be able to start and create their first campaign. The email campaign can be of any of the three types (not a one-off like it is currently)
Also enables the user to continue writing email sequence after configuring one email (during automation) and stops the user from doing the same thing again.
How new solution helps:
- User: Makes setting up automation more intuitive by setting configured email in the automation as default and continue writing sequence providing better experience
- Business (KPIs): Reduced time on task, faster time to value and activation, users will hit the freemium limits faster and would most likely upgrade to a paid plan
Learnings from the study
- Designing a smooth experience for a web-app is extremely challenging because the flows are very complex. You must understand your users inside and out and accommodate for each type of user persona in the interface.
- Start designing an intuitive experience early and conduct usability tests each step of the way with real users otherwise you’ll run into a lot of usability challenges later which will be very expensive to fix.
- Hats off to the sendinblue team for building such a competitive product in a space filled with fierce competitors.
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