A new onboarding experience

PROBLEM

New Constant Contact users bounce in their first interaction and don’t return because they aren’t able to connect with what the tool has to offer.

SOLUTION

Give new users a better onboarding experience that includes three onboarding questions and a refreshed dashboard. The questions are short and help users gain trust, learn what Constant Contact has to offer, and understand that the experience will meet them where they are.

TIMELINE

Overall: 4 months

BACKGROUND

In order to give new users the best experience possible and ensure their retention, I had to make sure the new first-time user experience was compelling for all users who find Constant Contact. The hypothesis was that social-focused users were coming to Constant Constant looking for tools to fit their needs and only being presented with tools to send emails. So, if the onboarding questions allowed Constant Contact to better understand what they're interested in, I could better cater the dashboard to them.

Going into this project, it was also clear from user research that most new users who evaluate the tool prefer to explore on their own vs. be directed to a specific task. I had to strike a balance between making the dashboard too simple and limiting to those who want to explore, and also making it too complex for people who need more guidance.

GOALS

KPIs:

Creation of emails (flagship feature)
Added contacts (main money maker)‍
MIR to dashboard from onboarding
MIR beyond dashboard
Activation (users send an email or add contacts)

INITIAL EXPLORATIONS & TESTING

Knowing that there were various personas coming to Constant Contact, I definitely wanted to figure out which persona new users fit into. To do this, I wanted to know which features they were interested in and what sorts of marketing tools they were already using. The next big question was what starting point to recommend to them and how to determine that. This involved conversations with engineering to ensure we asked questions during onboarding that the team could use in the backend to sort people into groups.

Most of Constant Contact's customers have a need to grow their marketing contact list. The product used to ask them to add contacts as a first step, but this does not factor in people who are starting out and have no contacts to add. An initial exploration to answer this problem was to ask them a dynamic question during onboarding based on whether or not they have contacts. If they say yes, they would see a question to start with either creating an email or adding their contacts. If they said no, they would see the options to create an email or grow their audience, something I knew lots of new customers would gravitate towards(see images below). "Create an email" was always going to be an option here because it's Constant Contact's flagship feature.
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Some other questions I considered at the start of the project were the following:

FINAL QUESTIONS

I then needed to present these ideas to stakeholders who could share their input in what information they thought would be best to personalize users' experiences. In talking to the head of Customer Success, the previous design team that worked on onboarding, customer lifestyle marketing specialists, and product partners, I shifted the set of questions to the following:

Main goal - Understand what their main intent is for being at Constant Contact. This information can also be used to conditionally display actions relevant to the user based on their goals. Initially, users were only going to be able to select one goal, but during testing lots of users wanted to be able to select more than one.

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Feature interests - Understand which tools users are interested in to help place them in a persona and conditionally recommend features on the dashboard. This is also a sneaky way to show new users what types of tools Constant Contact offers.

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What things are they already doing - In order to place users in a persona and gauge where they are in their marketing journey, I decided to ask this question. For example, if someone already has a contact list and a website, we can infer they are not totally new to marketing. If someone only checks off social media platforms, we can guess they fit into the social-first persona.

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4. Optional website question - I originally wanted this question to only show if a user said they have a website in question 3, but due to scope constraints, I had to show it to everyone. It's optional in case users don't have a website or don't want to share it with us. There is content to explain what we'll do with the information (shows the value to the user).

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DASHBOARD

Based on what we learned about people during onboarding, there needed to be payoff on the dashboard. There are two new components from previous dashboards at Constant Contact: the gamified profile and the dynamic goal-based actions. Everyone loves a game, and are more motivated to return if they're working towards something.

Gamified profile

The main goal is to incentivize users to continue giving us information so we could further customize the experience (things like website, industry, logo). There is always more information you could ask users during onboarding, but I wanted to prioritize the length being short. More questions, more drop-off. To prevent users from starting at zero, signing up is an automatic 40% completion.

Profile components that add up to 100%:

Baseline: 40% (for signing up)
Industry: 12%
Website: 12%
Verified email address: 12%
Physical address: 12%
Logo: 12%

Another benefit to incentivizing users to complete their profile is so they have less work to do in other flows. For example, they need a verified email address and physical address in order to send their first email. If they fill out that information early, they won't be blocked by the boring stuff in the email flow.

Dynamic goal-based actions

This section, in addition to the rest of the dashboard layout, was my answer to finding balance between a too complex/crowded dashboard that overwhelms, and an oversimplified dashboard that doesn't motivate/inspire or give room to explore. Users get two starting actions based on what they selected during onboarding, and see the goals they selected above the action cards.

The other cards they could see are the following:

Other dashboard sections explained

PROJECT RESULTS

Creation of emails (flagship feature): increased by 16%
Added contacts (main money maker): increased by 26%
MIR to dashboard from onboarding: 70%
MIR beyond dashboard: 85%
Activation: increased by 72%

*Note: results after 1 week.

IDEAS FOR THE FUTURE

-Ability to edit goals and track progress in depth
-Show branded templates and industry templates so users can see their brand represented in pre-made marketing campaigns.

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