About Yotpo
Yotpo, the leading eCommerce retention marketing platform, helps thousands of forward-thinking brands like Steve Madden, Princess Polly, Brooklinen, and Morrocanoil win customers for life.
🎯 The challenge
Yotpo identified a challenge similar to many of us: new customers were dropped in the product only to be immediately lost and confused about what to do next. They knew that in order to be successful and launch their upcoming self-service tier, they needed to enhance their user onboarding experience to drive product adoption and overall growth. The growth team, led by Omer Linhard and Yoav Aziz, recognized the importance of swiftly conveying the value of their User-Generated Content (UGC) platform to new users and encouraging ongoing usage.
🏆 The solution
Yotpo's team needed to improve their onboarding process. They decided to use in-app guidance to provide customers with better support in getting started. They chose Appcues for its flexibility, speed, and ease of use without coding.
👀 How they did it
1. Identifying problems and opportunities
Yotpo’s primary focus was increasing the number of "activated" users—those who quickly grasped the platform's value and formed habits of regular use. The team considered this metric even more critical than revenue, believing that revenue would naturally follow when users saw the product's value.
The team pinpointed two main issues through data capture and watching FullStory sessions: users feeling lost and unsure of what to do upon entering the platform and low feature adoption.
“We watched a lot of videos and saw that users were completing the installation inside the admin and then they were lost. Completely lost...there was no one to guide them, and they would leave. The first problem to tackle was giving our users clear guidance for their next action.”
2. Building a welcome experience
The growth team at Yotpo started by defining what they considered an "activated user"—someone who had installed Yotpo's review widget and generated at least one review.
To help users who felt unclear about where to go and what to do, they crafted a new welcome flow that provided users with steps to become an activated user.
3. Connecting in-app and out-of-app for complete onboarding
In addition to creating an onboarding sequence with tooltips for users to follow, the team created emails that triggered when users left the app that encouraged them to reach their milestone.
They linked the Appcues onboarding flow to Customer.io through Segment. This allowed them to send triggered emails based on users' progress in the in-app onboarding flow, ensuring they received the most relevant emails at the right time.
Eventually, the team added a last step to their welcome flow encouraging users to upgrade their plan. They were thrilled to observe that new users, after just 7 minutes in the product, were clicking to upgrade at a rate of approximately one new user per day. The team suspected that after being guided through the platform, these users felt confident in upgrading immediately because they recognized the product's value.
4. Expanding efforts across the board
After early success, Yotpo extended their onboarding efforts beyond the welcome flow for a variety of cases, including:
- Education on all major features
- Mini-tours for the customer service team to send to customers
- Payment reminders to aid finance in collecting payments
“Once we saw that we were getting amazing completion rates of 70%—or more—just for the onboarding flow, we started creating flows for all of the major features.”
These flows aimed to guide users through various actions and milestones within the product, reducing the need for extensive customer support and driving specific user behaviors.
✅ Results
Implementing onboarding flows with Appcues led to significant improvements for Yotpo. 50% percent of users completed the new onboarding flow, and 68% of customers paid their bill the same day they received the new in-app nudge reminder.
They also saw significant impact across their user activation, including:
- 1-week new user retention grew by 50%, and 2-week retention increased by over 60%
- The number of unique new users generating reviews increased by over 40%
- Installation numbers for the star ratings feature grew by 45% after the launch of a dedicated flow
- Installation numbers for the reviews tab feature surged by around 300% following a targeted onboarding flow
- The number of active users visiting 2 days a week increased by 30%, with similar increases in users visiting 3 days a week and 4 days a week.
These results not only improved product adoption but also attracted engaged and "addicted" customers. Yotpo's growth team successfully demonstrated the value of better user onboarding, showing its impact on user success and, consequently, revenue and lead generation.
Without Appcues, Omer Linhard said, “activation would decrease dramatically, which would impact revenue and lead generation.”
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Our hot take
"Watch and learn" is our motto—and we’ve seen time and time again it’s a winning strategy! It's all about observing users and then jumping in with quick improvements to make their experience better. By focusing on getting users engaged first, you’ll set the stage for exponential revenue growth. Cheers, Yotpo team—we’re constantly *watching and learning* from you!