Honestly, I was blown away. We’ve done massive multi-month projects with multiple people working on them and have never gotten anywhere near these kind of results as using Appcues for half an hour and launching an A/B test.

-Aaron Sherman

Storyboard That | Founder and CEO

Appcues is so powerful because it allows us to build our product marketing campaigns into a user’s natural workflow. When they’re in our product and at a relevant time, the Appcues message displays, which makes the user more likely to take action. With email, the user could get distracted or be working on another priority and forget to take action.

With a small engineering team, user onboarding was difficult to prioritize for Storyboard That. But Founder and CEO, Aaron Sherman kept a watchful eye on usage data and knew they could improve the number free trial signups who convert into paying customers.

So when they heard about Appcues, Sherman and his team were intrigued with the possibility of launching, testing and iterating their onboarding experience without having to change any code.

Challenge

Storyboard That is an online platform that allows users to create visual storyboards as an engaging alternative to more traditional forms of communication.

The team knew their product was delivering value. Thousands of users were coming back and creating multiple storyboards. Students and teachers use it for class projects, as do company teams to collaborate visually.

The company offers a 14-day free trial and was looking for ways to get more new users to get value, improving conversion in the funnel.

“We always think, ‘what do we need to do to make things better?’” said founder and CEO Aaron Sherman, in reference to his free trial conversion rate. “We’ve had a lot of success improving our site visit to free trial start conversion rate, but hadn’t really been able to move the needle on our free trial to purchase conversion.”

As a nimble 6-person team, Storyboard That was resource constrained. The company wanted to improve their free trial conversion, but couldn’t create an extra burden for their engineering team that was already stretched pretty thin.

Solution

The Storyboard That team installed Appcues to create onboarding experiences inside their product without changing any code. Since they were focused on improving conversion, they used the Appcues A/B testing functionality to test different Appcues flows against one another, and against not showing Appcues altogether.

A step in one of the Appcues the Storyboard That team tested.

The Appcues segmentation capabilities helped Storyboard That target only brand new users who go to the dashboard, ensuring the messaging was contextual and the A/B test would have clean data. They also used the Google Analytics integration to closely track user behavior based on which flow a user sees.

Perhaps most importantly, it was easy to use. “We’ve tried a number of different approaches to ensure more users find value: email, better help pages, etc. But it was always hard prioritize in-product experiences because we had to code them ourselves. Appcues gives our users the just-in-time training they need to be successful and feel empowered within Storyboard That.”

Results

After a few A/B tests, Storyboard That had an Appcues onboarding flow that converted greater than 2x the number of free trial users into paid users.

The company is now approaching a key milestone: 2,000,000 storyboards created on the platform. And they’re confident that further testing of their onboarding flow will help them grow even faster rate.