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Printify is the technology platform that's made it possible for millions of people around the world to become entrepreneurs by selling high-quality customized merchandise online.
While self-serve onboarding was still under development, Printify’s growth team needed a solution to rapidly test growth experiences and identify top-selling items for their sales team. Product marketing manager Krists Tauriņš was specifically looking for ways to boost user engagement in the early stages of the customer journey.
“We wanted to reach people (from a marketing perspective) when they are in the product—teach them about the Printify platform in the perfect context. And we just didn’t have the tooling opportunity to do that effectively,” Krists says. “An in-app communication tool is something that we needed to implement.”
Appcues provided the tooling needed for effective in-app communication. By leveraging Appcues data insights, Krists optimized user activation by creating Flows addressing in-app bottlenecks and stumbling blocks.
Folks from Growth, Research, Product Marketing, and Data teamed up to identify which actions merchants took in the product were linked to long-term success. Their first data-driven discovery revealed that members who connected a store within a specific timeframe were more successful in the long run.
In other words, linking an Etsy, Shopify, Wix, Bigcommerce, Squarespace, Wordpress, PrestaShop, or eBay store to Printify (where merchants sold their products) increased success by driving additional traffic and sales.
After watching recordings in FullStory, Krists identified stumbling blocks in their onboarding. The crucial activation step they just discovered (connecting to a store) was a major hangup. So, they created targeted Flows to address it.
“Appcues is great. You can build and iterate an MVP quickly. For example, I saw a page that was creating a bottleneck where people were dropping off because they just lacked context or education overall,” Krists says.
Knowing this critical activation moment was giving users pause in their onboarding journey, the team placed a single tooltip to help users who hadn’t connected their store.
Considering the importance of connecting a store, Krists wanted to expand their work to include nudges that pushed users to achieve this key activation moment outside of the general onboarding flow.
“Based on [my analysis], I developed 4 separate flows focused specifically on connecting a store. The flows were contextually placed to target merchants when it made the most sense in their journey, aka when connecting their store was relevant.”
All of Krist’s hard work strategically focusing on the activation moment paid off! Starting their flow with a tooltip that provided more information (vs. interrupting a user) resulted in a 10% uplift in conversion.
Krists also saw store connections increase—and subsequently, first purchases from stores increased. Merchants were now reaching Printify’s ultimate goal faster: selling goods using Printify.
To confirm results were linked to the change in flows, Krists turned to Heap:
“We did a 50/50 split - 50% of new signups saw the flows (exposed group) and 50% didn't (control group). We also created a separate user property that we sent to Heap which we used to identify if a specific user saw the Appcues experimental flow or not. In Heap, this allowed us to group our users and compare the treatment and control groups against each other. Whichever key metric I picked, the treatment group performed better than the control,” Krists says.
The success with Appcues prompted broader usage of the tool across teams at Printify. Other departments successfully used Appcues for different purposes, ranging from quick experiments to promotions and events.
Printify remains committed to experimentation and learning, concentrating on specific, scalable experiments that target key metrics.
Printify's success with Appcues underscores the importance of focused experimentation, leveraging data insights, and using in-app communication strategically to drive user engagement and achieve specific business goals. The combination of data-driven decision-making and the agility of Appcues enables Printify to continually optimize the user journey and stay responsive to user needs. We love to see it!
