Increasing user activation

After seeing a decline in upgrades, we dug deeper to find a strong correlation with user activation and upgrades. So we set out to increase new user activation and in turn and increase in upgrades.

Prior to this project I had done a round of “switch” interviews were we did a deep dive on why people sign up for Buffer. We saw a common pattern in people who started to get overwhelmed managing multiple social media accounts and wanted a place where they could dedicated a few hours a week to scheduling, then forget about it.

From here I did a deep dive on the usage data on people who signed up in the past 90 days and segmented them out but whether or not they upgraded their plan. My goal here was to look for patterns in both cohorts to see if people who upgraded did anything differently.

We found that people who posted my than 15 times to multiple social accounts in the first 7 days upgraded at a much higher rate.

The interesting thing we found was only a small percentage of people actually connected multiple social accounts and posted more than 15 times.

After digging in further on people who posted more through Buffer, we found having the browser extension installed was a key factor in people who posted more.

Increase the number of accounts connected by new sign ups

Increase extension installs by new sign ups

In a previous project, the growth team had experimented with removing all onboarding for the product. But now we had a clear goal in mind, we were able to bring it back as a very focused experience.

We started by encouraging users to connect multiple social accounts, explaining the benefits and showing empty slots to encourage them to want to fill them up.