Increasing engagement among first-time users

Microsoft Marketing explained

Microsoft Marketing is a marketing automation tool that enables marketers to orchestrate and automate customer journeys. Key competitors include Monday.com, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Marketo.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the route a customer takes from the time they first encounter a brand to the time they make a purchase. These journeys are strategically mapped out by marketing professionals, who are our primary users. Below is an example of a customer journey map that a marketer might create. Notice how this journey starts with an email, and forks into two paths based on whether the customer opens it or not.

Business problems

Only 26% of free-trial users engage with the product within their first 5 minutes of use. This leads to poor conversions to paid subscriptions, because users are not able to realize product vale and therefore drop out of the funnel.

Business goals

Increase the number of conversions from free trial to direct purchase.

KPI: an increase in the % of first-time users that successfully send an e-mail in their first 5 minutes of use.

My role

I worked with a PM and UX Researcher to improve the first-run experience for trial users, given the KPIs and business goals stated above.

Things I wondered

What are the known problems first-time users are looking to solve by downloading D365 Marketing?
What do first-time users currently do during their exploration? What is the first task they want to try?
What are the users’ perceptions of Marketing when they see the product? What are the expected capabilities and perceived capabilities?
What are the opportunities to wow users immediately?

User insights

Only 44% of users found the product easy to use

According to a past research study, only 44% of users found the product easy to use within their first five minutes of exploration.

We ran another study to find out 'why'

We knew the product was not easy to use, but what exactly about it was difficult? We tested on 10 Marketing Generalists that never used the product before. Their task was to explore the legacy product for 5 minutes, then answer some questions after exploration.

Recommendations from the study

Have demo/sample emails, journeys, triggers, segments
Provide good quality templates, the more the better
Let users set a goal or select their interest then show them recommended tasks
Let users integrate their other tools

Our solution

Simplifying the 'getting started' experience

Reducing cognitive load and decision fatigue by directing all users towards one entry point on the 'getting started' tab.

Introducing email templates and WYSIWYG editor

We listened to our user research and created an e-mail template library to help users send their first test email in no time. We planned to outsource the actual email template creation to another team, but I created some examples here for user testing purposes. Originally the thumbnail previews were landscape, but I changed them to a portrait orientation to better preview email contents.

Nudging users towards sustained engagement

Customer journeys are composed of multiple steps. Sending an email is just the first one! Once users complete the first step, we nudge them to continue engaging by adding a follow-up step. 'No dead ends' was an important UX principle. We also designed flows for edge cases, like when a user exits the email step early.

Adding a checklist module

One of the design teams on another Microsoft business product was implementing a new 'getting started' widget. In talking with their team, it made sense for us to reuse their component to help guide users towards completing essential steps, on their own time.

Outcomes

70% of participants rated the new first-run experience as 'above average', compared to 22% in the legacy experience. This metric came from running a post-design UX Research study using the same benchmarks.

This new design solution received the highest “wow” scores in user testing that this product has ever received. A "wow" score is a Microsoft specific measurement of customer satisfaction based on an average of 5 key indicators that are measured during user research.

Want to see more details? Full PDF available upon request.