This was the first study I conducted as a user researcher for Flodesk. Flodesk had never had a researcher up until this point, and this was the study in which I first implemented all research and recruiting pipelines and processes.
As for the main issue that led to this first large study, we knew that monthly subscribers leave Flodesk at their highest rates within their first two months of their subscriptions. This problem led me to formulate these main research questions:
To approach these main research questions, I first employed an interview study. Talking face to face with users is the most straightforward way to understand the depth behind user behaviors and motivations that you can't achieve with quantitative data alone. Although a survey would have given a better look into the population distribution of reasons for churn, since this was the first research study ever conducted at Flodesk, I thought it best to go the qualitative route and uncover as much about user motivations as I could. Then I would move into further exploration once I had established a good base of qualitative knowledge. With these interviews, we were able to uncover incredible detail behind why some users are churning so soon.
For the interviews themselves, I ran twelve 60 minute sessions over the course of two weeks, where the twelve participants were split into three target user groups: current email subscribers (our base tier), current bundle subscribers (our highest tier), and churned users.
To recruit participants for the study, since all of the potential participants had been Flodesk users at some point, I used our email marketing platform to reach out to a random sample of current and recently churned subscribers sampled from our database.
At the conclusion of this study I hosted multiple readouts of my findings – one for the immediate stakeholders meant to facilitate more intimate discussion, and one larger company-wide readout to keep the rest of our employees in the loop, thus reinforcing a research-driven culture at Flodesk.
The outcome of this study was an initial Jobs to be Done framework (a list of tasks and motivations users have for using our product), a better understanding of how/where users assign value within our tool, and user evaluations of how our product is helping them (or not helping them) to achieve their motivations. This allowed us to understand the core behind why newer users are churning, why paying users are remaining subscribers, and also gave us a better understanding of our user base as a whole.
To briefly highlight some of the main reasons I found behind churn – our analytics were falling short for some users, some members struggled with understanding how to create effective email newsletters due to ineffective onboarding and not very visible tutorials, many of our users felt that they lacked the time to really use Flodesk features to their full potential indicating a lack of direction to resources, and our general lack of onboarding resulted in some product confusion for less experienced entrepreneurs.
As a result of my findings I also made several sweeping product recommendations. They included:
As my first large study with Flodesk, my findings resulted in a large swath of different changes and implementations.
As a result of my initial jobs to be done framework and my recommendation to market our opt-in form offerings as a starting point for new businesses, our marketing team adjusted their marketing materials to more greatly emphasize free opt-in forms in order to maximize new sign-ups. We also began designing and testing for a mobile form builder in order to appeal more to mobile sign-ups as a result. This resulted in a 72% increase in verified trial sign ups over the following 8 months.
From my recommendation to create more customized/visible onboarding and learning materials, we began developing an onboarding questionnaire to ease the onboarding process for new users.
From my recommendation to do a better job of communicating the value of Flodesk on our site and in our marketing materials, we underwent an entire website redesign in which we focused more on communicating the details of our product offering suite, also contributing to that 72% increase in verified trial sign ups.
And from my recommendation to evolve our payment plan, I was given the go-ahead to launch a large-scale Max-Diff/Van Westendorp pricing survey to 400 current users and non-users alike in order to investigate potential ways we could go about structuring our pricing tiers. I analyzed and summarized the results using a Feature Placement Matrix, but more iterations need to be completed before any major changes are made to our pricing structure.
Lastly, this research initiated a routine of continuous contact with our members through various methods and mediums.