In addition to the continuous new member and churn research I implemented to gain knowledge about the audience coming and going from Flodesk, I also looked to fill the gap in Flodesk's knowledge of their existing members.
After meeting with key stakeholders and our CEO we determined that the best course of action would be to investigate and build out customer profiles of each of our top user industries, seeing as our target audience was small business owners and their marketing needs would shift by industry. Thus began a multi-study effort to uncover the needs, motivations, and business strategies of each of our main user industries, so as to allow us to better tailor our product to them and increase empathy toward our customers across teams internally.
Following an initial survey to gain a better understanding of the industry distribution of Flodesk's users, I dove into a series of mixed methods investigations.
Seeing as ours were more exploratory questions, I began each study with a round of user interviews meant to uncover where and how the users operate their businesses, their general motivations and struggles, and how they use Flodesk. I then followed each round of interviews with a quantitative investigation using our internal database, in which I would gather the user IDs of all survey respondents in the desired industry and investigate usage metrics to compare to their qualitative responses.
To recruit participants for each iteration, I used our email marketing platform to send a screener survey to a random set of users sampled from our database. I then manually selected interview participants based on their screener responses, ensuring their businesses were part of the proper industry.
This process was repeated for multiple user industries, including photographers, coaches and consultants, and media and graphic designers.
And as always, at the conclusion of each user industry's study I would host 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.
A main output of these studies was customer profiles, or personas, for each of Flodesk's top user industries. These personas were critical in informing our marketing and design teams when it came to product and marketing direction at the conclusion of each new round of these studies.
Additionally, these studies uncovered the main user journey to Flodesk for each industry, as well as their motivations behind joining, the Flodesk features each industry uses, how they implement their marketing strategies, the different tools they use in addition to Flodesk, their Flodesk likes and pain points, and importantly the spaces where they go to access different business information.
Uncovering all this information meant that with each new round of research I could make more recommendations for how to market our product to these different industries, as well as what new features we could develop to cater to the different industries that used our product.
Some of my recommendations from these studies were more functional, such as including new editing features for our email builders or new consumer-facing product features. But some of what I was able to uncover had much larger rammifications.
For instance, one of the more significant findings from one of these studies was that many people I interviewed were requesting features that we’d either just released or that had already been available for some time, indicating that our product releases weren't getting through to some of our existing members. For this reason, I recommended that we revisit past releases more often in our marketing materials.
As a result of these studies, not only did Flodesk's overall culture become more user-oriented from the distribution of the customer personas and the deeper look into our user base, but I was able to impact product development roadmaps and marketing roadmaps as well.
From my recommendation to revisit past releases more often in our marketing materials, we did just that, resulting in higher usage metrics of our less prominent features. I also initiated a monthly meeting between myself and the marketing team as a result of the first studies in this series to keep them more closely informed of user needs, motivations, and who our users are.
Other impacts include additional editing features within our email and form builders, more checkout functionalities within our checkout offering, and even two new PMs being hired to handle all of the new product feature suggestions that stemmed from this research.