ActiveCampaign Web Personalization

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ActiveCampaign Web Personalization

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Overview

This work is a series of design explorations that comprise current and future feature releases within Web Personalization in ActiveCampaign. At the time of creation, my primary goals with this work included:

  • Addressing common user pain points to drive adoption
  • Elevating the maturity of the recently launched, feature light Web Pers product line

What is Web Personalization?

  • Web Pers gives SMBs the ability to create many personalized iterations of a single web experience, without the complexity of managing multiple instances
  • Users leverage platform intelligence (gathered from other channels) to segment specific audiences
  • When audience members visit users’ site, our embedded code renders personalizations instantaneously
  • Rounds out users’ ability to create end-to-end journeys for the full customer lifecycle—beyond the inbox, meeting customers where they are

Common use cases

Web Pers allows our users to personalize images, text content, link destinations, and element visibility, with more personalization options coming soon. Some example use cases include:

  • Welcoming known/existing customers
  • Winning back past customers
  • Modifying content to target known interests
  • Ecommerce abandoned cart personalizations
  • Ecommerce cross-selling
  • SaaS trial management
  • Relationship- and account-based selling
  • Creating and managing gated content
  • Creating personalized forms
  • Intelligent content localization
  • Location-based targeting

Who’s using it

  • Lina Lenis is the Email Marketing Specialist at Yara → Once Yara wins a new customer, the customer is added as an ActiveCampaign contact. Then Lina uses customer details like location and language preference to personalize the language that fields appear in on ActiveCampaign Forms.
  • Taryn Myers is the Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Franchise Business Review → They use Web Pers to align their site content with lead-gen content for a more consistent customer journey.
  • Dominik Predota is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rouvy → Their team is building ultra-personalized landing pages on their business’ main website. They’re working on an EOY congratulatory Campaign that will link out to a personalized biking stats web page that shows unique stats for every visitor.
  • Marion Cornet is the Head of Marketing Communications at AITAKES → Marion uses Web Pers to spin up dozens of simple, short-lived pages for specific short-term conversion goals. They’re focused on operational efficiency, and don’t want to constantly burden the tech team with building and maintaining multiple short-lived web pages.

How it works

  1. User embeds our Site Tracking code into their page header, which runs between page call and render
  2. User defines an audience who will qualify to see the personalized experience
  3. User creates the personalized iteration of the page—can be an AC Landing Page, or a page built with any third-party builder (ie Squarespace)
  4. Once published, when a qualified visitor loads the page, the Site Tracking code works in conjunction with the ActiveCampaign browser cookie to identify them and load the personalized page

Adoption woes and hypotheses

  • Despite its potential, Web Pers saw underwhelming adoption in its first quarter following launch
    • In three months, we served ~40k experiences, representing ~9% of all traffic on personalized sites
    • ActiveCampaign’s user base was 140k+ at this time; ~600 had utilized Web Pers
  • Data revealed a steep dropoff between the time when users start working with Web Pers, and the act of publishing their first experience
    • Q4 2020: Conversations (~80%); Pages (~47%); Web Personalization (2.45%)
  • Talking with users, I worked with PM to identify four initial hypotheses for Web Pers’ adoption woes
    • Users do not know how to get started
    • The product is feature light and lacks platform visibility
    • The product suffers from connection issues
    • Customers are suffering from analysis paralysis
  • We identified five features which we believed would:
    • resolve most user hesitancy/confusion
    • bring Web Pers closer to feature parity with competitors
    • fundamentally improve the utility of the product
  • I collaborated with Product and Engineering to conduct a design sprint wherein we:
    • Fleshed out iterative designs for the four features
    • Gathered validation from users via usability testing sessions
    • Completed implementation of two features, with the remaining slated for future implementation

Getting Started Recommendations

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The problem

  • A recurring them among customers is that Web Pers seems powerful, but SMBs struggle to develop creative uses for the technology
  • Data reveals that many users engage with image personalization, but ignore (or fail to discover) other personalization options, suggesting that they’re not fully leveraging the feature set

Proposed solution

  • Our proposed solution:
    • Provides built-in product education aligned to users’ business verticals
    • Communicates the value of the product, through increasingly relevant recs
    • Lays the groundwork for building up platform ML muscle via intelligent recs
    • Contributes a new in-platform feedback mechanism to our design system

Preview Mode

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The problem

  • Usage data reveals a steep dropoff between experience creation and publish rates
  • ~25% of consulted users expressed concern about what web visitors would actually see
  • Customer feedback makes clear that users are hesitant to publish because:
    • there is no way to preview their personalizations live prior to publishing
    • they are rightfully worried about making mistakes at important touchpoints
    • in the current experience, they cannot modify changes once published (only delete them)
    • in the current experience, there is no easy way to impersonate the target audience

Proposed solution

  • Our proposed solution:
    • allows users to view an interactive preview of their personalizations as a qualified contact
    • would allow for in-platform preview both before and after publishing
    • empowers users to easily test and share their personalizations with team members

Canvas Device Size Simulator

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The problem

  • To meet GA timeline, we released Web Pers without the ability to simulate different device sizes
  • Users who segment their audience based on device type expect to see a relevant preview
  • Users cannot currently see how their personalizations scale across devices

Proposed solution

  • Our proposed solution:
    • Allows users to simulate an extremely wide range of screen sizes within the canvas
    • Reflects user feedback about which sizes are useful (ie, no tablet)
    • Strikes a balance between granular simulation control and abstract representation

Element Visibility

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👉🏼
ℹ️ #7 → Let’s check it out in prod

The problem

  • Competitive analysis revealed that many personalization tools offer control over element visibility—a feature omitted for achieveing GA
  • Direct user feedback made clear that some users considered this functionality essential to their personalization workflow in competitive tools

The solution

  • Our implemented solution:
    • Offers users granular control over element visibility for a highly personalized experience
    • Leverages the front-end structure of the target website to offer three visibility states
    • Allows the user to undo/redo their visibility changes prior to publishing

Experience Prioritization

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👉🏼
ℹ️ #8 → Let’s check it out in prod

The problem

  • Website visitors may qualify for viewing multiple different personalized experiences—users need a way to prioritize which experiences those audience members are served

The solution

  • Our implemented solution:
    • Allows users to stack rank their experiences for a given domain, ensuring that users who belong to multiple audiences are served the most relevant experience
    • Improved the layout of the Web Pers project manager, making it more scalable for power users who personalize across multiple sites

Research techniques and collaboration

Regular validation is critical in product design. Throughout the course of feature discovery, I prioritize customer engagement and work with Product to conduct competitive analysis. I believe strongly that:

  • individual designers should be close to the research process
  • designers should bring their cross-func peers into research whenever possible
  • solutions should be shaped by customer feedback loops using passive and active mechanisms
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Results and looking ahead

  • Focus on new Web Channels feature work has fluctuated since H1 2021
  • Much of the discovery done in this push is slated for implementation in H2 2022
  • While usage metrics have steadily increased for the Web Pers product line since our focus shift, a direct impact from this work is reflected in Q1 2021 stats. Releasing Experience Prioritization alongside Element Visibility garnered improved customer engagement and retention:
    • Organic (non-ad-driven) engagement from active accounts
      • Q4 2020 → 6.08%
      • Q1 2021 → 7.06%
    • Experience publish rate among active Web Pers users
      • Q4 2020 → 2.45%
      • Q1 2021 → 8.59%
    • Notably, these increases did not stem from any increase in product marketing
  • When we return to Web Pers, the team will conduct renewed discovery to survey the landscape, reconsider how Web Pers fits into our platform’s positioning, and proceed with some iteration of the earlier features described here.