Powering Mailchimp payoff moments with Shopify data
Mailchimp for Shopify integration end-to-end experience
From an overgrown maze to a smoothly paved road
E-commerce marketers using Mailchimp with Shopify were struggling to sync over their Shopify data and understand how to use it in Mailchimp. This was symptomatic of a larger issue with all integration connection flows: they typically concluded in dead ends on partner platforms with no clear next actions or ways to return to Mailchimp, which only increased friction and context switching.
Furthermore, e-commerce users were only trying Mailchimp’s basic email marketing product, and not exploring the advanced features available on our paid plans. Many interview participants perceived Mailchimp as too simple for their marketing needs and expressed interest in churning to other platforms (which was a sentiment some competitors capitalized on in their sales outreach).
The nature of this problem resulted in expanding our KPIs beyond growing the number of active users connected to Shopify. The integration experience needed to guide those users to their first feature activation / payoff moment by doing the “heavy lifting” for them. Rather than iterate on existing interfaces, our product team built a totally reimagined flow to change/influence user behavior.
Over the course of 18 months, I took on increasing ownership of the project, expanding my role from UX Writer to Design Lead, partnering directly with the Product Manager to deliver on objectives. Together, the product team empowered Shopify customers to scale and measure their impact, save time, and increase sales.
Transforming the end-to-end experience
Our changes helped users consolidate their workflows, personalize at scale, track and analyze their cross-platform marketing activities, and (most importantly) stopped them from churning to competitors like Klaviyo:
The redesigned signup process for first-time users coming from Shopify improved the usability of the account creation process from partner platforms. Adding plan selection to the flow resulted in a 72% lift in paid plan selections.
Redesigning the connection flow from the Shopify App Store resulted in more users starting and completing the connection process (total weekly users +15%) and users were completing the process faster (the slowest users by 46%). 60% of customers clicked the CTA to navigate to Mailchimp after syncing their data.
The new post-connection dashboard bridged the gap between connection and the customer’s first payoff moments by helping customers unlock Shopify data and leverage it in context. Its release drove 7x higher feature adoption in Mailchimp and 3x more conversion from free accounts.
New API-enabled sync settings allowed users to bring over SMS contacts, store behavioral data, and customer tags from Shopify to Mailchimp. Improved UX content resulted in decreased support inquiries regarding billing spikes from bulk import of non-subscribed contacts.
Breaking it down piece by piece
Over a year and a half, our team redesigned sections of the end-to-end experience using design thinking methodologies while fostering a culture of candor and seeking out diverse perspectives. We documented and benchmarked the existing experience, mapped the customer journey, identified payoff moments, prioritized the most promising solutions, gathered customer feedback via UserTesting, finalized our design iterations, and implemented designs across two engineering squads.
Seizing a patent opportunity
Where the work goes next
In 2023, I was part of a team that submitted a patent filing application for our Shopify post-connection dashboard design. The patent application required writing detailed documentation with precise language to describe the innovation. Filing a patent requires persistence and assertiveness in defending the idea against challenges and working through the legal process. Several times, my team received pushback that our solution was not patentable. This work challenged me to hone my storytelling skills and my ability to convey complex technical information in a clear and concise manner. I had to make several rounds of revisions based on feedback from patent lawyers. Here’s a one-line summary of the patent that was finally approved: “An actionable UI layer on top of API event data, served through modules delivered via a dynamically generated JSON.”
With Shopify representing our model for a “gold standard” integration, the team looked to establish the same end-to-end consistency between connection flows and post-connection experiences across other e-commerce integrations, and develop a sustainable framework that could easily adapt to other product verticals and streamline the launch of new integrations.