Accelerating growth for Vyond free trial users—from acquisition, onboarding, to conversion
✦ AI summary
Adam spearheaded UX design within a newly formed Growth team at Vyond, aiming to optimize the organic funnel from acquisition to conversion for B2B users.
He introduced targeted enhancements at key funnel stages: replacing email link verification with an optimized code verification flow, creating an engaging DIY interactive tutorial to improve onboarding learnability, designing contextual AI feature nudges, and developing an extended plan trial offering to lower barriers to entry.
These initiatives drove significant impact across all metrics, achieving a 15% increase in sign-up conversions, a 20% increase in first video completions, and scaling business revenue with a $30-35k MRR increase through the extended trial.
I optimized our free trial funnel to accelerate product-led growth and increase organic subscriptions.
Historically focused on enterprise B2B sales, we saw an opportunity to capitalize on an increasing proportion of organic user growth at Vyond. We established a new Growth team to leverage the existing 14-day free trial and drive self-serve plan subscriptions.
Our free trial users faced friction across the entire funnel—from high drop-offs during email verification, to a steep learning curve causing low video completion rates, to a lack of awareness of our premium AI features.
As the Senior UX Designer, I partnered with data analysts to identify drop-off points and implemented targeted enhancements. I introduced a streamlined code verification sign-up, a DIY-like interactive onboarding experience, contextual AI feature nudges, and an extended trial offering to bridge the gap to conversion.
Overall, the initiative was found to be successful in moving business metrics and showed that scalability via product-led growth is possible for a B2B focused product.
Key business metrics improved in this initiative include:
- 15% increase in sign-up conversion and 3x activation time reduction.
- 20% increase in first video creation completion and improved learnability.
- 2x adoption rate in AI features during onboarding phase.
- 15-20% increase in subscribers and MRR by 30-35k from the extended plan trial offering.
Several designs targeted at different stages of the conversion funnel were created addressing data observations and underlying user problems.
Acquisition stage: Enhanced email sign-up flow with code verification
Data observation: We saw a 30% drop-off from email verification link to account activation, compared to other sign-up methods, such as SSO.
User problems: Users experienced delays in emails, confusion for switching domains, and frictions in visiting multiple tabs and unideal cross-device operations for the process.
The solution: I leveraged the code verification method to allow automatic page redirection in domains, keep journey in one tab, and pushed for backend refactoring to send verification codes immediately.
Impact: This design resulted in a 15% increase in sign-up conversion and 3x activation time reduction.
Onboarding stage: DIY-like interactive tutorials for better learnability.
Data observation: We noticed only 50% of the new users complete their first video, which is a metric directly linked to retention and future subscriptions.
User problems: Most users are novice users with no video making skills. They were often overwhelmed by a blank canvas, and were forced to sit through a whole product tour, which wasn't helpful. Some valuable features like character expressions were hard to discover in their first experience.
The solution: I designed a do-it-yourself template and a side panel with progress bar for learning steps, enabling users to kickstart with pre-made materials guiding key features to make a video in Vyond.
Impact: This design resulted in a 20% increase in first video creation completion rate and showed an improved learnability in our post-release user testing.
Onboarding stage: Nudges for AI feature adoptions
Data observation: We observed a low adoption rate among new users when the AI text to video feature was introduced. Users who adopt the AI feature showed a higher conversion rate.
User problems: Most new users stopped discovering when they finished the first video, assuming that's all the product offers.
The solution: I designed a contextual nudge that appears after a new user saves their first video, prompting them to try the AI video feature for even faster results.
Impact: This design resulted in a 2x adoption rate among new users.
Conversion stage: Extended plan trial for more features at a lower price
Data observation: We saw a drastic difference in conversion rate (15% vs. 1%) in different industry sectors and countries, due to the company's global pricing strategy.
User problems: The existing free trial offering prevented users from fully evaluating the product value, especially with high value AI features gated by a paid subscription.
The solution: I designed a workflow for an extended plan trial offering, enabling existing free trial users to get a paid plan for 7 days with $10, one-tenth of the monthly price.
The experiment: The solution was experimented in Canada and Australia, seeing a 5% participation rate and 40% of the participants converted to a full plan. It was then rolled out to 100+ countries.
Impact: The official launch resulted in a 15-20% increase in subscribers and MRR by 30-35k.
Navigating the "messy middle" through cross-functional collaboration and rapid iteration.
The polished solutions above were the result of a highly iterative, collaborative process. Working within a newly formed Growth team meant establishing agile design rituals from scratch.
Data-Driven Collaboration
I proactively did my own analysis on Amplitude to query funnels, identifying the exact drop-off points (like the 30% drop in email verification) that formed the foundation of our design hypotheses.
Rapid Prototyping & Scrapping Ideas
Many design explorations were made for the onboarding experience. Ultimately, we landed on a simpler approach that leveraged existing design components, ensuring a short turnaround sprint while still effectively solving the problem for both users and the technical team.
Overall, the initiative was found to be successful in moving business metrics and showed that scalability via product-led growth is possible for a B2B focused product.
Interested in working together? Reach out at y3vu060312@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.