Blogger Onboarding

01 — Challenge

Our aim was to improve new customer retention in their first 30 days.

With a wide range of customer types at Bluehost--from individual hobbyist to enterprise-level corporations--there were countless journeys to guide users through, based on their needs. So we opted to start with a single customer segment: the individual blogger.

02 — Process

The blogger customer comprised a large percentage of new acquisition and early-life churn.

The blogger customer, for Bluehost, was also one of the least experienced web-builder cohorts of our entire customer base. And looking at this cohort's behaviors at a macro level, we determined that a key indicator of their success was publishing their website in the first 30 days.

Assumption: We need bloggers to publish their website quickly, in order to retain them. So how do we do that?

My philosophy: Keep it simple.

The strategy was to target this specific segment with a simplified version of onboarding, omitting any information that wasn't relevant to this cohort. We whittled the web-building process down to five easy steps, and provided educational content to guide their experience in a self-serve manner. As for messaging, we kept the language basic, removing all industry speak and technical terms, in favor of conversational, action-oriented descriptors.

Using this approach in our creative, and after a series of A/B tests for optimization, we deployed an onboarding stream via a triggered email automation, based on the individual blogger's publish status.

This email stream was the first step in what became a total revamp of the blogger experience. Using the data obtained from our initial email automation, we worked with the Product team to build and test a dynamic in-app experience specifically tailored to bloggers. The iterative in-app experience included testing a series of onboarding checklists, building onboarding surveys into the product signup flow for more specific customer data, and an eventual dynamic website tool for bloggers.