Make's onboarding is a standout example of product-led growth done right. Their team lifted activation by over 4% by embedding templates directly in the first empty state. In this teardown, we’ll walk through how they guide users to value fast—with no tour or tooltip required.
We sat down with Aydın Çağlar Ekim (“Caglar”), a growth specialist from Make to understand how his product growth team managed to drive up activation rates through experimentation. He shared tactical tips about user onboarding personalization, different onboarding flow UX, and collaborating with the rest of the organization.
The growth team at Make focuses on three critical areas: activation, engagement, and monetization. Caglar’s primary focus areas are activation and engagement, where he designs and tests different onboarding experiences. A few of his blockbuster growth experiments have increased activation rates by as much as 6%!
The challenge of onboarding new users to Make starts with its breadth. Make empowers users to innovate the way they work with the power of automation — so just about anyone could be a user. Their widespread addressable market brings them thousands of new signups. So, the onboarding process at Make needs to be comprehensive enough to cater to distinct user needs while remaining simple enough to be completed within the first session. Sound familiar?
To tackle this challenge, Caglar and his team created a dynamic and personalized user onboarding flow that speaks for itself. You can go on their onboarding journey as Make offers free trial accounts. Caglar breaks the core onboarding experiences down for us. Here are the six main experiences with visual examples:
Make leverages Candu for their Onboarding Survey, Empty States, and Resource Hub to implement personalization at scale. Candu’s ease of use allows Make to conduct numerous A/B tests and manage different segments and content types efficiently. It was important to Caglar that Candu’s customized content looks seamless against Make’s platform – users should not be able to tell them apart. By leveraging no/low-code tools, Caglar ensures Make’s onboarding process is tailored, efficient, and continually improving.
“I think Candu has helped us a lot, especially with personalization. Managing all these different segments and different content, maintaining them, requires an iterative approach, with an easy-to-use tool, like Candu.”
Want to build Make-style onboarding? Try Candu for User Onboarding
Make personalizes its onboarding dashboard and resource hub, segmenting users by on user roles and technical proficiency. (we also wrote about other types of personalization) For example, Make tailors developers-oriented content for users who identify themselves as having experience with automation. Personalization extends to onboarding emails, ensuring each touchpoint aligns with user goals, use cases, and technical abilities:
Like Make's empty states? Try building your own empty states.
Even the in-app Resource Hub includes personalized content based on use case.
Then test again.
Caglar has conducted numerous product growth experiments, many of which yielded unexpected (or disappointing) results. His experience matches many product growth teams when attempting to move the needle on activation rates. Caglar first tried personalization by use-case, providing tailored templates for different personas, such as marketers versus salespeople. However, the impact was less significant than anticipated.
“I think the overall understanding for growth teams is that if at least 50% of your experiments are failing, you are doing it right. Otherwise, you probably aren’t being bold enough with your experiments.”
One insight emerged from analyzing various experiments: The behavior of technical and non-technical users differed. Technical users preferred more educational content, whereas non-technical users favored quick-start templates and simple guides. This discovery led to the development of distinct onboarding experiences tailored to these two groups, which significantly improved activation rates with both groups.
One truth of experimentation: You’re not going to hit every swing, but if you keep at it, you will hit some out of the park. Make’s most successful activation experiments have more than compensated for the duds, and yielded significant improvements. Across various experiments, Make observed a +4% to +6% relative increase in activation rates—across different groups. This repeatable testing, learning, and refining process enables the growth team to enhance its user onboarding experience over time.
Caglar and the growth team employ an agile, iterative approach to launching new growth initiatives, emphasizing the importance of qualitative and quantitative validation. The process begins with formulating hypotheses gleaned from user research, followed by iterative experiments designed to refine these insights. This data- and insights-driven approach helps Make continuously improve its product-led-growth experiences. We asked Caglar for his team’s operating model:
The Growth team conducts moderated user tests to understand user behaviors and pain points.
The Growth Team heavily leverages its product analytics tool (Mixpanel) to perform detailed reporting on user behaviors across different segments.
The Growth team conducts regular impact tests, validating whether content is relevant and whether an experience continues impacting user outcomes.
Make is constantly tinkering with its content and is willing to abandon or modify content that isn’t performing based on the test results.
Each iteration is validated rigorously. As content and user experiences are personalized, the growth team checks that each iteration and branch adds real value to the user experience.
The growth team at Make needs to be able to test ideas swiftly and efficiently, but they can’t do it alone. Collaboration with engineering and design teams is crucial, particularly when implementing product changes or when they need last-minute feature flags. The use of no-code tools like Candu provides them with the autonomy to implement and test changes quickly without being bottlenecked.
Here’s how the collaboration works across different teams at Make:
This level of cross-team collaboration, combined with the growth team’s autonomy, enables Make’s growth team to move quickly and efficiently. They can test and iterate on ideas rapidly, ensuring continuous improvement in their user onboarding experiences.
For product growth teams looking to start to improve their user onboarding experience, Caglar had a few takeaways. By following these strategies, product growth teams can develop a more personalized onboarding experience that moves the needle on activation.
Personalization should begin after you have identified distinct user groups that exhibit different behaviors and engagement patterns during onboarding.
Analyze data from previous experiments with good sample sizes to identify different user behaviors. This analysis can reveal potential personalization opportunities and help formulate hypotheses for new experiments.
Design onboarding surveys that are both easy for users to complete and provide valuable insights. Clearly explain to users why the data is being captured and how it will benefit their experience.
Begin with basic personalization, such as tailoring experiences based on user roles or technical ability, and refine and branch from there. Starting simply allows you to refine your approach quickly without becoming overwhelmed.
Rigorous testing is essential to validate every personalized element. Ensure that each change adds real value to the user experience. Continually testing existing content will help you understand if it's adding value to your users’ lives.
Personalization should not be a checkbox exercise. The most critical and challenging part of the process is validating the impact of your personalization efforts. You’ll need to embrace trial and error as necessary for effective personalization.
Achieving statistical significance can require significant traffic, especially if you are testing on different fragments of your user base. This process is more challenging for early-stage companies with lower traffic volumes.
But what's most important? "Be bold in your experiments, don't be afraid to fail. Thanks to AB testing and an agile approach you can always pivot quickly and iterate," said Peter Trenkner, Growth Program Manager at Make.
“Breaking down experiment results can be tricky because sometimes they can be biased. There will always be a random change and if someone is looking for something that went positive, they will find it. The change needs to be very substantial for a very high sample size and maybe even tested in a follow-up experiment if there is doubt," said Caglar.
Personalizing user onboarding can significantly improve user activation rates. By maintaining a robust experimentation framework, working collaboratively with other teams, and leveraging low/no-code tools, Make’s growth team has optimized its user onboarding experience. Other product growth teams can learn from Make's approach to mining insights and executing experiments. Start experimenting – you can also use Candu to personalize your onboarding UX today, why not request a free trial?
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