Company

HoneyBook helps creative professionals in the events industry get organized, elevate their brand, and deliver the digital booking and payment experience their clients expect. The platform handles pesky, time-consuming processes and gets them booked and paid faster with beautiful digital proposals, e-signatures, and online payments & reminders. Knowing these businesses rely on their client-facing branding and reputation, HoneyBook solicits trust as early as its onboarding process. “This is how they’re going to be seen by their clients, and so they’re afraid of giving up control of some of their interactions with clients,” Yotam Soen, Director of Product, said. “This whole process of doing business on their own is obviously not trivial.”

Goals

In order to establish trust for its clients from the beginning, HoneyBook initially employed a specialist-led sign-up process. But the process proved to be a bottleneck for onboarding new customers. So HoneyBook’s product team turned to Mixpanel to switch its onboarding flow to an open, self-service platform, measure how users moved through its funnel, and then increase the overall conversion rate.

Solution

Switching from one onboarding method to another is a business-critical transition. HoneyBook needed to track users’ behavior closely in order to make improvements quickly.

Through Mixpanel, the product team is able to test which behaviors lead to better conversion and then leverage the user interface to encourage those behaviors.

In just two months, the product team at HoneyBook was able to improve the onboarding conversion rate by 33%, through exploring People profiles, viewing Mixpanel Funnel reports, and targeting each specific step of the funnel.

If a HoneyBook prospect sends out their first client proposal quickly, they are likely to become active users. Knowing this data point, the team established this action as the final part of their onboarding flow.

The challenge was ensuring that new users reached this stage.

Using Mixpanel’s Funnels, the product team could identify which actions in the sign-up process experienced drop-off before reaching the proposal. HoneyBook was able to test variables at these steps and improve the conversion of each action individually. “In Mixpanel, we looked at the stages that had the biggest drop-offs and focused on those,” Yotam said.

By digging into reports, the product team was able to observe which actions users were having trouble completing and A/B test improvements around those.

Emphasizing the right elements

Then, with Mixpanel’s Explore feature, the team was able to drill down into the history of people profiles and validate how individual users navigated during the initial stages of signing up.

“One thing that I find very helpful in Mixpanel is the Explore section,” Yotam said. “I looked at maybe 200 members through it. But after looking at ten users that way, you can see patterns. You can read it quickly.”

Pulling data from Mixpanel’s Explore, Yotam and his team were able to choose which elements of the site’s design to downplay and which parts of the UI to emphasize with modals and blank states.

Increasing self-service onboarding

Mixpanel’s analytics gave the product team the depth to look at specific actions and the real-time power to watch how variants competed against each other.

“We improved on each of the funnel’s stages,” Yotam said. “None of them is a very dramatic improvement itself, but they add up.”

By approaching each stage of the funnel with data-driven rigor, HoneyBook increased its onboarding from 18% completion in March to 24% completion in April, resulting in a 33% increase over the course of two months.

Results

Mixpanel is an integral part of how HoneyBook’s product team improves business metrics and user experiences simultaneously. Having driven higher user acquisition, Honeybook is excited about the potential for experimenting in user retention. Yotam knows what all good product managers do—it’s never one change that moves the needle on a product’s success. Instead, it’s identifying the many levers that affect a user’s experience and making incremental improvements to a larger order of magnitude. With Mixpanel, HoneyBook has both breadth and depth in understanding their users and driving successful behaviors.