DocuSign leverages Mixpanel to track key metrics, resulting in more conversions, onboarding completions, and paid upgrades.

DocuSign is the global standard for Digital Transaction Management (DTM) and eSignature, with more than 100M users globally. Working with 250K companies in 188 countries, DocuSign helps individuals and companies go fully digital to help them keep life and business moving forward.

DocuSign prides itself on offering a world-class experience for organizations of every size, industry, and geography. It’s one of the few companies whose technology touches its customers’ customers. Called “Signers” by DocuSign, many of them have never electronically signed anything before experiencing DocuSign.

“Making sure that DocuSign is easy to use so that our customers’ agreements get returned completed and signed as fast as possible is key to our customers’ success,” says Drew Ashlock, Senior Product Manager. “We want our customers and their customers to love the experience of DocuSigning because that’s what fuels the network effect and virality.”

The more people who send out documents, the more people are exposed to DocuSign. In fact, this network effect of its core product flow brings in 130,000 new unique users every day. Key to scaling for this massive growth is having fast, easy, and targeted product analytics.

“We measure our success by our customers’ success,” Drew notes. “Successful Transactions — the number of documents that our customers successfully complete using DocuSign — is our one key metric. It ensures that every employee is aligned to making it as easy and fast as possible for customers to complete their transactions on the DocuSign Global Trust Network.”

DocuSign uses Mixpanel in a variety of ways across the company. As DocuSign’s needs have grown over time, Mixpanel has easily grown with them. “When we originally started using Mixpanel in 2013, it was just for marketing,” says Drew. “We wanted to better understand how many users were actually converting to paid customers.”

“Then we wanted to ensure Signers were able to be successful and complete documents,” Drew continues, “because increasing successful Signers helps grow use of DocuSign and the total number of Successful Transactions.”

Today, DocuSign uses Mixpanel at every step of the customer journey, from acquiring new users to converting those users into paid customers. “As long as our Successful Transactions are growing, that means continued success for our customers and continued growth for our company.”

“With Mixpanel, everybody can see who made it through the funnel.”

Using Funnels to test features

Most users are accustomed to DocuSign’s generous freemium features, so Drew and his product team knew there were numerous opportunities to encourage free users towards upgrading as they used DocuSign more.

They reasoned that by exposing certain gated premium features, they would incentivize more free users to upgrade. “When we decided to expose some premium features to our free users,” says Drew, “we used super properties and Funnels to track which features drove conversions for our free users.”

The team’s Funnels demonstrated that feature walls resulted in a 5% lift in upgrade conversions. “Given that we see 130,000 new unique users every day, this is a significant boost for us,” says Drew.

Improving account creation with A/B testing

DocuSign used Mixpanel to monitor an A/B test to see if it could increase another important metric: New Signer Accounts.

New Signers are able to create a free account after signing a document. The free account retains a copy of the signed document and allows Signers to use DocuSign as a Sender.

Using Mixpanel to monitor this essential funnel, DocuSign increased free account creation by 15%.

“Where the value of Mixpanel comes in is in being able to monitor that viral funnel to ensure New Signer success,” says Drew.

Boosting first-time user conversions

Prior to Mixpanel, DocuSign didn’t have a clear window into new user behavior. When the team noted a significant drop off in conversions immediately after the initial sign up, they turned to Mixpanel to understand why.

DocuSign suspected it was missing a step in the onboarding process and decided to test the impact of a separate user experience for new users.

“Initially, we were leaning on our UI and let new users explore our web app on their own,” says Drew. “But with Mixpanel, we could monitor how users interact with the web app as we test and launch new features.”

“Now, we walk customers through sending a document when they log into our web app for the first time,” says Drew. By adding this curated “first user” experience, DocuSign boosted Signer-to-Sender conversions by 10%.

With the help of Mixpanel, Drew and his team were able to boost conversions, improve onboarding completion, and get more paid customers to upgrade. Going forward, DocuSign is using Mixpanel to make its overall data more impactful.

As DocuSign grows, it continues to accumulate a massive quantity of data across data stores old and new. “We’re building a data ecosystem now, gradually adding more data that we want people to have easier access to,” says Drew.

“We’re integrating all the data that actually powers DocuSign into a data warehouse, adding event-based user tracking across all our different applications, and syncing up with billing data, back end data, and email data. It’s going to be great to have all of that disparate data available in a single place where we can query it,” Drew says.

“Being able to then tie Mixpanel events to our backend data is going to be big for us. Mixpanel helps make our data more valuable.”