How FirstCry uses Mixpanel to optimize user engagement and drive business growth

FirstCry is a pioneer in multi-channel retailing for mothers’, babies’, and kids’ products in India. Its platform spans a robust online presence through a mobile app and website, over 1100+ modern stores across 500+ cities, and a wide-reaching general trade distribution network. FirstCry offers an extensive range of products including apparel, footwear, baby gear, nursery, diapers, toys, and personal care items. As of mid-2025, the platform features around 1.6 million SKUs from more than 8,000 Indian and global brands, including its own private labels. The FirstCry app has been downloaded over 160 million times in India, reflecting its strong digital footprint.

While FirstCry had a strong analytics foundation for tracking overall business performance, teams saw the need for deeper insights into how users were interacting within the app. As the company grew, understanding in-app behavior became key to improving user journeys, boosting engagement, and increasing conversions. With the phase-out of Google Analytics properties, FirstCry also looked for a more flexible and modern analytics solution. The aim was to build on their existing setup with a tool that made it easier for teams to explore user behavior and make faster, more informed decisions.

At FirstCry, data has always been core to how decisions are made across the organization. The company was already using in-house systems and Google Analytics to track performance trends, user engagement, and product adoption. But as app usage surged, teams needed a faster and more flexible way to dive deeper into user behavior and engagement patterns—without depending entirely on central data teams.

To expand their analytics capabilities and enable deeper product insights, FirstCry adopted Mixpanel for its ease of use, real-time data availability, run funnel & cohort analyses, and identify drop-offs. Mixpanel helped FirstCry to enhance its analytics capabilities, helping teams experiment faster, optimize the app experience, and make more user-centric decisions.

FirstCry adopted a structured onboarding approach with tailored training, enabling teams to quickly integrate Mixpanel into their workflows and drive performance improvements.

• Marketing Team: Leveraged Mixpanel’s Insights and Funnel Reports to track banner click-through rates (CTRs), analyze peak engagement times, and optimize promotional strategies based on real-time performance data.
  

• Technology Team: Used Mixpanel to monitor user behavior, identify crash points, and quickly resolve technical issues, leading to faster problem resolution and an improved user experience.
  

Funnel optimization and signup success

One of the most valuable outcomes FirstCry experienced through Mixpanel was streamlining its signup process. FirstCry was looking for deeper understanding of the sign-up funnel to identify potential causes of drop-offs. Mixpanel’s Funnel Reports provided detailed visibility into each step of the signup journey, enabling the team to pinpoint and address friction points with precision.

During the analysis, the team uncovered a recurring OTP (One-Time Password) verification error that was affecting conversions during high-traffic periods. This issue had been difficult to isolate earlier without the granular level of funnel breakdown that Mixpanel enabled. With Mixpanel’s actionable findings, the product team refined the OTP retry logic and enhanced session handling.

As a result, the team observed a noticeable reduction in drop-offs at the OTP verification step, significantly improving the efficiency of the signup flow and delivering a smoother onboarding experience for new users.

Anirudh Chaturvedi, CPO at FirstCry, noted: “Mixpanel’s ability to provide detailed insights into user behavior helped us identify the exact points of friction within the user journey. This level of visibility enabled the team to make more informed decisions, prioritize improvements effectively, and drive greater alignment between user experience and business goals.”

Technical optimizations based on device and mobile data analysis

FirstCry’s tech team leveraged Mixpanel’s Device Analytics and Funnel Analysis to uncover and fix device-specific issues that were affecting user drop-offs. By using Lookup Tables and device-level breakdowns, they identified a pattern: certain lower-cost mobile devices had significantly higher drop-off rates at crucial touchpoints—such as listing and product detail pages.

Digging deeper, the team found that performance limitations on these devices—such as slower processing power or limited memory—were leading to laggy interactions and longer load times. With this discovery, they optimized app performance for those devices by streamlining transitions and reducing complexity in key user flows.

These improvements led to a 3-5% uplift in top-of-funnel engagement on various devices, including better listing-to-PDP and PDP-to-Cart progression. As a result, the app delivered a smoother, more consistent experience—especially for users on entry-level smartphones

Anirudh shared: “Mixpanel helped us identify exactly which devices were causing friction in the user experience. By optimizing app performance for those devices, we quickly saw meaningful improvements in user engagement. The ability to uncover and act on such insights so efficiently has made a real difference for our teams.”

Looking ahead, FirstCry plans to deepen its use of Mixpanel across teams. Beyond product optimization and performance tuning, the platform is increasingly being used to support marketing campaigns and experimentation. With Mixpanel, teams have been able to build on their existing campaign strategies by running more granular experiments on banners, offers, and promotional placements—tracking click-to-purchase behavior in real time and iterating with greater speed and precision.

As FirstCry continues to grow, Mixpanel is expected to remain a key enabler—helping teams uncover actionable insights that drive smarter decisions, ongoing innovation, and sustained business impact.