Lemonade uses Mixpanel to give every employee the insights they need to help increase conversion rates across the board.

Lemonade is not your average insurance company. With no brokers, no runarounds, and an experience powered by artificial intelligence, Lemonade offers consumers a new way to get affordable renters or home insurance, all from the comfort of the web or a mobile device.

When a company like Lemonade is upending how a longstanding industry does business, it has to learn from user behavior quickly and use that data effectively across the whole organization. That’s where Mixpanel came in.

“Everything we do is based on data,” said Gil Sadis, Head of Product at Lemonade. “Executives, product, marketing, analytics, customer service, and even underwriting teams learn how to use Mixpanel as soon as they join the company.”

Lemonade’s ultimate business goal is to increase its number of policyholders over time. With more than 100,00 policyholders and counting, the company must optimize partner and paid acquisition channels and educate its consumers on how Lemonade is different than the traditional insurance model. Then, the company quickly serves personalized quotes so that it’s easy for a consumer to purchase a policy that’s right for them.

By understanding its data, Lemonade knew it could drive better customer experiences and, ultimately, better business outcomes. Specifically, Lemonade wanted access to user behavior insights in Mixpanel to determine company strategy, to help allocate time and resources, and to ensure that teams can make data-informed decisions every step of the way.

With Mixpanel’s suite of product analytics products, Lemonade has been able to measure and optimize high-performing acquisition channels, and also improve purchase funnels, making it easy for consumers to convert into loyal policyholders.

“We’ve had Mixpanel implemented since Day 0—even before our public launch, to test that our infrastructure was working,” Gil said.

Through Explore and People profiles, the company has an end-to-end understanding of the user: “Because our product and marketing are omnichannel, it’s really easy to see the entire journey a user takes—from acquisition to moving through one of our hundreds of funnels, to ultimately purchasing a policy.”

Detecting anomalies in its data

“In our busy day-to-day, we’re not looking at every funnel to make sure everything is working. But Mixpanel’s anomaly detection feature tells us when there’s a steep drop or unexpected uptick. This is exactly why we want everyone on Mixpanel. When everyone can access the tool, we quickly spot issues or notice the trends to capitalize on. “The difference between Mixpanel and other analytics tools is that Mixpanel’s Machine Learning will notify you with what you should care about.”

“In every product spec and with every feature we build, we have designated placeholder for Mixpanel. That way, we can determine the events we track and how this feature is helping us measure and work toward our larger business goals.”

Fueling high growth and productivity

As newcomers to insurance, an industry that has operated without major innovation for the past 150 or more years, Lemonade has taken a design and customer-centric approach, and the strategy is paying off. In just one year, the company secured 70,000 policies, serving more than 100,000 policyholders, and counting. In fact, Lemonade’s rate of acquiring new policyholders doubles every 10 weeks.

In addition to its focus on AI and mobile-first design, Lemonade credits much of this growth to the insights its teams are able to find and leverage with Mixpanel.

Ninety-five percent of its employees use Mixpanel, and their decisions are driven by insights they discover in the tool. “Part of onboarding a new employee at Lemonade is creating a Mixpanel account. We want people to engage with data, ask questions, and find the answers in data to make the right decisions,” Gil said.

In fact, the team’s reliance on Mixpanel has allowed the company to operate in an incredibly nimble and unconventional way: “At Lemonade, we only focus on the most important stuff, so the entire org can have the biggest impact. And while we have a very focused vision, we don’t chase quarterly roadmaps, which many people find strange.

“However, Mixpanel helps us rigorously prioritize and balance where we innovate versus iterate, all based on what we learn from our user behavior data. Nearly everyone here uses Mixpanel, so we are all empowered to make informed decisions with data. For example, when we release a new innovative feature and measure it with Mixpanel, we see its direct impact on the business and how many people are interested in it.

“Then, we can compare that to the impact a more iterative product change has on our users. Since everything is measured in Mixpanel, we have clear evidence about what to care about and how to balance priorities.”

From the company level down to the individual, trust in and use of the data saves time: “Mixpanel saves every product manager, at a minimum, half a day’s work, every week. And with anomaly detection, the most important user priorities surface to us instantly.”

Increasing purchase rates with anomaly detection

With the launch of Lemonade’s Extra Coverage product, Mixpanel’s machine learning helped the team uncover a key insight: new policyholders weren’t fully completing the purchase flow. “To finalize a policy with Extra Coverage, a user has to submit their policy for review. At this stage, there’s no need for payment, but Mixpanel helped us find that most people didn’t submit it for review; they went through the entire flow and then suddenly stopped,” Gil recounted.

“After anomaly detection notified us of the staggering drop-off rate, we dug deeper into Funnels to find that part of the problem was a browser-based technical issue. In addition, the call to action was not clear enough. It felt like you already submitted something, even though there was still one last step.”

Tackling both the technical and the UX issues led to a dramatic improvement. The product team saw a 50% increase in overall conversion for Extra Coverage.

Improving the company’s overall quote-view-to-purchase rate

In the beginning, Lemonade’s new user acquisition rate wasn’t always doubling every 10 weeks. “When we launched in 2016, we didn’t know how our customers would behave. Lemonade is a completely new product and insurance buying experience. We did a lot of user testing, but we didn’t really know how our acquisition funnel would perform,” Gil remembered.

“Post-launch, we saw a huge drop in the funnel where users first see their quote view. We went straight to Mixpanel. It was easy not only to understand at what stage users dropped but also find and connect with the specific users to ask for qualitative feedback to improve the user experience.”

“We made the top navigation really lean. It was a bit cluttered at first and introduced too much insurance talk—jargon like ‘annual deductible.’ We simplified everything so if you went through the experience all you would see in the quote view is the price and a CTA to buy. Then there was a small arrow ushering you to send you to the next section.

“We couldn’t have tracked, measured or understood changes without Mixpanel. We tested the placement of features, order of different sections, and even the copy. Today, the user experience is a culmination of all those smaller Mixpanel-backed experiments.”

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