Migrating users to new email builder

Why migrate users?

Mailchimp, the leading email marketing platform with a 71.75% market share, introduced a new email builder with new features in 2020.

Despite efforts from different teams to boost adoption, only 26% of paid customers have adopted the new email builder. Most users continue to prefer the "classic" builder, even though it's no longer supported.

Problem to solve

Users avoided the new email builder mainly due to a combination of factors:

1. Familiarity with classic builder and time constrains to explore new one.
2. Perceived lack of benefits in switching to new builder.
3. Email templates created in the Classic email builder were not compatible with the New email builder.
4. Missing basic features in the New email builder

The Classic email builder, our core product, has technical limitations hindering modern features like automation or AI integration.

Billions of emails are created using this 15-year-old, unsupported software.

Goals and KPIs

• Increase usage of new email builder.
  • From 26% to 40% for all paid users.
  • From 13% to 20% for high-value customers (accounts spending > $10,000/yr).
• Improve customer satisfaction score:
  • From 68% to 80% "very satisfied" for paid users.
  • From 56% to 70% "very satisfied" for high-value customers.

Solution: Map all necessary efforts

Working with my my manager, a UX researcher and a content designer, we developed a comprehensive roadmap to boost adoption of Mailchimp's new email builder.

This roadmap helped secure leadership support, ensuring necessary resources for implementation.

It outlined steps to enhance the email builder and increase user adoption.

To migrate users seamlessly to the new email builder, we will:

1. Fix bugs and add missing features
2. Enable email template replication
3. Encourage and educate users on the new editor
4. Phase out the old builder

All improvements to be before for Black Friday 2024.

Implementation of roadmap

After sharing the roadmap with leadership, as well as research backing up our decisions. We assigned the work to different teams by phases.

Phase 1: Reaching feature parity

The New Builder initially lacked basic features crucial for high-value customers ($10,000+/year). This gap made the new builder unusable for them, necessitating feature additions.

Incremental releases of features allowed users to design newsletters exactly as they wanted, boosting New builder adoption.

List of features to improve adoption and usability:

• Border Stroke: Adding more patterns and usability improvements
• Divider block: More style options
• Text boxes: New borders, margins, spacing, highlighting, and radius options
• Button: Customizable borders and styles
• Social media icons: Expanded display options
• Image: Fit/fill controls and corner radius adjustments
• Video: Alignment, border radius, thumbnail options, and URL updates
• Video: Alignment, border radius, thumbnail options, and URL updates

Phase 2: Enabling replication of old emails into new builder

Supported engineering to develop feature that allowed legacy users to migrate email templates from the classic to the new builder. Initially aiming for 100% pixel accuracy, user testing revealed that content quality, proportions, and key element placement were more important than exact replication.

We launched the feature with a minimum 91% pixel accuracy, ensuring quality of images, layout, and text was maintained. This approach balanced user needs with technical feasibility.

Phase 3: Designing an intuitive user flow for replicating emails into the new builder

We created a flow so legacy users could replicate their old emails, created years ago on the Classic Builder, into the new builder.

We tested two methods:

1. Asking users about builder preference
2. Defaulting to the new builder with an option to revert

The second approach proved more effective.

Phase 4: Onboarding Users to the New Builder

We needed to reintroduce the new builder, highlighting its changes and features while minimizing the learning curve. Given our time constraints, we opted for a simple onboarding tutorial. This wasn't ideal—research shows users often skip tutorials, and we faced limitations in available layouts each of the onboarding steps. However, it was the most practical solution given our limited time and resources.

The outcomes

This roadmap prioritized user adoption of the new email builder over releasing new features. We redirected teams to focus on improving the new builder and increasing user satisfaction, based on evidence of its better user experience—despite its initial lower adoption rate.

The roadmap's clarity enabled us to efficiently address gaps between the two email builders and allocate engineering resources effectively.

Takeaways

This project enhanced my skills as a lead designer through cross-team collaboration and breaking down silos. I learned the importance of gaining stakeholder support and teamwork in tackling complex issues.

Before this, we had spent months redesigning and adding features to the new builder without seeing improvements in user satisfaction. This experience taught me a crucial lesson: understanding what to design and why is fundamental to effective problem-solving.

I realized that knowing which problem to solve can be as important as being skilled at solving problems.