Fueling small business growth by helping customers know and grow their audience
Popup forms solve a top pain point for marketers and SMBs, allowing them to grow their customers and collect data to build deeper, more meaningful relationships.
In July of 2024, Mailchimp acquired Amped.io to address these pain points—but the solution, previously optimized for about 500 power users, needed a strategic design plan for scale. I guided the post-acquisition integration of Amped.io’s team and capabilities, designing strategies for driving new customer growth while successfully migrating 71% of customers to the Mailchimp ecosystem within three months, and setting the company up for a powerful go-to-market campaign at the start of 2025, six short months after acquisition.
Outcomes
Opt-in rates of 10% on average—20% higher than the industry standard
Customer benefit
Converted 71% of Amped.io
base in 3 months ($1.1M ARR)
Revenue
Increased feature activation: 80% of the customers that publish forms set up brand kit
Product growth
Adapting to the needs of mid-market customers
Evolving from underserved or over-served, to a flexible solution that scales to your needs, no matter how simple or complex
Mailchimp’s historic forms were dramatically oversimplified relative to our target mid-market customers, lacking even basics like customization and mobile support. Another critical gap was dynamic visitor targeting with custom filters and triggers.
Amped closed the gap on these key features with extremely powerful editing capabilities—however, ease of use was a significant barrier for use.
Our design challenge: Retain the power of Amped, with the ease of use that would enable us 10x scale of the current userbase, while integrating the creation workflow seamlessly into Mailchimp.
Designing beautiful seams
The team defined an aspirational end-to-end experience, elevating forms to the top of the experience funnel and accelerating customers with core Mailchimp capabilities like Brand Engine and App Integrations.
Driving speed with provocational prototypes: Illuminating product-wide connection points and seeing what was possible drove meaningful cross-functional debate with rich input from customers to inform where to invest first. This allowed the team could move with speed while prioritizing what mattered most to customers.
The impact: Within 3 months, the team was able to migrate Amped.io into Mailchimp and converted 71% of the Amped customer base.
Continual iteration
First iteration of the template gallery, an effective MVP to accelerate time-to-publish
To ensure customers reaped the benefit of our powerful new pop-up creation tools, the team designed a progressive setup flow to guide marketers and SMBs through the critical decisions that would impact their output.
Learning with real-time customer insights: Our MVP enhanced ease of use with a new template gallery so customers could customize a best-in-class pop-up form rather than create from scratch. By launching at the point of minimum-viable, the team streamlined the workflow and made the pop-ups offering a standout feature in our go to market campaign—and gained critical insights from early adopters on how we could improve the experience to capture a broader audience.
Impact: Customers were allowed early access to new tools—and those switching to the new forms solution saw 38% increase in click rates month over month.
Second iteration of the template gallery, prioritizing Mobile optimization and nuanced filtering options
A streamlined editing experience
Original Amped pop-up editor, elevating a full-fledged feature set that only a long tail of customers would need
Our design approach for the new pop-up editor focuses on lowering the barrier to entry while raising the ceiling for customization. By moving away from a cluttered, kitchen-sink interface, we’ve created a guided experience that scales with the user's expertise.
The result: We moved from underserving this cohort, to providing a solution that was far superior to anything else they could find on the market. Customers switching to our new forms solution saw opt-in rates of 10% on average—this is nearly 20% higher than industry standards.
The pop-up form editor revamped with our Mailchimp Design System foundations, substantially improving the hierarchy for ease of use
Connect to learn more
Drop me a message if you’re interested in learning more about this project. I’m always happy to connect.