Designing a new onboarding email to improve retention on the platform

Overview

Signing up for a Wattpad account is a strong signal that a user is interested in its content, features, and communities. Their first few days with Wattpad are a critical moment to turn that initial interest into a lasting habit, but we currently have no structured follow-up to welcome them to Wattpad and connect them to its most engaging features.

Goal

Determing if a new welcome email helps new users discover value in Wattpad, with success measured by an increase in week 1 and week 4 user retention

Impact

• 7% increase in Week 1 retention

What I did in my role

• Defined a completely new scalable email template for the Marketing Team. • Worked closely with my PM and Marketing Team to determine and define how each section with the newsletter would foucs on engaging new users with Wattpad Content. • Paired with Art Director to align on the right assets for the newsletter. • Worked alongside the engineer to ensure handoff and implementation of the newsletter

View Prototype

Why is this important?

Enabling new users to get to discover valuable content sooner is more likely to get them be engaged on the platform and thereby get activated. Early engagement is key to long term retention.

Business and UX outcomes

The key outcome was to get users see the value of the platform by showcasing values props of the platform sooner. This would thereby affect activation and retention and bring in more engagement to the platform. Additonally, we also wanted the onboarding experience from a passive 'Welcome' to an active 'Guided Path,' resulting in higher user confidence.

Design Direction

Several layouts were explored keeping in mind: scalability of templates, assets organization, responsiveness across browsers and devices. This also helped standarize the template for the marketing team for all other newsletters.

Feature Impact

Led as an experiment, there was a 7% increase in W1 retention. (Please note these are only the highlights of the casestudy)