Growth Initiatives

Business Goal

Bloomz aims to create a social network for parents to keep informed and engaged with their children's education. One of the business goals was to increase the number of active Preschool and Elementary school parents from 165,000 to 500,000 for the upcoming school year without increasing the marketing budget.

What to improve?

Analyzing Teacher's Journey

With the help of our data engineer and marketing team, I collected and mapped out all the key metrics along the teacher's journey to see where we can make the most impact. We identified the need to improve our cost per acquisition and the post-registration conversion rate where teachers created an account, but 56% of them don't proceed to invite parents. For the ones that do, it takes them an average of 17 days to send out invites to parents. We want to increase the conversion rate and decrease the number of days it takes to invite.

Customer journey map of how teachers discover, learn, and use Bloomz along with business goals. Each touchpoint also have metics next to it.

Key Insights Gathered

After conducting several rounds of user interviews, analyzing the data, and observing user training sessions, we identified the following issues preventing teachers from inviting parents to use the product.

"What will parents see?" Found that many classes only have 1 parent. Teachers were inviting themselves as parents to understand what the parent's experience is like.
"What should I share?" Teachers know they should get parents involved but don't now how.
"How is this better than other products?" Teachers are already using a bunch of other apps. How is this better than those other ones?
"Is anybody else using this?" We see many teachers posting to Facebook and Twitter asking if anybody else tried out Bloomz since the product is so now.
"What do I do next? When we helped set up a school, the common question is "Okay, so what do I do next"?

Design Ideation

I facilitated a design workshop with members of the Product, Marketing, and Engineering teams. I presented the key insights and we brainstormed ideas for improving the conversion rate and time it takes to invite parents. To help the team visualize each idea, I quick created some wireframes. Next, I helped the team map out and voted on which ideas they believed would have the greatest impact and what we should explore further. I took the top 5 ideas and iterated on the designs.

14 wireframes showing all the different ideas from the design workshop. An impact to effort mapping of all the ideas. Paper prototypes for one of the ideas.

Design Solutions

The biggest barrier preventing teachers from inviting parents in a timely manner is the time it takes to figure out how things work and feeling apprehensive of being the first in their school to introduce something new. We believe the following features will address these issues.

Step-by-step checkoff list of what to do next.
Social proof of teachers loving Bloomz and saving time.
Demo class populated with sample content.
Video walkthrough of key features.
Ability to try key features and easily see what parents will see.

Checkoff List & Social Proof

Just like when we were physically at schools helping teachers setup their classes, we created a checkoff list in the app to guide teachers through their onboarding. We also added what other teachers are saying about the app and how much time they saved since using it.

3 screenshots. A checkoff list of what to do next, a post showing teachers saving time using Bloomz, and a post showing teacher quotes about their positive experience using the app.

Quick Tour

The quick tour show teachers how to use each of the key features and lets them try it out without having to creating a dummy parent account. After trying out a feature, they can immediately see the email message parents will receive and what the parent's experience will be like.

Demo Class

We created a demo class populated with example content that teachers of a similar grade level typically shares. We also populated it with dummy parents so they can practice sending messages and photos to individual parents.

Reduce CPA of Email Blasts

The cost per acquisition of email blasts were way too expensive at an average of $42.93 CPA. We found that not many recipients were opening our emails and definitely not clicking through. We experimented with different subject lines and messages but not much success. We conclude that:

Our emails were perceived as junk mail since it comes from an unknown sender.
Many have not heard of Bloomz.

The CEO hypothesized that if the email came from someone they knew, they would more likely read the email and try out the product. I designed a card prompting teachers to invite other teachers we found from their school to try out Bloomz. All they need to do is to click "Invite Selected" and then send. This feature had a substantially positive impact on our growth. It reduced the cost per acquisition of the email list by 98.9% from $42.93 down to $0.45.

Screenshot of the prompting asking the user to invite other teachers from their school.

Outcome

The business goal is to increase the number of active Preschool and Elementary school parents from 165,000 to 500,000 for the upcoming school year without increasing the marketing budget. To achieve this, we aimed to improve the cost per acquisition, the post-registration conversion rate, and reduce the amount of time it takes to invite parents. Here are the results of our effort.

+18%

Improved conversions

Increased post-registration conversions from 44.4% to 62.6%

-5 days

Inviting parents quicker

Went from 16.8 days to 11.1 days to invite parents on average

-99%

Reduced Cost Per Acquisition

Reduced CPA of purchased email list from $42.93 to $0.45

500K850K

Surpassed growth target by 2X

Targeted to grow from 165K to 500K active parents (an increase of 335K parents). We were able to increase it by 685K parents which is 2X the original goal.