How Animoto uses data to create a culture of customer-focused decision making
At Animoto, we strongly believe in a data-driven culture. Since our main goal as a business is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to create professional videos, we try to focus on customer-centric data to inform much of our decision making. The path for growing our business goes through improving the customer experience, engaging users, and making the process of creating videos as easy as possible. To do this, we have to look at data from a myriad of different angles. In this post, we will outline some of the strategies we use.
Keeping everyone in the company informed as to how our customers are using the product
Transparency is a big part of how we operate at Animoto. From the data side of things, this means keeping everyone up-to-date on how we are trending in important metrics and KPIs like sales, lifetime value (LTV), churn, new subscriptions, and monthly active users (MAU). But most importantly, we keep everyone in the loop as to how our customers are actually interacting with the product.
How are users interacting with certain features within the product? And how do these features result in the number of videos they create? We have dashboards and reports showing this type of data — and everyone at Animoto has access to them. We look at every possible metric that we feel might benefit our users — from how much time it takes to finalize their very first video to how many assets they add and what template they use. We strongly feel that every metric, every customer generated event, and every interaction the user has with the product is important to understand. Knowing our customer’s product usage behavior helps our product team to come up with ideas for future improvements to the product.
‘Data-Gatekeeper’ to ‘Data-Enabler’
Curiosity among Animoto team members and accessibility of data was the main reason why Animoto was one of the early adopters of Looker, a reporting and business intelligence (BI) tool. To support our growing, customer-focused team, the Analytics team morphed from a ‘data-gatekeeper’ to a ‘data-enabler.’ Inspiring curiosity allows our marketing team, designers, developers, and product owners to not only start asking questions, but also have fun diving into the data.
One of the initial challenges for the analytics team when enabling access to the data was overcoming the fear that the data would be misused or misinterpreted. And that business owners would draw “wrong conclusions”’ from the data that would lead to questionable decisions. To overcome this fear, the analytics team heavily invested in training and coaching business owners by creating a special “data onboarding program” for new employees. While there is always the inherent risk that data can be misinterpreted, the benefit of data democratization outweighs the risk.
Analyzing the Customer Journey
Many companies rely on click-stream data to see how their users are interacting with the various features of their product or website. And Animoto is no different. We utilize our event tracking data to help us understand the journey that our users take from hitting our website for the first time, to creating their very first video, and beyond. By looking at all these data points, we can identify trends that show which features or behaviors are highly correlated to a user being successful — which in our case means creating stunning marketing videos. Once we identify these trends and behavioral patterns, we can better tailor the experience to benefit our users. In some cases, understanding the customer journey can help us identify big opportunities for improvement, but most of the time we’re using it to find small incremental enhancements to our product or user flow.
A culture of testing
While jumping into the deep end can be thrilling…it’s not the best strategy in a business context. We have a lot of ideas swirling around in our heads about how to make the customer experience better (some better than others). And the most effective way to determine whether these ideas are winners or not is to test them out…and to look at the hard data that results from them.
In 2016, we introduced a new product for creating marketing videos. Before we launched, we tested every detail of it to see how customers reacted. And we used those results to inform the direction that we took with the product. We make it a priority to test nearly every change we implement, however small — from the color of button to the layout of a landing page. Doing so allows us to make changes that benefit both the customer and the business — a win-win!
Quality of data over quantity of data
Not all data is created equal. Many companies collect data simply for the sake of collecting data. We used to be the same way. But this doesn’t necessarily lead to better insights or better decision making. We were gathering millions of rows of data each day and only using a fraction of it to inform decisions. The key to reducing this “data bloat” is to decide which metrics are the most beneficial to the overall business, and ultimately, the customer. Is knowing something like how many pages a user viewed before signing up informative? If so, track it. But if something is not so important, like how many seconds a user was on a particular page for example, then don’t waste any time or resources looking at it. Narrowing down the amount of data you look at makes decision making that much easier.
Listen to our customers
Even though Animoto as a company is heavily reliant upon data and metrics, the last piece of the puzzle is a tried and true method — actually listening to our customers! We have fantastic customers who are incredibly passionate about our product and creating videos, and they have insightful feedback and ideas about our product because they are the ones constantly using it. If there is a feature improvement that they think is a good idea, we give it heavy consideration (and then we test it). It is important to not lose sight of the ultimate goal of your company — to serve your customers. If we solely focused on quantitative data points to make our decisions, we would be doing a disservice to our customers and missing out on qualitative data that we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.
As Animoto moves forward and grows as a company, we are always on the lookout for more ways to improve the experience for our customers and strengthen our business. Data plays an integral role in both of these objectives and is the foundation of much of our decision making. By empowering everyone in the company to have direct access to this data, we can be absolutely sure that we are moving in the right direction as a collective group.
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