Project Overview
In June 2024, Mailchimp acquired Amped.io to transform the popup forms product into a market-leading, high-converting solution which customers can be proud of using. As the lead Product Designer on the project, I lead this high-visibility and high-pressure effort to integrate the new acquisition into the Mailchimp core experience. A team of two Staff Designers, two Senior Designers, and two Junior Designers executed the day to day work under my guidance.
The reason for the acquisition? Mailchimp's existing popup forms were in dire need of an overhaul. The uninspired forms had limited triggers, targeting, and design options resulting in low CSAT scores, negative VOC feedback, and low usage.
Lead, Product Design, Interaction Design | Mailchimp | June 2024 - February 2025 (9 months)
Customer Problem
Customer acquisition is the number 1 problem small business customers face.
Current Mailchimp Popup Form Builder
Before the Amped acquisition, Mailchimp users experienced multiple issues with the legacy Mailchimp popup forms product that prevented them from growing their audience:
Limited design options: available layouts didn't align with industry standards or allow for customization beyond colors and images.
Low opt-in rates: essential features like URL targeting and site triggers were missing, causing popups to show on every page without considering user behavior.
Insufficient performance metrics: only basic list growth data was available, with no insights on opt-in rates or device usage.
Amped.io Popup Form Builder
The new Amped.io technology also came with it’s own share of customer problems to solve:
Designed to be human assisted: Amped was not built to be self-serve, the company leveraged technical customer service managers to design and manage popups on behalf of customers
Templates were exclusively e-commerce driven: The majority of the Amped customer base sold goods online, where as Mailchimp customers span many other verticals.
Design process + Strategy
Our first step towards integration was imagining how Mailchimp forms would look, feel, and act with the new technology. The new popup forms builder, while feature-rich for advanced marketers, proved too complicated and overwhelming for many Mailchimp customers during testing.
“The [Amped] editor looks like it should operate in the way that Photoshop does... I should be able to just move it over but I can’t... you literally need somebody that already knows what they’re doing to show you how to do that.”
As we began to set our vision for the future of popup forms, we refined the questions we were asking ourselves.
From
“How does the Amped.io technology fit into the Mailchimp ecosystem?”
To
“How might we quickly get the benefits of the Amped.io technology into customers hands without forcing them to design exclusively in the advanced builder?”
I took the lead on setting a 12-month vision to answer this new question. We focused on:
First time use and onboarding, with the goal of designing an experience that enables new users to publish a form and start collecting new subscribers in Mailchimp as quickly as possible
Identifying the happy path to publishing a popup, so users can spend less time designing and more time collecting contacts
Leveraging GenAI for simple branding and content editing
Positioning popup forms as the front door to more advanced features especially automations
Phase 1 of the integration
While we fine-tuned the vision, we worked in parallel to release a Private Beta within 60 days of the Amped acquisition. Our squad had two goals:
Retain a strategic cohort of Amped accounts—customers were not required to move over to Mailchimp as part of the acquisition
Learn and test our adoption and completion LOFAS (leap of faith assumptions) with high-value Mailchimp customers
To meet tight deadlines set by senior leadership, we chose to maintain the current product experience with minimal changes. The only requirement for the product was to shift the visual identity from Amped’s to Mailchimp’s.
Learnings
Mailchimp users found creating, designing, and publishing a popup in the Private Beta overwhelming and just hard to use. However, users who had an advanced designer on their team appreciated the flexibility of the new tool.
We exposed an internal knowledge gap, resulting in training 33 product support reps + 16 strategic CSMs on the value and strategy of popup forms.
During QA we found a major bug within our customer journey API that we were able to fix before releasing to GA, a huge win before a larger release
Phase 1 Customer Case Study
Avenova is a Mailchimp customer who used our legacy popup form to capture phone numbers. Through the Private Beta they saw great success: their new popup ahcieved an email opt-in rate of 9.71% and SMS opt-in rate of 6.23% —a 251% increase compared to their legacy popup.
This success comes with caveats: Avenova is a high-paying customer, and relied on our technical account managers rather than designing the form independently.
Outcomes
Mailchimp users who opted into the Private Beta saw a significant increase in opt-ins and list growth, seeing the value of the new popups product.
Ultimately we converted 469 users, 71% of Amped customer base, bringing in over $1.1 million in annual recurring revenue.
Phase 2: Designing the MVP
Once the Private Beta launched and our vision was set, we set our sights on our general release—which just launched February 2025! This first release is truly a MVP—getting the essential elements of our vision into our customers hands as quickly as possible so that we can replace the existing and archaic technology.
With collaboration from my manager, I established the scope of our MVP popup forms experience by focusing on 3 key swim lanes:
Design the ‘creation flow’ to guide users through key decisions needed be made which were once human-assisted
Organize all the form rules, targeting, and triggers into one ‘checklist’ leveraging familiar patterns within Mailchimp
Create a centralized ‘hub’ for organizing drafts, history, live forms, and performance analytics
Throughout our design process we conducting moderated testing on the end to end experience and refined concepts based on user feedback. Prioritizing this testing helped identify pain points and improve usability before launch—and added a lot of items to our roadmap as fast follows.
MVP Outcomes
We’ve been released to 100% of customers for less than a month and are already seeing exciting results.
Our customers’ average opt-in rate is about 10%, which is 20% higher than industry standard
Our average create to publish rate is about 18%, with e-commerce customers coming in highest at 34%
We’re on track to hit our success metric of increasing popup forms adoption 5x by July 2025.
What’s next
While the data is still incoming we’re seeing some clear trends and opportunities ripe for refinement.
Based on our popup creation funnel we’re seeing two key moments of user drop-off:
The first major user drop off (25%) is seen at the "Select Template” step—the moment in the funnel where a user is able to browse and ultimately select a popup template. While frustrating, this resonates—our template gallery functionality was significantly descoped to make our deadlines.
The second major drop off (23%) comes at the “Builder: Review Settings” step. This is the point in the end to end experience where users must use the popup builder—our #1 known area of friction for customers.
Based on this data, we are reaching out to real Mailchimp users and interviewing them to understand what prevented them from publishing. In addition, we are watching fullstory sessions to analyze common blockers and patterns in user behavior. Once we complete this research we plan to release enhancements to both the gallery and popup builder.