In 2024, dormant orgs (customers defined by their lack of an active newsletter in the last 30 days) at Axios HQ was at 20%. My team was tasked in tackling this issue in the product/engineering team. This project was one of the results from the work done to tackle this metric.
To prevent future churn, I had to investigate why organizations became inactive to identify preventative features we could build. Our focus was on real send infrequent senders, who had a 27.70% churn rate compared to just 5.24% for frequent senders.
I was tasked with the product researcher to uncover why these users infrequently sent newsletters or never activated at all. We did 12 interviews with customers identified as dormant. The goal of these interviews were to answer:
The outcome of these interviews can be categorized into 3 groups. Users whose org no longer recognized value in having Axios HQ, IT issues, and other issues. Our analysis after the interviews is that IT-related challenges emerged as the most actionable opportunity. Unlike the other issues that demanded extensive product overhauls, the IT pain points presented a clear path forward with the highest return on investment, allowing us to deliver immediate impact.
Axios HQ's primary users, communications professionals, often lack the technical skills to integrate the platform and rely on IT teams for setup. With integration manually set up by our solutions engineering team, the process often resulted in lengthy email threads and low IT prioritization, delaying implementation and frustrating users.
“There’s a process that has to happen internally with our procurement team and our IT team… all of those logistical things that need to happen in the background before we even start utilizing the tool. That didn’t happen really and truly. The integration was incredibly clunky. I was essentially serving as the middle man.”
Research into our integration analytics saw that 63% of dormant orgs do not have a custom domain setup integration. This is twice as many compared to our active customers.
Building self-serve integrations to allow IT teams and customers to directly set-up their integrations within Axios HQ will decrease the likelihood of users that do not activate. Thus decreasing the chances of an org becoming dormant. This will also allow IT teams to directly access controls and resources to best understand Axios HQ.
To design this feature, I collaborated with our solutions engineering lead and used the tools they use to integrate customers to understand what was necessary for our users to self service.
