Using Data to Delight Customers: How Pictory Increased Conversions by 16% and Reduced Churn by 15%

Insight/Action/Outcome: One of the key goals for Pictory’s leadership teams was to identify the characteristics of their core audience and build something that would keep them coming back. Using Amplitude to segment users by location, behaviors, industry, job title, and more, they tracked key product and business indicators to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP) and create a dedicated ICP dashboard. These insights empowered Pictory to concentrate on customer segments with promising conversion rates and Lifetime Value (LTV), and they reduced cost of goods sold (COGS) by 30% in three months.

Ambiguity is inevitable when you’re a startup, especially in the early days. You’re on a tight budget, so you use a combination of rudimentary analytics tools, gut feeling, and qualitative data to get by. With any luck, that works well enough. But you don’t want to rely on guesses forever. Eventually, you must invest in a platform that captures user data to guide your company’s growth. It’s the best way forward, especially when your growth strategy is product-led.

I’m the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and co-founder of Pictory. We make an AI-enhanced video creation platform for content marketers. Our vision was clear from the outset: we wanted to simplify the complex domain of video creation using AI and frictionless UX. Our intuitive web-based platform lets content creators go from script to fully edited video, including stock imagery, royalty-free music, and AI-generated voiceovers using a simple three-step process.

As CPO, one of my main goals is to build a product our customers find valuable, and one of our core business strategies is product-led growth (PLG). We are not a sales-heavy company, so we must make a product that is easy to onboard, delighting our customers so they recommend us to their friends and colleagues. Ensuring their success is the key to our growth, which requires us to draft a product roadmap aligned with their needs.

Data is a core value

Pictory was founded in 2019 and launched the first version of our product in June 2020. We summarize our values as CREDO: Curiosity, Respect, Expeditiousness, Data, and Openness. It’s a coincidence that the acronym means “belief,” but these are the words we live by. Data is the pillar of these values. Trusting data over opinion allows us to be curious and creative, respect each other and our customers, move expeditiously, and be open and transparent. Without data, our team scattered across 14 countries could not build products that reflect our values and better serve our customers.

Customer feedback informs our product-driven decisions. We update Pictory monthly, adding new features, improving workflows, and addressing user issues. Initially, we relied on qualitative data like user interviews for that feedback. However, as we grew, we realized we needed to analyze quantitative data to understand what we saw on the platform and heard from our customers.

We evaluated many analytics tools and went with Amplitude because it captures key events and user behaviors better than anyone else. Amplitude is user-friendly and simple enough for people without a data science background or experience with reporting tools. Amplitude also integrates with our other systems to consolidate data and automate workflows, simplifying the development of features our customers will care for.

We use Amplitude to capture and analyze user behavior. We build cohorts, segment data, and generate charts, dashboards, and reports to understand the impact of product upgrades and business decisions. Our product, marketing, and customer success teams use Amplitude daily to measure engagement, determine customers’ needs, and drive campaigns.

For example, we feed data from Amplitude to our CRM to trigger automated drip campaigns. If a customer hasn’t made a video in a month, we’ll email them asking if we can do anything for them. Conversely, we’ll email a customer who has made 20 or 30 videos in a week to congratulate them for being a superuser and ask how we can better serve them.

Identifying the ideal customers

For our Q3 leadership meeting in Seattle last year, one of our key goals was segmenting our users to find our ideal customers. If we could figure out who they were, we could focus on helping them succeed. It’s a more innovative, targeted way of growing our business and earning customer loyalty. Instead of diluting our product by trying to reach the maximum number of users, we wanted to find our core audience and build something that would keep them coming back.

We don’t have the time or resources to go after everyone, but we had an aha moment with Amplitude, where we found the best users to target to drive product adoption and customer retention. I took a deep dive into user behaviors, generating reports that segmented users by geographic location, professional and personal activities, industry, job title, and more. I used Amplitude to leverage this information and track key product and business indicators to identify our ideal customer profile (ICP).

My findings led to the creation of a dedicated ICP dashboard that tracks metrics like conversion and activation rates, new customer acquisitions, and subscription cancellations. These insights empowered us to concentrate on customer segments with promising conversion rates and Lifetime Value (LTV). As a result, we reduced our cost of goods sold (COGS) by 30% in three months.

New features reduce churn rates by half

Pictory has seen tremendous growth in the last two years. We grew 300% in the first ten months of 2023 and 3,000% since the beginning of 2022. Despite our success, we wanted to reduce our churn rates.

My team leveraged qualitative and quantitative data to tackle the problem. Through user interviews and user data from Amplitude, we determined that our customers were spending hours searching our video library for the perfect images to match their script and leaving Pictory in frustration.

We eliminated this pain point by introducing our AI-powered B-Roll matching technology that automatically selects appropriate footage to accompany our customers’ words. We also upped the quality of our stock footage by licensing and integrating the world-renowned Getty Images video library. These two actions reduced our churn from 30% to 15%, allowing us to retain more users matching our ICP and growing high-quality revenue that churns less frequently.

Amplitude helps us understand how customer engagement with specific features drives conversions and retention. For example, we discovered that conversion and retention rates were 3X higher among customers who used AI voiceovers in their videos. Armed with that insight, we partnered with ElevenLabs, the world’s leading generative voice AI provider, to offer ultra-realistic voiceovers that closely mimic human narration. We released that feature in September and saw an uptick in our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in the first week. Our conversion rate also surged 16% as ICP users embraced the new tool.

A strong data culture leads to a stronger product

Amplitude has created a data-driven culture at Pictory to support our product-led growth. Whether brainstorming new features or updating existing ones, we use data to make informed product decisions. Before we gather as a team, I encourage everyone to look at the data in Amplitude so we can base our discussions and decisions on facts.

Amplitude is ingrained into our culture and our workflows. It helps us increase conversion and retention rates by delighting our customers with a powerful video creation tool they love to use and are proud to recommend to their colleagues and friends.