How Blue Apron Used Amplitude To Activate More New Customers
Blue Apron worked with Amplitude and Optimizely to study user behavior and create engaging content.
5.5%
increase in conversions on recipe pages
7%
increase in conversions with personalized email
Blue Apron’s core product is a meal experience that customers create using the original recipes and fresh, seasonal ingredients that are included in every box. All recipes are accompanied by printed and digital content, including how‑to instructions and stories of suppliers and specialty ingredients. Blue Apron also sells wine, which can be paired with its meals, as well as a curated selection of cooking tools, utensils, and pantry items, which are tested and recommended by Blue Apron’s culinary team.
Blue Apron has developed an integrated ecosystem that employs technology and expertise across many disciplines. The company’s supply-demand coordination activities––demand planning, recipe creation, recipe merchandising, fulfillment operations, and marketing––drive its end-to-end value chain.
Discovering where new customers are coming from using Amplitude
When John Cline, Senior Engineering Manager of Growth/Member Experience, used a combination of user pathing and funnel analysis in Amplitude to investigate the pages consumers were visiting before they entered the sign-up flow, he discovered that a significant proportion of people who visited the Blue Apron Recipes page continued on to begin the sign-up process.
We have a page that lists all of our upcoming recipes. We did not think many people visited this page prior to signing up, but we realized the Recipes page actually had a higher percentage of traffic than we expected,
In order to take advantage of this insight, the team conducted a full refresh of the Recipes page to include sign-up CTAs and display even more recipes for consumers to peruse and gain a better understanding of the Blue Apron meal experience.
Using Amplitude, the team learned that its Recipe page was an important component of the digital experience that could help attract new consumers to its product. Making the upcoming recipes more prominent on the page has helped improve conversion by 5.5%.
Original page design
New page design
We’ve found that Amplitude is very user-friendly. Even someone who is not particularly technical can use Amplitude to dive into, study, and interpret complex product data. Amplitude helps the Blue Apron Growth team own and drive results for customers.
Using Optimizely to test personalized emails to consumers who expressed intent to purchase
During a review of the abandoned cart experience, the team saw an opportunity to improve how Blue Apron contacted consumers who expressed intent to purchase a meal (i.e. left the product in their online shopping cart), with a more personalized approach.
As part of updating the design, the team hypothesized that customers who received a personal email, sent on behalf of a member of the Customer Experience team, would be more likely to try the product.
The team conducted an experiment to study whether sending these customers a personalized email—one that introduced the Customer Experience team, offered several options to speak directly to an expert on the team, and highlighted a favorite recipe—would help improve conversion. After testing the personalized email using Optimizely Full Stack, the team saw a 7% increase in conversion.
Original email design
New personalized email design
We can now get an early signal from the Optimizely Results Dashboard within a few days, which helps empower product and engineering managers to make decisions on their own.
Results
Using Amplitude, Blue Apron learned that their recipe pages were a great way to acquire new users. Making these more prominent has helped improve conversion by 5.5%.
Using Optimizely, Blue Apron was able to test a personalized email to consumers who expressed intent to purchase Blue Apron that improved conversion by 7%.
