Growth feature set for a low-converting user segment
Copyfolio is a website builder designed for writers and marketers, but when it first launched, the focus was primarily on writers. Over time, we began exploring new audiences with similar needs, including social media marketers and UGC creators. Since Copyfolio is a simple, easy-to-use website builder with a few writer-specific features, we believed it could serve these groups just as well. New users started signing up, but conversions didn’t follow, so we wanted to understand why, and solve the problem.
Reading time: 5 mins
Team
Product lead & 1 designer
My role
I’ve been working as the sole designer on Copyfolio’s small team since February 2023 – which made it tough to choose just one or two projects to write a case study about. During this time, I’ve redesigned the blog feature from the ground up, built landing pages in Webflow, made countless usability improvements, shaped the product to support a completely new strategy, and recently started revamping our monetization strategy, and so on.
I chose this feature set because it shows the kind of impact you can have on conversions when you listen to users and design with their needs in mind.
Project intro
When the first marketers started signing up, I dug into our numbers and noticed something interesting: social media marketers made up 18% of our overall user base, but only 13% of our Premium users. This 5% gap stood out, especially since, for other user groups, the difference was only a few percentage points. I suggested that we should run a quick research round to find out why this might be.
Challenge
The biggest challenge with this project was time: targeting marketers wasn't part of our main strategy at the time but my roadmap was cleared for a few weeks so I got the green light. After conducting interviews with Copyfolio users from this target group, around 20 different feature ideas were born. I had to prioritize them carefully and find a way to fit them into Copyfolio, since the product was still primarily a website builder for writers, so I couldn’t make any drastic changes.
Outcome
Two larger and several smaller features were developed – and the impact started to show almost immediately. We began seeing more and more social media portfolios, and the conversion gap started to close. Today, there’s only a 2.7% difference between free and Premium users among social media marketers. Also, the new features are being used and appreciated by the entire Copyfolio user base, not just the original target group.
Video upload
After the research, one of the non-negotiables was adding a video upload feature to Copyfolio. Until then, users could showcase their work through case study pages, PDFs, links, and blog posts – but the most important insight from this target group was that they didn’t just have written examples. They had plenty of visuals, and were much more focused on making their portfolios visually interesting. They were also more tech-savvy than our core audience and more willing to invest time into building their sites.
The "Video gallery" premium section in use, and its settings.
The video library prevents users from uploading the same video multiple times, ultimately saving storage space for us.
Instagram feed section
Another solution we introduced was an Instagram feed section, built using Meta’s API. It started out as a hackathon project, so finalizing the design felt like a low-hanging fruit. Once users connect their Instagram account, their posts are automatically displayed and kept up to date as they publish new content. It quickly became a user-favorite, not just among marketers, but also among users who wanted to showcase their personal feeds.
Visitors can preview the Instagram posts directly on the website.
New sections
Copyfolio already had a wide variety of section presets designed to make website building fast and easy. As a quick solution, I reused these existing components, with updated settings, visuals, and copy, to create sections that served an entirely new purpose. This showed users how to make the most of these sections – like using the "Image cards" layout to showcase social media copy, as seen above. These updates required very little development time while delivering direct value to marketers, as the tailored sections helped make Copyfolio feel like it was made for them.
A simple "Text + video" and a "Columns" sections used to showcase metrics.
Learnings
This short project reinforced how important it is to regularly talk to users from all target groups, and showed that even quick improvements can have a huge impact on conversions. Users don’t just care about a list of features, they care about how much the product resonates with them. Because of that, small additions like these can make or break the experience.