Invoice2go is an all-in-one app for small businesses to get paid fast by customers and manage cash flow. And, even in their early days, they prioritized research. As a company of under 100 people, they already had several user researchers on staff. Product, marketing, and research partnered and continue to collaborate closely together to bring the right products to market, prioritizing both tactical and strategic research to understand how they can constantly improve and iterate on their products.
To address the evolving needs of their customers, Invoice2go was in the process of pivoting from solely an invoicing platform to offering a more full-service solution, including banking through Invoice2go Money. And Invoice2Go leveraged Plaid to do that, which communicates between the app and the bank, encrypting user information to maintain security.
Invoice2go Money was designed to add value to the Invoice2go customers’ experience, yet the Invoice2Go team saw customers dropping off after signing up for Invoice2go Money. The team at Invoice2go also planned to bring credit card payments directly into Invoice2go Money’s full service offering, where previously merchants had to run payment cards through a third party processor. But, without more widespread adoption of Invoice2go Money, the card payment feature also wouldn’t succeed.
3 Steps Invoice2go Took to Solve for User Drop‑off
#1 Determined there was an issue
Invoice2go introduced the payment and banking capabilities with a new set of flows. Customers needed to apply for this new card offering in order to accept payments. But the team, including Pranav Piyush, VP, Product & Customer Marketing, saw that there was significant drop-off between customers applying for the new card payment offering, getting approved, then actually using it.
But why? If customers were interested enough to apply, they got approved, why weren’t they taking the last step? The team needed to dig in and determine the obstacle.
#2 Launched an in‑product survey to understand where the obstacle was
Piysuh’s team had a hypothesis about what was causing drop-off based on analytics, as well as the design and product teams’ intuition. Their hunch was that using Plaid to link to a bank account was presenting an issue for users, but they needed data to validate that hypothesis.
To do that, they launched a Sprig in-product survey and targeted users who applied for the new card payment system, were approved, but didn’t actually start using the app. Leveraging Sprig’s integration with Segment, Invoice2Go was able to easily sync their events and attributes into Sprig, and target specific users dropping off post sign-up. They wanted to dig into whether users thought this process was easy or difficult and why.
#3 Used the survey results to validate hypothesis
The survey asked a simple question to start with — how easy or difficult is the process? But then they went deeper. They asked users why they hadn’t linked and let them share open-text answers on what could be improved to lead them towards feature adoption.
There was a specific step in the process where a user linked a third-party bank account using Plaid. The team’s original hypothesis was that customers were unfamiliar with Plaid and were not eager to provide their banking details. This turned out to be correct, with 30% (the highest percentage) of users citing “I didn’t know what Plaid was so I didn’t provide my bank account details.”
There were also issues from a usability and awareness perspective. Linking a bank account to start accepting card payments was not a natural process for many of Invoice2Go’s users.
Now, with the facts in hand, they knew that solving for the users who did not know what Plaid was and the others who didn’t understand the functionality had to be top priority in the product roadmap.
The Results: Feature Update Decreased Drop‑off and Increased Completion by 25%
Thanks to the in-product survey results, Invoice2go introduced a new flow that focused on both awareness and usability.
To increase awareness of Plaid, the team introduced a new flow that talked about what Plaid is, and provided more clarity around how it works.
And to improve overall usability, the team developed a micro-deposit feature that allowed customers to bypass entering in their login credentials for their bank account via Plaid and instead just share their account number and routing number. A micro-deposit was then used to verify that it was the correct account. Providing two ways to link their account provided options for users depending on their comfort level and knowledge.
These changes led to decreased drop-off in the banking onboarding flow and a 25% increase in completion rate of users applying, being accepted, and then using the card payment offering. Through in-product research, Invoice2go was able to get data quickly on the issues that were most critical to fix first, while also learning about other areas to work on based on the qualitative, open-text findings.
But That’s Not All…
Invoice2go has continued to use Sprig throughout their business, and the findings from the user research platform have had a measurable impact on the business. Among other outcomes, the team used Sprig to:
- Understand user concerns over migration: Invoice2go knew a migration from their current card payment platform to Invoice2go money could be anxiety-inducing (as change often is!) and they measured the reaction by running an in-product survey. They targeted users who hadn’t yet turned on Invoice2Go card payments and were continuing to use the current card payment platform instead. They asked what users would do if their current access was turned off tomorrow to get a quantified sense of the impact this could have on churn, then launched a marketing campaign that directly addressed the concerns that came up.
- Evaluate evolving product experience: Invoice2go wanted to make sure they continued to deliver on core value of the product and that there was still product-market fit, so after 9 months, they asked users who’d been on the app at least six months and had more than two sessions, “how disappointed would you be if you could no longer use this product?,” followed by an open-text question. The answers to these validated and informed the product roadmap, and prioritized new templates, the ability to view a user’s entire cash flow, and a packing slip option.
How You Can Replicate Invoice2go’s Success
From their earliest days, Invoice2go emphasized continuously learning and evolving in order to grow. Here’s how you can do the same.
- Target the right users with in-product surveys triggered at critical points in their journey: You’ll get the right answers if you ask the right users. Invoice2go specifically targeted users who had begun the process of implementing card payments but hadn’t completed it. By asking only those users, they were able to understand the exact concerns that were standing in the way.
- Use a quantitative approach to qualitative research: By asking open-ended questions to validate hypotheses, as well as bring new issues and improvements to light, Invoice2go was able to find qualitative insights at quantitative scale.
- Use research to prioritize the roadmap and make iterative improvements to existing products: You may have a hunch — even a strong hunch — but that’s not enough to invest time, energy, and resources into a project. Validating that hypothesis with data lets you prioritize the roadmap with conviction.