Increasing Conversion Rates at Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile

What if you could tap into the exact moment a customer is about to make a decision and change the course of their journey with the flick of a switch? At Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile, my team did just that—turning data into actionable insights that transformed our business.

Over a short period of time, Ultra and Mint have become known for excellent wireless coverage at an affordable price. Being a non-major player in the crowded wireless market presents unique challenges. Key among these: Convincing potential customers that affordable plans really can deliver exceptional service.

As Senior Manager of Digital and Product Analytics at Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile, I focus on our ecommerce business, and I recently pivoted to our app and mobile analytics. We want to provide a great customer experience and ensure the right message hits the consumer at the right time. My efforts have focused on creating frameworks and processes that fundamentally improved decision-making and operations, significantly reducing time spent on manual data manipulation while enabling my team to dig deeper into insights that drive business growth. This approach has yielded transformative results—and we wouldn’t have seen those results without Amplitude.

Better reception on our user data

There are so many ways to interpret data. With the sister businesses growing, my analytics team knew we needed to go beyond basic customer acquisition insights to make growth more predictable and sustainable. We had to understand our customers on a deeper level and identify those attributes that turn a six-month customer to a six-year customer to a lifetime one. We needed a tool to offer real-time insights, enable smarter decision-making, and lead to tangible results.

Amplitude has been instrumental in addressing these challenges. The platform was already in place when I came on board, and it's clear why my boss chose it. To start, while Amplitude is a great solution out of the box, it’s also easily customizable, enabling my team to make any instrumentation changes the tracking team wanted. But the big reason behind my boss’ decision was that Amplitude would empower us in areas where other solutions fell short.

For example, when I first started at Mint, event-based tracking was nowhere near as big as it is now, but Amplitude was already ahead of the curve with it. When Google Analytics 4 (GA4) came out, I thought, “Wow, this is familiar,” because Google had tried to mirror Amplitude. Even then, GA4’s event-based tracking was a couple of years behind Amplitude’s—and in my opinion, it still functions primarily as a lackluster digital media tool. It can’t handle customer behavior on a site or in a product. Amplitude’s ability to segment audiences based on specific behaviors—and understand the customer journey at an unprecedented level—makes it the superior tool to GA4 in every way.

In addition to the feature advantages, Amplitude is a catalyst for collaboration because it’s easy for users of various skill levels to learn, use, and share their insights. As a data scientist, I couldn’t do my job without Amplitude, and I love it for reasons that only a data engineer could. On the other end of the spectrum, you can be a total data novice and still use Amplitude to extract valuable insights—and use those insights as a starting point to build your data analysis skills and confidence.

Using Amplitude to signal-boost sales

A highlight of my Amplitude journey was leading the creation of a groundbreaking personalization framework that revolutionized the customer journey on our website. This multifaceted project required cross-functional collaboration with email, content, and analytics teams to design and track every aspect of our customer experience. We collected more than 200 new data points to enrich our understanding of user behavior, and over the course of 40 iterations, we developed a streamlined path to purchase that not only answered customers’ most common questions but also recommended service plans tailored to their needs.

The result was a seamless experience powered by integrated data flows, which also allowed us to respond to new insights quickly and even test new product ideas on the fly. We saw a significant increase in conversions from the homepage—the most significant I’ve ever had. Beyond the immediate uplift, the accompanying email series achieved a conversion rate of more than 2x that of our next-best program, proving the long-term value of this initiative.

We’ve also come to rely on other Amplitude features to fuel our success. Behavioral tracking and A/B testing in one platform have been pivotal for increasing conversions. When we introduced a new site layout, it had a beautiful design, but users weren’t interacting with it as we had intended. Amplitude’s behavioral tracking proved that users weren’t following the intended flow: They were attempting to perform steps out of sequence, leaving them confused. A/B testing gave us the data for constructive feedback and recommendations to the design team, and with further rapid iteration with Amplitude, we landed on the most effective design.

Clearer connections to our inner data nerds

My commitment to fostering a data-centric culture has extended beyond project delivery. I’ve worked to upskill colleagues, promote data literacy, and encourage cross-functional collaboration, doubling the number of regular Amplitude users on our team. By implementing repeatable processes and leveraging Amplitude’s real-time analytics capabilities, we’ve cut analysis turnaround time from six weeks to under one week, unlocking the agility needed to support our thriving CRO testing program. Amplitude has been instrumental in enabling this transformation, with its intuitive UI and powerful features allowing us to create dashboards in minutes and monitor user behavior in real time.

Across the organization, we’re seeing an understanding of the data at a much deeper, richer level. My team started getting more intelligent questions and thoughtful insights from every department. Instead of asking, “How is my project doing?” they’re asking, “Why are we seeing these results?” They don’t need to know SQL to build a chart, and they can easily share it with me for my edits, which update in real time. This new level of data literacy has enabled the company to become more agile and effective in using data to drive action.

Amplitude has always been a great tool for us, but it’s the relationship I have with my Amplitude account team that has put this partnership over the top. I’ve worked with a lot of partners throughout my career, but I love working with the Amplitude team the most because they're always working to give us an edge. I told our account rep, Felipe Luna, that I wanted to know the best ways to use new solutions and products. Since then, Felipe has updated me on every new insight, product release, and demo that could support our goals. I know he thinks about our business and anticipates what we might need.

I’m a data nerd—always have been, always will be. I love all Amplitude does beyond the platform itself to let me nerd out: their new education series, Amplify conference, and the Amplitude Community. I’ve never worked with an organization with such great support as Amplitude’s.

I can’t imagine growing without it

Through a rigorous, data-backed approach, I’ve ensured that every decision delivers measurable value to Ultra and Mint. From driving groundbreaking personalization projects to streamlining operations and mentoring colleagues, my work with Amplitude has laid the foundation for continuous improvement and innovation. These efforts reflect a deep commitment to embedding data as a core and sustainable element of our organization’s DNA, positioning us for ongoing success in a rapidly changing landscape.

With Amplitude, we can now act on data quickly and efficiently, reducing errors and improving performance in real time. I can’t imagine not using Amplitude now. Without it, we couldn’t have scaled our efforts or maintained the level of insight required to drive continued growth.