Creating a more seamless customer journey with the Instagram Basic Display API

Their Story

Transforming memories into photo books

When Vanessa Quigley realized she had not printed a single photograph of her young son despite often posting family photos to Instagram, she worked with her husband and a small development team to create and launch Chatbooks, an app that turns digital photos into photo books.

Their Goal

Boosting conversion rates

Many of Chatbooks’ customers engaged with the Instagram platform and were high lifetime value customers. A friction point for these customers was that the Chatbooks photobook collection creation process required them to leave Instagram. To encourage customers to remain on Instagram longer and increase conversion rates, Chatbooks wanted to allow people to connect their Instagram accounts before proceeding to download the application.

Their Solution

Enhanced access

Chatbooks implemented Instagram’s Basic Display API, which allowed users to connect their Instagram account to their Chatbooks account within the Instagram application during the early stages of the customer journey. After linking the accounts, people could see the photos that would be included in their photo books within the Instagram browser itself, before moving to the Chatbooks application to finish the order process. Additionally, the Instagram shopping functionality allowed Chatbooks to tag its Series product in each relevant post or story, allowing people to begin creating their own photo book just by clicking on a product.

In addition, Instagram Basic Display API helped Chatbooks solve the challenge of creating a cohesive experience between Instagram Ads, Shopping pages, and the landing pages users encountered once they decided to view Chatbooks’ products. With the data and insights from Facebook Ads Manager, Chatbooks was able to compare the performance of ads that redirect users to download its application, to ads that direct users to a landing page, and found that the latter was higher-performing, and commanded a higher conversion rate.

Their Success

Increased customer engagement

The ease that the Instagram Basic Display API brought to Chatbooks customers by providing the ability to create photo albums without having to leave the Instagram application resulted in an overall lift in all photo books series purchases for the company. Chatbooks also saw the following results:

• 2x increase in photo books series purchases (compared to traditional channels such as app installations)
• 6x increase in Chatbooks’ Instagram Series product purchases
• 41% increase in customer conversion rate

“Previously our customers had to leave Instagram to download the Chatbooks application, which created a clunky customer journey. With the implementation of Instagram Basic Display API, our customers are now able to easily connect their Instagram account to the Chatbooks landing page, and create their photo books and albums seamlessly. By making it easier for customers to choose photos and emotionally invest in our product, we have seen an increase in both engagement and conversion rates.”

-James Goodman, Product manager, Chatbooks