A Collaboration by the FirstMark Product & CMO Guilds
1 — Make the most important step, the first step
Company: B2B SaaS platform enabling partner networks
Friction: Our first step used to be to ask prospects to connect their CRM. Once you do that, the CRM team is involved. Since you’re sharing data, all of a sudden Legal & Compliance are involved. And to top it all off, you’re suddenly in single-player mode and it’s a lost cause.
Fix: Now, we ask prospects to connect to one partner *first* -- the value being twofold: (1) prospects already have partners, and you’ve already navigated all of the traps on sharing data between them so it’s easy peasy; and (2) if our main way of driving growth is to get people to invite their partners onto the platform… you get right to the desired outcome.
2 — Simple branding can be the best branding
Company: Email service provider
Friction: Signing up for a new ESP requires a lot of teams, and a lot of parties involved. Getting new customers on was slow.
Fix: Created an internal project called “signup to send in 30 minutes”, which was a mission statement unto itself - and it galvanized an entire cross-functional team to get to work.
3 — Don’t sleep on cart abandonment campaigns
Company: Health insurance
Friction: Ours are big, complicated purchases. Consumers would come, start shopping, and then essentially abandon the cart.
Fix: We set Braze hooks to do cart abandonment emails for abandoned consumers. Even for these highly considered purchases, we saw a 50% conversion boost from people who had registered and had something in their cart that never actually finished.
4 — Swap ‘Sign in with…’ to ‘Continue with…’
Company: Freelance marketplace
Friction: We use sign in with Google for auth…
Fix: We changed “Sign in with Google” to “Continue with Google” - you’d be shocked how much a conversion increase that one word change drives.
5 — Capture domain info to match personal with professional
Company: Freelance marketplace
Friction: There’s a lot of “coworker curiosity” with our product and that helps drive bottoms-up expansion. But our “Continue with Google” approach (see Tip #4) was giving us lots of personal Gmail addresses vs. preferred professional email addresses.
Fix: We implemented an “SSO lite” functionality a bit later in the funnel so that even if you auth’d with a personal email, we collected domain information later in the registration process to allow us to tie you to a professional account.
When you marry Tip #4 and Tip #5 and the combined conversion impact is 💪.
6 — Put your best foot forward, even if data says otherwise
Company: Freelance marketplace
Friction: We were being too honest in our data science models so our logged-out discovery experience for first-time visitors was suppressing unavailable, but great match, freelancers.
Fix: We adjusted our model to show freelancers who aren’t necessarily available on our logged out experience so that users could get a bit more engaged & excited -- and then when they actually log in and go to discover, it wasn’t an issue that those exact freelancers weren’t available. Resulted in more people converting from top- to middle-of-funnel, and had no negative impact from mid- to bottom-of-funnel.
7 — Test the real estate *around* your Login button with CTAs
Company: Investment advisory platform
Friction: We wanted to deepen the engagement among our current consumers.
Fix: We learned that the real estate *around* the Login button was absolutely invaluable so we started to test the CTA next to that button. We tested, for example, “Talk to an advisor” as one CTA. Not only did advisor conversations pick up, but a bunch of positive downstream effects occurred as well: more 401(k) rollovers, increased referrals, and greater usage of the advisory service. Our hypothesis is that the presence of the words “talk to” and “advisor” boosts consumer confidence in our ability to serve them beyond being a robo advisor.
8 — Put more products above the fold
Company: DTC healthcare
Friction: We have multiple funnels, for both simple commerce and more considered purchases. But one simple change helped us boost conversation and basket size..
Fix: Get as large a product assortment above the fold as you can. This increases conversion as well as basket size. Products that were buried below the fold weren’t converting nearly as well.
10 — Use Clearbit Forms to increase form fill rate
Company: B2B SaaS Marketing tool
Friction: We know our on-site forms aren’t great, so we set out to improve them. We used to have a four-field demo request form.
Fix: We deployed Clearbit Forms. The customer is presented with one-field form (email) and if their email is sufficient to enrich the other three fields via Clearbit, then that’s all they fill out. If not, Clearbit Forms unfurls the three additional fields for them to manually complete. This drove a 47% lift in website form fill conversion.
11 — Try basic motion in your LinkedIn ads
Company: B2B SaaS Marketing tool
Friction: We were doing a lot of expensive, static image ads on LinkedIn. 2.6% CTR and 3.5% engagement. Wanted a win.
Fix: Simple—just add motion! We experimented with adding slight motion/animation to our assets and it drove a big jump in performance. CTR went up 60% and engagement up 100%.
12 — Boost mobile conversion by incentivizing app usage
Company: Digital media platform
Friction: We get the majority of subs coming through our paywall - about 50%, depending on the marketing mix. We’re always trying to boost conversions. But mobile (50% of the traffic) had much lower conversion.
Fix: For mobile web paywall views, we put messaging in around continuing the article in the app to continue for reading for free. Even though there were more steps (app landing page, download, open, etc.) we saw substantially more conversions from mobile traffic. Depending on the channel, the LTV was 30-50% higher. Another simple win was, for example, if someone had Apple Pay enabled on their browser -- just show that lower-friction payment tool instead of other interstitials.
Other tips for increasing mobile conversion rate?
● Tip 1 : Try to drive as many people to download the app as possible.
● Tip 2 : Another disproportionate win was having a sticky navigation bar to help users
move more quickly around the site.
How do you get customers to the “aha” moment faster?
#1: We have a high-consideration product, but we realized that if we could get them into a conversation , we could convert them at roughly 70% rate. So we focused our top-of-funnel efforts on hooking them with a quick value add: “Get the most accurate assessment of the value of your assets, anywhere?” People are very willing to answer lengthy questionnaires, because this is exactly what they care about… enabling us to start a sales conversation with them.
#2: In our freelance marketplace, we know that once you finish crafting your first job post, we can convert you -- you’ll all of a sudden see tons of freelancers that can meet your needs. So similar to the previous example, we try to just start a conversation around, “Help me estimate how much cost it will take you to complete this task” - which is what people are curious about and converts at a high rate. Once you’ve done that, you can start showing matched freelancers and you’re halfway done with the job post anyway.
What are folks using for funnel tracking, experimentation?
● Snowplow (similar to Fullstory, but also has base analytics)
● Fullstory (for watching + event dumps into Redshift)
● Heap or Segment for event tracking
● Hotjar for watching user journey
● Mixpanel to understand funnel performance, very end user friendly.
● Google Optimize for A/B testing (had historically used Optimizely)
