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How Brightpod increased visitor to trial signup conversion from 5% to 9.7% in 2 months

February 20, 2014

Researchers found that the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage.

What keeps someone from not signing up for your app? I kept asking myself that question in late September 2013. One of the things that kept coming back to me was TRUST. You need to make your website visitors trust you. You need to make them aware that others trust you and that the others are using your product to power up their businesses and they are seeing value. This is a powerful connection.

Before November 2013, Brightpod’s website to signup conversion rate was a stagnant 4% — 6%. This meant that for every 1000 people coming to the site, only 40–60 of them would signup to take the trial :(

We had designed our website in December 2012. The website was functional but it didn’t have the design crispness that I had hoped for. Plus we had made considerable progress in our development so there were a lot of new things that should have been showcased on the site. It was time for a complete makeover.

We had to take the signup conversion a notch up.

Our goal for the revamp was to have a simple, clean website that make people feel awesome and build trust. Brightpod’s customer base was growing so putting up quotes and testimonials a.k.a. social proof was paramount.

I created an Evernote document and started planning the website redesign process.

Next, I had to choose which framework I was going to use. The earlier version of the Brightpod site used Foundation by Zurb. This time it probably was going to be Bootstrap.

Luckily, a week earlier my developer sent me a link to webflow — a web service where one can build websites without writing any code. You can think of Webflow as a GUI for Bootstrap. I signed up and started playing around. This tool was just perfect. The templates helped me get started and the tool made sure that every page I created worked on all modern browsers and devices. Super!

webflow

I kept the pages to a minimum. The goal of the website is to convert and not to distract.

Home Page

The main headline should generate a happy feeling. What do you feel when you goto a beach? What do you feel when your work is under control?

Benefits Page

“Features tell, benefits sell”.

Instead of a features page I decided to have a benefits page. I was hoping this way people could related to Brightpod better. Imagine if I sell you health drink and tell you ‘this drink is in-expensive and tastes real good”. Not effective. How about “this drink will help you feel energised all day”?

Buzz Page

Anyone who has spoken about Brightpod should be featured here. Social proof is what drives everything these days. When I goto an app I want to know if other people are using it.

Tip: Learn how to embed Twitter testimonials on your website or blog.

Plan Page

This page was going to be important as most people checking out plans and pricing before signing up. I came across a KISSMetics post on 9 Ways to Make Your Expensive Product Look like a Total Steal and found the post to be very helpful. I implemented a bunch of things from this post on the Accounts Page (within the app once you signup). For the pricing page I:

  • Kept the price in a small font
  • Put a quote from a customer.
  • Specified that our pricing is not per user per month.
  • Did not complicate the visitor with a complex matrix comparing different plans. Instead, I chose only the top features they would be interested in and decided to keep the plans simple to understand. Everyone who signs up will be automatically on the Agency plan for 14 days. I rather have them make a decision on which plan they would like to keep while they are upgrading or downgrading (from within the app) than right now.

Help

We moved our Help pages to a service called HappyFox. They are a help desk software but we only use their Knowledge Base service to power up our Help section. It is always better to have your help pages in a content management system so you can update it in real time.

I got the site completed by end of November 2013. I even made a small Evernote document on how to update the site on an ongoing basis since every time I exported the code from Webflow I had to minify javascript and do a few other things.

Next, it was time to test out the sites page loading speed. I checked GTmetrix, Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Tools. The images that I had uploaded on Webflow were not optimised so I ran all the images through ImageOptim and deployed the site again.

brightpod-page-speed

We took the site live in early December.

Here are the stats for conversion to trials after the launch. We were getting around 4%-6% before.

conversion-recent

As traffic remained almost the same, I can attribute this increase to the new site redesign.

What can you learn?

  • Make your visitors feel awesome.
  • Keep your site simple, clean and clutter-free.
  • Include quotes from customers and media.
  • Make sure your site loads fast.
  • Build trust.

Now, my next challenge is going to be to increase the conversion rate from 10% to 15%. How about a single text box asking for your email on the front page to get you signed up?

Sahil Parikh

Building Brightpod, playing golf 🏌🏽 and traveling the world 🌏

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