Sign-Up Flow Re-Design & A/B Experiment
Summary
The Growth squad has been formed in the last year to support pricing and packaging initiatives, focus solely on increasing our activation rates, and partner with our new CMO and his restructured team to move the needle on that metric. The sign-up flow is one of the most pressing areas to focus on as the drop-off rates are so significant, and we rely too heavily on sales-led/handheld funnels into trials.
Similarly to our pricing pages, our sign-up flow had no focus or love for 3+ years, and many problems needed attention. We wanted to start with a series of experiments and take a cautious, iterative approach to updating this flow since it's a sensitive touch point along the customer journey. We don't want to affect sign-ups negatively.
Team
- Growth Product Manager
- Growth Engineering Manager
- Growth Product Designer (Me)
- Frontend Engineers
My role in this project was to minimally re-design the sign-up flow to reduce drop-off rates whilst gradually bringing the experience up to date with modern standards. There are multiple iterations of this flow that the squad will roll out slowly vs all at once.
Problem to solve
54% of users who begin sign up drop off after this step:
We want to increase this number to increase activation, our primary metric.
Theory
62% of people out of the 46% that DO get past step one end up completing the signup. If we reduce drop-offs at step one, we assume we will increase the number of completed sign-ups, increasing our chances of activation/conversion.
Opportunities
- Increase successful trial sign-ups, leading to higher activation rates
- A more favourable initial experience for users who are interacting with our product for the first time
- Increased trust and transparency between Customer.io and prospects
Result / Proposal
Break the re-design into small chunks so we can experiment and move carefully, and include the following changes and updates:
- Improve the overall experience by modernising the design to feel in line with the design of the product once they're logged in
- Remove unnecessary visual clutter and distractions (testimonials etc.)
- Standardise the experience by including links to our privacy policy, etc.
- Improve the password experience
- Introduce email verification
- Update the goals step to understand the user's job to be done more clearly (WIP)
- Consider introducing a conditional Premium Sales Qualified Leads step to reduce the amount of workload on the sales team
- Break the data centre choice out into its own step to highlight the importance - many users choose the wrong one, and it's challenging to change it later
Eventually, we want to get to somewhere like this flow, which moves the goals step inside the product itself. I suspect this will significantly decrease drop-offs if we give the user the sense that sign-up is complete, they can see the product, and they are eager to get started.
The first experiment is an A/B test to understand if minor tweaks to the initial UX reduce drop-off rates, allowing us to move forward more confidently.
This Figma file covers the breakdown of changes and the first A/B test is detailed in the Designs below.