How Marketing App Fomo Doubled Its Activation Rate for New Signups

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Tim: If you have a free trial or a money-back guarantee, one of your most important to dos as a marketer is to get them using your product and getting results quickly. Otherwise, you’re likely to see either a failure to activate or a money back request. FOMO had a problem where their new signups weren’t activating their tool because they couldn’t figure out how to do it and didn’t know where to find the answers. So, founder Ryan Kulp and his team came up with the solution that doubled their activation rate and spawned a great new idea for finding new users. You’ll love this regardless of what you sell whether it’s SaaS, info or whatever. So, stick around. I’m Tim Piage, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Cool. So, I’m definitely excited to talk about this. Can you first share with us the results that you guys have been able to get with today’s tactic?

Ryan: Sure. We’re actually able to double our activation rate for new signups.

Tim: Nice. I love it. Okay. So, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and what your company is all about?

Ryan: Well, my name is Ryan, I’m the cofounder of FOMO. FOMO is a marketing platform that helps people increase their on-page conversion rates through a little snip at a JavaScript that you plant on your website and what this JavaScript has on your website is it shows notifications in real time of recent customer interactions like recent purchases or signups or whatever.

Tim: Nice. And this is primarily used in e-commerce or is it really all over?

Ryan: You know, we actually started only as an e-commerce plugin on Shopify and that was a couple of years back. But over the last few months, we’ve rebuilt the platform from scratch and we can now work on a lot of other e-commerce platforms as well as any website that has stuff like purchases, signups, blog comments, and so forth to share.

Tim: Nice. Alright, cool. So, that being said, the stuff we’re gonna be talking about today is what you did to really, you know, drive activations for FOMO, is that right?

Ryan: That’s right.

Tim: Great. Alright. So, why don’t you dive in? Tell… Tell us a little about kind of what you did?

Ryan: Yeah. So, you know, we relaunch our platform as FOMO and able to work on any website with an API etc., about a month ago and during launch day or launch week, you know, super hectic. We had bugs we were fixing. We had issues with customers not understanding how the product worked, messaging, all of the classic launch… things that you would expect when… when you throw it on a wall and this is what happens. And so, we knew that there was a lot of stuff needed to do to fix the product or improve certain things but all of that required writing code, writing tests, QA, pushing staging, merge into production, really just stuff that we take way too long given the pressure we were under in the expectations of our new users. So, we did a few really small simple things that took us about 30 to 90 seconds apiece and they doubled their activation and increased conversions.

Tim: Yeah, that’s crazy. So what were those things that you did?

Ryan: Sure. So, the first issue we had was that new users were getting a welcome email that was pretty generic. It said “Hey, I’m Ryan, I’m the founder of FOMO and good luck!” or you know…

Tim: [Laughs]

Ryan: …not exactly good luck, right, but what are you doing with the product, [indiscernible 0:03:19] to hear more, looking forward to your feedback and we’ve got a bunch of replies to that. And people basically said “I don’t know what I’m doing,” “I don’t know how to get started,” “I’m not a developer but I see this API.” And we were kind of frustrated because we specifically spend time building a Zapier Integration so that marketers who don’t code were able to connect with us without writing new code. But, while the Zapeir Integration was on our, what I thought was a very conspicuous and clear integration’s page, it actually was I guess hidden and people weren’t finding it or they were abandoning it during our onboarding because they didn’t see that there was this Zapier Integration available.

So, the obvious truth was that we needed to fix onboarding. We need to make this Zapier Integration more conspicuous etc., right? But we wanted to activate users faster without doing any of that. So, given that we already had a welcome email and it was easy to just type in a couple new words and deploy the new version, I simply added a PS to that welcome email. That said “Hey, to get started without writing any code, click here to enable Zapier and then click here to follow our guide on how to do that.” And that one PS literally doubled activation. I checked the database and went from 12.6% to 25% activated users within a couple of hours of adding that PS.

Tim: That’s crazy. I mean as literally just a PS. Now, you know, I don’t imagine that this is gonna be a problem that simply listening to the show would have, but this wasn’t just a matter of saying like “I’m gonna add a PS that maybe is helpful.” This was a matter of there was a very clear problem that your costumers were having and you found this out as a result of them replying to the emails and telling you “Hey, we, you know, we don’t know how to do this. We’re not developers.”

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So, to solve that problem or at least for one solution to the problem, you made it clear right there in the email and their first interaction with you. Here is what you can do if you’re not a developer. Is that kind of the idea behind it?

Ryan: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think also the other abstraction here is that you may have a resource or some piece of content or some guide or whatever that’s really helpful and critical to users becoming successful with your product. Because if they can’t find it, then it might as well not even exist. And so while we had built out a support portal, we had built how to wiki, we had built how-tos, we had built this integration’s marketplace. All of these things that were meant to help empower users to activate themselves; it effectively didn’t exist if they couldn’t find it. So, the PS really what it did and what I think is applicable for everyone is that it just removed that… That search and discovery from what the customer needs to what the customer is able to… to find by just giving it to them in once click instead of five.

Tim: That makes perfect sense. And there were something else that you mentioned that had worked for you. Can you talk about that?

Ryan: Yeah, that’s right. So, the PS was really empowering because it basically said “Hey, customers want this.” We just have to hold their hand and help them find it and taking that way of thinking across to the frontend of our product on our client’s websites. So this JavaScript snippet that creates these notifications we thought “Hey, you know, if someone were browsing one of our customer’s websites” and they thought “This thing is really cool.” and “Who is this by?”and “Who built this?” There was really no way to see it without being kind of a savvy developer looking at the source code of the website, figuring out with some keywords like where is this widget coming from.

And, you know, some people will do that and that’s certainly how I found tools in the past. But majority of people won’t do that. Whether they don’t know how or they just don’t feel like it and they shouldn’t have to go to the great extent to look at source codes to see who is using what, right?

So, we realized that having a free plan was something we always wanted to do and we didn’t’ have our free plan on our e-commerce plugin. And since we’re now exploring used cases outside of e-commerce, we wanted that. So, we simply made a free plan which already existed but the hack here was to just add a link Powered by FOMO in the bottom of all of those free plan widgets. And then, of course, that was another thing that compels free users to upgrade the pay. And by doing that, we have gotten a lot of extra hits. Five to 8% of our traffic is actually now from the clicks on the Powered by FOMO notifications and we have about a 15% conversion from that.

Tim: Wow! That’s amazing. I mean that is people that, many of them probably wouldn’t have found you, you know, in any other way. Maybe eventually in some runabout way but really there was no easy way from them to find you. But they saw this widget they said “Wow, that’ll be cool. I’d love to use that.” That’s a huge amount of people that actually signed up and started using it.

Ryan: Definitely. It has been nuts. And to take that even further, because we’re now removing the branding of Powered by FOMO for our page users but we still kind of want to get more users through the end client experience on our paid accounts. So, if you’re paid user even though you don’t have Powered by FOMO in your notifications, if you’re are a developer or if someone were to open up the Chrome console on a paid user’s website, they would also see a console log printout that says “Want to show of recent customer activity in your real time? Get started and use fomo.com/developers.”

Tim: Nice.

Ryan: And that’s effectively the “Powered by” but in a flavor that developers appreciate. And it also shows on the paid account stores or websites simply because it doesn’t change the end user experience.

Tim: Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that. These are some really, really great ways to increase the results that you’re getting from your software. So, for the software folks listening, I think it’s pretty a clear content. For the folks who aren’t… that don’t have some kind of a SaaS product, I think that this still applies. You just have to find creative ways to not only get, you know, found traffic. We talked about this a lot at LeadPages, this found traffic, but also how to make the experience a little bit easier for the folks whether it’s, you know, in info business or, you know, physical products. Find an opportunity to make the next steps clearer, right? If you are selling a physical product, you know, maybe it’s in the PS of the thank you e-mail for somebody buying. Maybe it’s, you know, giving them some tips for getting the most amount of use out of it, something like that. But, you know, I think using these tips can really work regardless of the industry. So, thank you so much for coming on the show, Ryan, and sharing with us. We really appreciated it.

Ryan: Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it. Cheers!