How Brand24 Tripled Their Trial Signups (with Mick Griffin)

Tim: Does the experience you’re giving your customers naturally lead to giving them more of what they want and does that lead to them trying your product? If not I have good news. It’s not too hard to find out where you’re going wrong and then correct it. That’s what today’s guest Mick Griffin is talking about.

His SAAS company Brand 24 had generated a ton of new traffic but was losing out in terms of conversion rate. What he did ended up tripling their trial signups in a really short period of time and given the company more value out of all that new traffic.

I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Mick, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show.

Mick: Tim, thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Tim: Yeah, I’m excited. So why don’t we start off by talking about the results you were able to get? Can you tell us about that?

Mick: Yes, certainly so what I want to share with the audience today is that we trickled our conversion rate on trial paid signups for SAAS component. So we went from a 2.5 to 7.5 without actually having to generate more traffic.

Tim: Nice. That’s awesome. Yeah I love to hear that. So we’re going to get into the tactic in just a minute but first tell us a little bit about who you are and what the company is all about.

Mick: Yes, certainly. So yeah I’m Mick. I’m chief revenue officer for Brand 24. Brand 24 is a social listening tool. So our kind of nutshell pitch is that we help brand connect with consumers online wherever the conversation is happening. Yeah we’ve been on the market now for four years. We were founded out of Poland and the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve really got some strong global expansion and now we’re saving over a thousand customers and tracking roughly around 30,000 brands every month.

Tim: Wow that’s awesome. You really have some amazing brands. I got a chance to look at that. it’s really incredible to see who’s really using this and getting great results so that’s cool.  So why don’t we just dive into it? Can you tell us a little bit about what you did that just got these awesome results?

Mick: yeah certainly. So the base of the story is we feel like we’re a very hands-on brand. We’ve always liked to connect with users not only paying customers but trial-ers and so on. So what happened was in the very beginning of our global expansion, the lead base group really steadily while the conversion rates were quite steady. So let’s say for example they were around 4%, 4.5% from something that hit our homepage to someone not signed up for our trial. And then what happened was that the brand kind of gained a little bit of momentum and we drastically increased our homepage traffic over a really short period of time. Like most brands we’re in the office, we were throwing high fives, you know, [Indiscernible [00:03:01] living the dream so to speak.

Then what happened was that basically our number of the trails, our number of leads at the end of that that the conversion didn’t go with it. So all this great traffic, all this new traffic is something that our leads, the number of trials were very, very static and this is where we kind of have to take a step back and say what’s happening with this traffic. Is our conversion rate just going to stay that low or is there something more we can do?

Tim: Got you. Okay. So you saw that that was happening how did you work on improving that?

Mick: Yup. Certainly. So what we did is we have that deep discussion that no we really don’t believe that the conversion rate is going to go down. We believe we can keep that higher conversion. So let’s look at what we can do. We kind of employed to tools there at Brand 24 that are still employed to this day. The first one is heap analytics. The second is [inaudible . So ‘m sure to some of your listeners that they will be promised a third of. But for us they really revolutionized the way we worked for a very short period of time.

Tim: So you know I know there are a lot of people that aren’t familiar with them. I’ve had a lot of people talking to me about both of them really. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about why the specifics of what you were looking and what those tools allowed you to do.

Mick: Sure. So actually in the very beginning, we felt almost that these tools that they were competitors, that they were doing the same thing. The main aim for us to say, okay, we’ll listen we’ve obviously got Google analytics and that’s great or we really can’t see where the hole in the funnel is in our customer journey. Where are we losing people the most. We can guess, we can make educated choices. We could AB test but the bottom line was we’d almost doubled our traffic and our number of [Indiscernible[00:04:57] was almost the same. So we really wanted to find a tool that could us show us that customer pathway. Now we analyzed a couple of different solutions on the market and we came to [Indiscernible [00:04:57]. Now what they basically do is they show you what the customer experience is literally click by click. Now Heap is very data driven and the data looks, it’s all about clicks and all about the journey, i.e., the customer went from the homepage to the pricing page, blog and it shows you every single click by click and it shows you in a data format. Where Hadja is the same tool but in a different way it shows you visually. So Hadja will literally show you where the cursor goes, how long did they pause, where the hit match, where were they focusing that kind of clicker attention. Was it upper right-hand corner, lower left-hand corner and we really need the combination of two because it was great seeing that somebody went from the homepage to the sign-up form that they dropped off. But what we also needed to know was well where were they focusing their attention. Was there something that screen like a little bit of text that they clicked on and nothing happened or was there an error. So we kind of mixed together both the fact that we wanted to see what they were doing from a data point of view and we also wanted to see it visually.

Tim: Got you. All right. So you looked at it and what did you find? What was the missing spot?

Mick: Sure. So we kind of, we broke it into two and again this is something that we’ve always tried to do at Brand 24 since this point is that try not to look at it as much as this one statistic like okay, we’ve got this many viewers, users on the page and we’ve got this many trials at the end. We really wanted to see the great in the middle. So the first thing we did was say okay what about step one which is we need to get them to click the button that takes them to the registration page. So where are the gaps in the funnel on the homepage and this was focus number one. Just to give the audience an idea. When we’re at our lowest point, this conversion was 7.5%. So 7.5% of the people went from the home page to click yes, I’ll take a trial.

After the analysis we got that up to 13%.

Tim: Nice.

Mick: So we almost kind of got [Indiscernible[00:07:21]  like half the traffic we were losing came back. Well what we did and this was very much down to again the combination of the product. So the first time we went, we went into Heap and we saw now the great thing about Heap is like many of us, we had images on our homepage that didn’t go anywhere. They were nice awards or they were mentioned on [Indiscernible[00:07:42]  something that we all have.

Bu we didn’t hyperlink. We didn’t have like click it and see it. But with Heap you can still track if people clicked the image even if it doesn’t take them anywhere. So we suddenly started to see a tread map was many of our new users were clicking on what we call [Indiscernible[00:08:04]. So they were clicking on those nice brand icons that you mentioned in the beginning of the call although we’re clicking on testimonials and we weren’t really, we weren’t actually taking them anywhere. So the first thing that we did is we started to optimize that. So we started to make some of them clickable. We started to put also call to actions around those areas.

So we started to, we put many, many more buttons on the homepage which were [Indiscernible[00:08:29] try us today especially around the case studies. For example we would be like now is your turn to test. So we started to follow them and see what they needed and they just needed us to be where they were. So at the beginning we just had a call to action at the top of the page which is sign up for a trial and if you scroll down three or four page views there was no more call to action. So the first thing is we added a lot more options to sign up. This was the key.

Definitely this was where we went 7.5% conversion to almost 13% just by giving them more options. One trick could do this post mortem and we could talk to some of those people. It was literally that matter that hey listen yeah we’ve heard about you guys. You’re new to the market. We wanted to learn more about why we should choose you. That was our biggest problem. Before that time, we’ve had really solid conversion because we were always talking to people first. We were building that. People will go to the website after a phone call or after an email. Then suddenly we were generating organic traffic and they hadn’t had that first experience with us.

So giving them more options, giving them options around those trust builders that we put on the website was a huge lifting conversion of for us.

Tim: Yeah that’s super interesting I think you know, there’s a lot that’s cool about this but the fact that they were looking at those trust builders and maybe curious what that meant and what were the results and how they were using it and how you know, your stuff could work for them. Making it so that there was a call to action so that they could actually click so that they could learn more seems like it made a big difference.

[00:10:11]

Mick: Yeah. We had to really kind of liberalize it as a story. You know I can say to someone hi, yeah, you found those at Brand 24. That’s big. Would you like to use those. If the customer in their own kind of pathway would be like I’m interested, well I’m going to learned. I’ve learned some more about you and they scroll down the page and I wasn’t giving any more opportunities to say oh now I know enough to test you on that’s what we did as a team. Yeah it’s still very effective to this day because every day we meet, we’ve generated more organic traffic. This is always going to be the aim. We had to just give them little checkpoints in that story where they could say yes now I know enough all the way down to obviously the very, the filter of the page now.

Tim: That’s awesome. Yeah this is so interesting. I think that if people are somebody is listening to this and they’ve got analytics. They’re looking at Google Analytics. They’re using Hadja or they’re using whatever and they’re not sure what to look at, I think this is really going to be helpful because it just shows you just need to consider what that experience is, what is that person looking to accomplish by clicking on you know, the picture of you or whatever.

So I think that’s really interesting and I think that it’s really valuable. So what are you working on going forward? What are you looking at now that you have these analytics, you have this data? What are you going to be changing going forward?

Mick: Sure. So for us at that stage, what we had is we kind of took the whole so to speak from the homepage to the signup. But we still very much needed to increase because what we have there is from people that went to registration form we had a conversion rate of 34%. Again we were considering that quite low. Again what we did is we analyzed and we got that from 34% to 56% again without. Like we said one goal we had was hey listen maybe we just need to increase the traffic and we’ll be happy with those low conversions and then we’re really happy as a brand that we didn’t jump the gun. We knew that there was a little bit more to be done. So it’s again I was… we were very lucky. We went to the [Indiscernible [00:12:25] event  in San Francisco. It was a big topic which is the frictionless experience and we looked to our signup page and we had six fields.

Tim: Uh-hum.

Mick: Those fields were account name, your company name, discount code, email address password and repeat password.  Suddenly we looked at the experience and we wrote that down and we saw okay, well people putting name, account name, the company name wasn’t so bad but we were losing something like of all the traffic we lost, we lost I think it was 35% and the discount code stage.

Tim: Wow.

Mick: Which makes sense now to me. I mean this was phenomenal loss but nobody looks at the discount code anymore and thinks no, it’s not for me. The first thing they do is they run away and they look free online or they start searching Brand 24 discounts. We truly were only thinking how do you make it easy for people who have a code and then we realized that hey listen, in the big scheme of things, you know, I think 7% of all our users actually had some kind of function in our expired discount codes.

Tim: Wow.

Mick: So we were really alienating 93% of our users with that field there. We also just realized that you know less is certainly more. Again I think that the benchmark used to be that you lose 7% for every field or something like that. We were losing even more so.

Tim: Right.

Mick: So narrowed that down and literally now what we ask for is two fields which is email and password and that was it. Because we wanted to have a completely frictionless point. We had to ask ourselves was is the business name important for us to make conversion? No, it’s not. I mean it’s great to drop that name in maybe when your sales team have a call or you have a personalized email but it wasn’t outweighing what it cost us to have on the signup form.

Tim: And you can always get that information afterwards?

Mick: Well excuse me. This was [Indiscernible [00:14:34] to the point. So what we started to do was we’ve taken it. So just to reach up. So yeah that kind of went from well from 34 to 58% conversion on that page just from taking the fields away that were not necessary. What we managed to do now is actually we build Heap and Hadja into our customer journey. So as you said, the going forward now for Brand 24 what we’re constantly changing is when a customer answers the system, when they sign up for a trial, we tried to use that precollected information to our advantage. So we looked okay, well the trial user actually spent 30 minutes already on our blog so they probably find a lot of content, very, very useful.

[00:15:25]

So [Indiscernible [00:15:25]  information will then serve them more content that they’ve shown us that they’ve already like where people that can jump straight in without checking a blog or without checking a customer success story will serve them more with your tutorials firs rather than kind of deeper content.

So even though we analyzed in the beginning to optimize the processes, we actually now use that same data to optimize the experience.

Tim: Nice. No I think that’s great. There are so many reasons to be paying attention to these things and when you can really focus on what’s it like to be a visitor, what’s it like to be user, you can focus on that not just from a, oh I’m looking at this, I’m going to my website and trying it out and seeing but really analyzing what the data is telling you. You can really take your performance to another level. So thanks so much Mick. I really appreciate you sharing this on the show. I know people are going to love it. So thanks.

Mick: No problem, Tim. Thanks so much for having us and yeah I hope it helps.