The UX of marketing in an early-stage startup
Improving new-user acquisition of an early startup by addressing usability issues during sign up
TL;DR
I addressed usability issues of the landing page experience. Fixing it drove up the weekly sign-up rate by 162%.
A major usability issue and a lack of information deterred potential users from from signing up
Upon analyzing google ads, we found that the new user acquisition rate was barely 0.3%.
Based on user behavior from Microsoft Clarity, there's 2 big causes for this ✨ embarrassing retention rate ✨
Not enough information about the services before being prompted to sign up.
A dead-end sign up flow for first-time visitors.
I designed an interactive user flow, and a dynamic login screen, bringing up the acquisition rate from 0.3% to ~7% in one month.
We addressed these issues with an interactive landing page and a dynamic sign up process.
The "stickiness problem"
Users don't get enough information from ads to sign up and commit
Huge chunk of users navigated to the home page to learn more info.
An interactive preview of our top offering
(taste of the product).
2-3 interactions → Sign up to continue
Builds familiarity with the product.
4X more likely to sign up if the user feels like an action was incomplete.
The usability problem
Of ~110 people who attempted to sign up, a usability issue failed ~80 of them.
When trying to create an account, they fail but aren't told why.
It was failing because users were trying to create an account in the 'Log in' page, not the sign up page.
A dynamic login screen that takes you where you need to go.
Users are taken to the login screen if the entered email is recognized, and the account setup page if the email is new.
Impact
New user acquisition multiplied about 20x in 2 months
What I learnt
Working at a start up taught me speed, Versatility, and collaboration.
In self-reflecting on my time at a young startup, I leant 2 very important ways of working in smaller teams:
You always wear multiple hats
In a startup, you aren't limited to the role you signed up for. It's common to assume roles like graphic design, marketing, QA officer, etc.
Cross-team collaboration is norm
Being a small team, every member is in constant collaboration with the other teams. I found myself constantly working with marketing, Dev, QA teams, and R&D departments.
Check out some of my other work…
