How we increased conversion: the history of the cloud service CleanTalk Anti-Spam

How we increased conversion: the history of the cloud service CleanTalk Anti-Spam

Representatives of the cloud-based antispam service CleanTalk Anti-Spam told vc.ru about how they have achieved conversion improvements of the service site, using fairly simple solutions and assessing their effectiveness.

CleanTalk Anti-Spam is a cloud service protection from spam bots for websites. Since the introduction of the service the number of clients has grown steadily, but over time it became clear that the effectiveness of website conversion can be increased.

For ease of understanding and analysis, we divided the conversion to “free” (registration on the website) and “paid” (the beginning of the use of paid services of service). Of course, they are interrelated: increasing the number of users at the registration stage, we get the growth of paid users.

So, we decided that the increase in the number of users of the service in our power, but it needs to look for ways to optimize existing channels of attraction. As a result, spending relatively little time and resources to search for and testing ways, we have achieved very impressive results surpassed our wildest expectations: the conversion registration has increased by about 98%, and registered in pay ― by 49.4%.

Our users

The users of CleanTalk Anti-Spam are the companies that have a corporate website, private owners of personal sites, webmasters and studios, as well as owners of Internet-shops. In fact, the need for protection from spam bots may arise from any website that has any form to fill.

User expectations regarding the anti-spam service is quite natural and predictable: turning once, they want to get everything, to no longer pay for the service and pre-existing attention problems and not to waste their time. They want to be fully confident in the effectiveness and fully trust decision. In our case, this means that they get protection from spam, which are invisible to the visitors and do not make them to do extra work to prove that they are human.

“Free” conversion

The first thing we noticed as a potential source of growth in registrations, changes of site design. However, as it turned out in our case, the design has little effect on conversion. We have developed several variants of external execution of the main page and tested them, but any tangible result is not given.

The next thing we decided to try – to put the registration button directly in the part of the site, which is the main driver of traffic. The solution is quite obvious: the interested visitors can see the offer in the place of the site for which they came. In our case it blacklists the IP and email addresses from which to send spam. As a result simple call to the registration in the right place for two months of testing gave a 6.6% increase in registrations. Of course, after this we left button on a new place.

The next step we decided to place a pop-up window with a banner calling for registration. This banner is displayed only after the user makes the second search on site: thus see it only targeted visitors likely to be in need of protection from spambots.

Despite popular and quite well-founded belief that a pop-up banner ads annoy visitors, we received an increase in registrations of search blacklisted in 38.9%. However, we have not received any complaints and have not seen a reduction of repeat visits to the site.

After done, we can give advice: look at what additional information you can use to attract users. Describe in one sentence what problem you will solve, and make offer to users with a minimum required to achieve the goal steps.

Further research of the own site led to the idea that it is possible to simplify the registration procedure and form for it. We have removed from form all of the extra fields, leaving only the most necessary. So, now users don’t need to come up with passwords, they are generated automatically and come immediately after registration to the specified email account together with other necessary information. As a result, the form has only two fields ― email and website address.

In case of refusal from the manual password entry in favor of its automatic generation, we have been guided by the consideration that a new user arriving at unfamiliar service, is unlikely to want to use own regular password, but rather will be to come up with a new one. Of course, this complicates his task, the user may leave the website. Simplifying it, we have achieved growth of registrations of about 12%.

Good results were achieved by embedding the registration form in the settings page of plugins for CMS WordPress and Joomla. Thanks to the simplicity and speed of registration of the conversion growth amounted to 19.5%.

“Paid” conversion

Because of the nature of the SaaS-model, most cloud services, including CleanTalk Anti-Spam, give users a free trial period. However, the duration of the period is different for each service, so find the best option we have decided experimentally. Moreover, the duration of the trial period and the conversion also depends on the source registrations.

We have supposed that, depending on the source of registration, our users need different on the length of the trial period. From some sources, users come prepared and “ripened”, while the other need more time to explore the capabilities of the service. For CleanTalk registrations sources can be divided into three categories:

• Search traffic from the blacklist;
• Traffic from the plugins directory;
• Transitions from websites and social networks.

We have divided the sources and each of them changed the duration of the trial period. It should say that the system does not display the duration of the trial period in days, instead, users see the date up to which they can use the functionality CleanTalk without payment.

For search traffic from the black list the best conversion was at the 7-day free period. Compared with a trial period in a 14-day period, which we applied to all users initially, the conversion increased by 86%!

For registration of the plugins directory best indicator was 14 days. Selective survey of users showed that this group of users needs more time to assess the functionality of the service and its applicability to their situations. Since we initially used the 14-day free period, other options its duration caused a decrease in  the conversion.  

But for users who came from websites and social networks, the trial period is not needed at all. We assume that this is due to the fact that these people move from the sites, where they are already familiar with the service, read the description, feedback or review. That is, they already have the recommendation of a trusted and reputable source for them, so there is no need to test. Thus, compared with the 14-day period, the growth of paid users amounted to 115%.

Not less attentively should be approached to the choice of payment systems and the order of their placement on the payment page. Be sure to choose a proven and well-known payment system, not to be in favor of those in which the lower commission. Also, do not introduce too many ways of payment, as it disperses the attention of users and causes them to doubt the initial choice.

Some time ago, we experienced some technical problems with receiving payment via PayPal. As a result, we have moved the system down, which was a mistake. During the test, we left only two methods of payment, and PayPal was again raised up. As a result, the number of payments increased by 23%.

The placement of the security certificates on the payment page and the EV Green Bar in the address bar on the website should give to increase the confidence of users and, consequently, increase conversion. However, in our case both of these actions have not gave any result. This is certainly connected with the high level of technical competence of the audience of the service, which not needs to be convinced of the safety of popular payment systems.

We continue to use EV Green Bar, and the icon for the security certificate was replaced by the icon back guarantee payment. However, it did not have any effect and only serves to inform users about this possibility.

We were very pleased with the results. However, even those actions which had no desired effect in our case, in other situations can bring significant benefit to the business. For each service it is very individual and depends on many parameters. We wanted to draw your attention on the things that helped us in the development. Perhaps our experience will be useful to you.