Boost SaaS revenue by streamlining registration for immediate product access

Summary

We redesigned the registration flow to increase the registration rate and the number of users who proceeded to checkout and purchase. The optimized flow resulted in a 9.32% increase in conversion rate (CR) and an 8.3% increase in average revenue per user (ARPU).

Overview

Depositphotos.com is one of the most popular stock photo websites, offering users on-demand and subscription plans. Depositphotos sells licenses worldwide and is localized in 25 languages. The site receives approximately 23 million visits per month (according to SimilarWeb).

Research

We started the research by evaluating the quality of user flows and funnel performance.

New users followed this funnel to download an image:

Search for the desired image;
Register an account to save the image;
Select a plan;
Pay for the plan;
Download the image.

Of course, this funnel had drop-offs, but the size of the drop-offs varied significantly. We decided to focus on the second stage of the funnel – registration – because we saw an opportunity there.

Users need to register an account in order to save and rate images they find on the site. User surveys revealed that there was a disconnect between the “download image” call-to-action on the image detail page and the offer to register an account after clicking that call-to-action. The subsequent offer to register an account with Depositphotos listed the benefits of having an account. However, users were confused as to why they were offered to create an account when they clicked on “Download Image. This is a very eloquent quote from the user surveys: “I don’t want an account, I just want to download this image.

The other insight we gained from the user surveys, and confirmed by user testing, was that the primary motivator for users to purchase a plan was to download a single image or a small number of images found in the current session. This led us to conclude that the account registration offer should be focused on a specific image that the user has found and decided to download.

So we decided to focus the registration process on downloading a specific image and explain the need to create an account as a natural step in downloading that image.

Hypothesis

We hypothesized that by better explaining the need to register an account and by focusing users’ attention on downloading a specific image as the primary motivator for registering, we could increase the registration rate and, as a result, the buy-to-detail rate.

Solution

We created a variation of the registration pop-up where we offer the user to register in order to save the image, instead of listing the benefits of creating an account as in the control variation. So, instead of a generic list of benefits of creating an account, we introduced the image the user wanted to download into the registration pop-up and explained that they needed to register in order to save and download that image.

Control variation

Alternative variation

Validation of the hypothesis

To validate this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment to measure the impact of the new registration pop-up on registration CR and ARPU.

The experiment had the following characteristics:

Type of experiment: A/B test

Traffic split: 50/50

Device: Desktop

Key metric: ARPU

Secondary metric: Registration CR

Number of sessions included in the trial: 801,039 sessions

Number of plan purchases recorded during the experiment: 991 purchases

Results

The alternative variant outperformed the control on all key metrics: 8.3% increase in ARPU 9.32% increase in registration CR.

Key Takeaways:

There must be a strong logical connection between the steps of the conversion funnel.
Make sure you research and understand the key motivators for users to move from one stage of the conversion funnel to the next.
Optimizing for microconversion (registration flow) can have a positive impact on macroconversion. This isn't always true and needs to be tested.