We're seeing more signups, more engagement, and more activity. Not sure how that is a bad thing?
"So you're saying providing details is bad and vagueness is good. Vagueness "incites curiosity" which increases signups."
Not really, we're saying that for certain kinds of free consumer apps, curiosity can be a very strong motivator for someone to try a product. (This kind of tactic would never work for a paid product for instance or a product targeted at business users.)
Vagueness doesn't necessarily incite curiosity, but asking first time users to parse detailed messaging often kills it prematurely, and you've got to find the right balance that optimizes conversion. This is what worked well for us.
Finally, there are many other tactics that we're successfully using to turn the users who just signed up into active, engaged users and they are mentioned elsewhere on this thread.
1.)“ You didn't show what you were using before, but at a dismal 5% conversion I am guessing it was straight screenshots that weren't "posed" on a device or anything?“
I looked hard for a screenshot of our original landing page but couldn’t dig one up. The screenshots were of the parts of our site that were resonating the most with our most engaged users, and we got good feedback on both the screenshots themselves and the visual design. However, we found that the additional complexity for our average user in having to parse and understand a bunch of screenshots is not as effective as a sports-related photo with a simple, powerful tagline and explanation.
“I don't think I would call a football and baseball image "random" on a sports site, though.”
You’re right, random wasn’t the right word. We meant that we didn’t experiment much with the photo itself or ask for feedback from a wide list of sources.
2.)“Your original headline was a classic mistake.”
We are not just talking about taglines or even comparing the two taglines we showed here. In fact, “A Social Network for Sports Fans” is almost as vague as “Follow Sports Together”.
We experimented with a lot of other options for messaging and many which were more detailed and clear (3 bullet points on the key benefits of the site, for instance).
In these experiments, we consistently, we found that simple but curiosity-inciting messaging works better than more detailed and clearer messaging.
4.) This lesson is obvious to us now, but was not obvious from the start. By sharing our results we are hoping that others will avoid our mistakes, even the ones that may be obvious to you.
5.) That sounds like a cool study. I'd love to read about it even you can find the link.
Yup, the "Find out more" link is a great idea and something we're in the process of trying. We're doing an experiment with creating a 30 second video about the benefits of the site. We're planning to have a link on the landing page which says something like "Watch a quick video to find out more" which opens up the video for those users who are curious but not curious enough to sign up right away.
You are absolutely right and our goal is to get engaged users. We are doing a lot of other things to drive engagement and I’ll blog about that soon.
All of our acquisition methods specifically target sports fans and are zero cost. For instance, we have partnerships with some sports content sites that run our ads for free. We also drive quite a bit of traffic by posting links to Sidelines in team fan forms.
The on-boarding process for Sidelines takes a few steps. One of the things we do, is as soon as you sign-up via the landing page we ask you to select your teams. This gives the user something to do and we find that 95% who sign up complete this step. In the sign up flow, we automatically subscribe new users to other users on the site who are active and follow the same teams, and this is explained clearly to the user in the sign up flow. Once the user completes the sign up flow, he lands on the feed, which shows interesting stuff the people he is following have shared about his teams. Since the feed is such a universally well-understood UI construct, users get it, and we see a good percentage of our first time users reshare an item or comment on an item on their first visit.
We also send out a welcome email (which we’ve been experimenting with) which explains more details about the site and how to get the most out of it. We’ve had fairly good success in bringing users back to the site with the welcome email.
We’re currently in the process of implementing a tour which will walk the new users through the features of the site, that should further drive engagement on the first visit.
It's hard to measure since we've seen engagement levels consistently rise over the past month, but we've also been doing a lot of OTHER work to increase engagement and bring people back to the site. For instance we've been driving community/discussions around specific teams on the site, sending out email notifications/newsletters, FB notifications etc, optimizing FB open graph- all of which have been pretty effective for engagement. It's still unclear whether there is a direct correlation between clarity on the landing page and longer-term engagement.
We recently A/B tested the hell out of our landing page at Sidelines (http://sidelinesapp.com), so there are some interesting things we learned that may be applicable to you:
1. Coming up with an effective single-sentence explanation of your product will affect your conversion more than anything else. I don’t think you’ve quite nailed it with “An app for you and your campus.” Figure out what the most compelling use-case of your product is and make that clear on your landing page.
2. Make sure your landing page looks great on mobile browsers (especially since yours is a mobile product). Right now, on Safari on my iPhone, I don’t even see the map.
3. I would get rid of “Exclusively at Stanford University”, since I think it will turn off people from other schools. You should experiment with removing it or even better, showing it only if the IP of the person clicking the ad is in the Bay Area.
4. I would get rid of the “What do you want to shoutt about?” I think for most people using these kinds of apps for the first few times, they start of as consumers of info/content and you later have to convert them to producers of content. Your value prop with “What do you want to shout about?”” here is all about the producer side, and I think that may not be as appealing for brand new users. Look at Twitter for example. Their landing page is all about the consumer value prop, and doesn’t mention the sharing aspect (“Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”)
5. A launch date and countdown would be awesome.
6. Get people to connect their FB accounts instead of
just giving you their email. This way you could potentially send them FB notifications as well when you launch.
7. Try putting your messaging front and center instead of to the bottom left. We got great results with this.
8. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Anything I or anyone else here may tell you would just be intelligent guesses at what we think will work. You’ll get way better results from doing some quick A/B tests. We went from about 7% conversion to our landing page to about 55% conversion just by running a series of A/B tests.
"So you're saying providing details is bad and vagueness is good. Vagueness "incites curiosity" which increases signups."
Not really, we're saying that for certain kinds of free consumer apps, curiosity can be a very strong motivator for someone to try a product. (This kind of tactic would never work for a paid product for instance or a product targeted at business users.)
Vagueness doesn't necessarily incite curiosity, but asking first time users to parse detailed messaging often kills it prematurely, and you've got to find the right balance that optimizes conversion. This is what worked well for us.
Finally, there are many other tactics that we're successfully using to turn the users who just signed up into active, engaged users and they are mentioned elsewhere on this thread.