How VWO Drank Its Own Champagne and Improved Free Trial to Paid Conversions

We use VWO to improve our website and product experience continuously. For the campaign described in this success story, we focused on enhancing the user onboarding experience within the VWO platform. Our goal was to transform the existing onboarding process, which was slightly complex, into a streamlined engine for user activation and feature adoption.

We used VWO Insights (our user behavior analytics capability) to analyze our onboarding process, leveraging heatmaps, session recordings, form analytics, funnel analysis, and metrics reports. Additionally, we conducted detailed internal UX research, including interviews. Together, the analysis highlighted the following insights:

• The onboarding experience was fragmented, with setup tasks scattered across various areas of the platform, leaving users uncertain about their next steps.
• The onboarding funnel was broken, and the new users’ onboarding journey was difficult to monitor, making it difficult to track user progress effectively.
• Internal feedback indicated that the onboarding experience lacked richness and didn’t clearly convey the value proposition of our products.
• Furthermore, our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) were spending considerable time manually guiding users through setup, which, while helpful, wasn’t scalable. This pointed to the need for a more streamlined, self-guided onboarding process.

All of these factors led to a significant drop-off, with many users not taking any further steps. A form analysis using VWO Insights showed a 62.77% drop-off rate, meaning more than half of the visitors didn’t interact with the free trial sign-up form on the VWO dashboard.

Hypothesis

These observations revealed an opportunity to create a more unified structure, allowing users to manage their accounts independently with ease and clarity. 

Our product team hypothesized that a centralized, interactive “Get Started” tab on the VWO dashboard could significantly improve the onboarding experience for all free trial users. With a clear, step-by-step checklist, this tab would simplify account setup, boost adoption of key features, improve activation metrics, and reduce the strain on our support teams.

To bring our hypothesis to life, we designed, built, and tested a new, centralized “Get Started” screen, along with various UX optimizations. This new onboarding flow acted as a guided journey, presenting users with a clear set of tasks, including:

• Account configuration: Helping users set up essential steps like data center selection and privacy settings.

• Product setup: Ensuring users installed the VWO SmartCode and configured products correctly from day one.

• Advanced feature discovery: Showcasing powerful enterprise features to encourage deeper adoption.

We tested the new, interactive onboarding flow (i.e., the variation) using the Split test, which allowed us to measure its impact on the onboarding experience and workflows.

Here is how control and variation looked:

[The variations for the test were created in collaboration with the development team and utilizing different VWO Visual Editor features.]

Results:

The test ran for 25 days, and the variation outperformed the control. The “Get Started” enhancement made a noticeable difference in the onboarding experience. We tracked product usage metrics for:

1. VWO Platform – The platform from where individual capabilities, account setup, billing, and settings can be accessed.
2. VWO Testing – A/B testing capability that allows running A/B, split URL, and multivariate tests for the website.
3. VWO Insights – Behavior analytics capability that allows tracking visitor behavior using the heatmap, session recording, form analytics, on-page survey, and funnel tracking.  

The new variations significantly improved both the conversion rate and user engagement. Specifically, the conversion rate from free trial to paid users increased by 127%. Additionally, there was a rise in the number of users successfully setting up tracking and campaigns for these capabilities.

Below is a detailed comparison of the new experience versus the control.

1. VWO Platform

2. VWO Testing

3. VWO Insights

The results validated our hypothesis: the checklist significantly improved the onboarding experience, helping users navigate the VWO interface more seamlessly. By providing a clear, step-by-step guide, new users were able to adapt to the platform quickly.

We noticed a decrease in the number of users analyzing the heatmaps report five times or watching five session recordings. This suggests that while users are successfully setting up the heatmaps and session recordings, the workflow is not effectively guiding them back to view these reports. This observation is now the basis for our upcoming tests.

The success of this initiative underscores that the experimentation principles we champion for our customers are just as vital to our own success. By pinpointing a key friction point and using our platform to test a user-centric solution, we not only enhanced our product but also established a more efficient, streamlined path to success for every new VWO user.

Ready to optimize your digital experience? Start your free trial of VWO today and see the results for yourself.