Growth HackHow Groove increased Annual subscribers by 10%

Basecamp make project management software. Think a combination of Slack, Trello and some other tools that you would normally use all rolled in to one.

This case study is kind of the opposite of the normal ones. This is a story of how Basecamp redesigned their homepage, which lead to a 16% decrease in free trial sign ups.

Measure

Basecamp did a redesign of their homepage.

After about 3 months they realised that their “viewed homepage” to “signed up for free trial” conversion rate had decreased by about 16%.

Find the bottleneck

Basecamp compared their new and old designs and realised that they had removed the signup form from the homepage.

Instead of users filling out their details on the homepage directly, they had to click a button and do it on another page.

Experiment

Basecamp ran an experiment where thy added the signup form back to the homepage. Their free trial signup conversion rate increased 16%, meaning they recovered their loss.

Next Steps

Website redesigns can decrease conversion rates and be a pretty big business risk. SaaS companies often have monitoring and alerting for technical issues, like page error rates, but not for key conversion rates.

If you are doing a major redesign, then keep an eye on key conversion rates. If they decrease a lot, it’s best to know early so that you have more time to fix them before running into cashflow issues.