Growth HackHow Pay Point increased MRR by 159%

Paypoint allow websites to collect payments online. Kind of like Stripe, but I think they are more focussed on retail and commerce markets.

What problem were they trying to solve

What were they trying to achieve

Paypoint wanted to get more signups. Their revenue is tied to the total sales of all of their customers. So signing up more customers means that Paypoint can increase their revenue. More revenue means that Paypoint can help more websites take online payments.

How did they do it

I really like the Paypoint cases study because they followed a data-led-growth approach of measure, find the bottleneck, experiment to increase revenue.

It’s really tempting to skip the first two steps and go straight to experiment based on a hunch. But even if your hunch is correct, you might be experimenting in a place that isn’t the bottleneck, meaning that your revenue increases can be small.

Paypoint started by using Google Analytics to find the biggest opportunities on their website. The case study does not go into detail on how they did this. I guess that they would have been using goals to track conversion events and then used Google Analytics reporting to figure out the biggest bottlenecks. Based on the article date, I think they would have been using Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3).

Google Analytics told them that their registration form was teh biggest bottleneck to getting more signups.

This is understandable because Paypoint have a rigorous signup process, which can put some people off because it looks like a lot of work to complete. They are in the financial market and need to do things like Know Your Customer (KYC) verification.

Paypoint made a few major changes to their signup form. They went from a two step form to a one-step form. Their second step was pretty small, so it only added a few fields to the first page.

Moving to a one-step form meant that they could change their Call To Action on the first page from “next” to “continue to payment”. “next” implies that there could be more than one more step, so it could seem like a lot of work. “Continue to payment” implies that you are almost done.

Paypoint changed the form design to space things out, making it look nicer.

I really like that they kept the bright yellow color for their Calls To Action. Experiments that I have run in the past suggest that high contrast between a button and the rest of the page can increase clicks on that button. Google use this pattern a lot with their product marketing pages (e.g. https://www.google.com/intl/en_nz/drive/).

Why did it work

All of the changes were made at once, so it is difficult to know what ones have the most impact. In the past, I have seen changes to Call To Actions have really big impacts on conversion rates. For Paypoint, I would guess that changing the form Call To Action from “next” to “continue to payment” would have had the biggest impact.

Next experiments to run

Long forms can often be the bottleneck in registration processes, they can look like a lot of work.

There is a really common pattern that companies use that Paypoint didn’t try.

A long registration process can be split over multiple steps, with a progress bar on the top. Smaller steps look achievable and the progress bar assures users that they are not far from the end.

Some companies step this up and start users with one or two steps completed on the progress bar. This uses the Endowed Progress Effect, where people are more likely to give more effort if they think they have already made progress.