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For any software business, the online signup is the lifeblood of customer acquisition. The new tooling available to developers makes it easy to build and most prone to mess-ups.
Like designing retail experiences, online signup has a broad target audience. This wide audience makes it harder to empathize with the customer’s journey and “walk in their shoes.” The challenge of empathy then creates a ground ripe for short-cuts in design and engineering that destroy the user funnel. Three stereotypical design mistakes stand out.
The No-Reward Signup
This is the we-will-call-you signup. If someone signs up for your product and all they get is a confirmation email that someone will be in touch, you have failed. The no-reward signup makes sense for private beta products or measuring demand, but it destroys value when part of a mature flow.
If the customer needs to speak with a live person to try your product, either someone hasn’t thought through the customer acquisition channel or the company is pre-revenue. The quality of the signup experience reflects the maturity of your revenue model.
The need for online signup to be meaningful is especially true for SaaS companies selling to small businesses. A sales cycle has a crumple zone that gives you room to make mistakes when trying to convert a lead. This zone is the smallest for Small and Medium Business owners. Overworked and understaffed, they are the businesses’ operators, purchasers, and marketers all in one. They have only so much time in the day to work on long-term initiatives, and you get a small fraction of that time.
If by some chance you do get them to show interest and signup, you’ll waste so much time playing phone-tag trying to get them on the Zoom call to demo your product that either they’ll lose interest or find a competitor. Time just killed your deal.
Even for enterprise SaaS software, unless you’re Palantir and selling to the CIA, more likely than not, you’re selling to individuals in business units. They want to try you out before they battle with internal procurement to get the budget approved. Why not make their lives easier by giving them a meaningful reward to sign up? The Enterprise customer may have a bigger crumple zone, but it is finite.
Generally speaking, a we-will-call-you signup is inexcusable the longer you’ve been in business.
The No-Gmail-Email Signup
Then there are the signups that require you to use your ‘work’ email. In other words, not your Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or any other public email provider. This is tone deaf in these days of privacy and work habits, showing laziness in execution.
The high probability that the only reason work email is a requirement is to make it easy to qualify leads and maybe clamp down on system abuse. Both are excuses for not solving the underlying computational challenge of knowing your customer.
Not all signups have to end with unfettered open-sesame entry to the platform. Access has to be earned by building reputation, and reputation is built by conscientious usage. So instead of pawning off reputation-making to the user, help them by helping them achieve it, by curating their experience from the very first step.
The Upfront-Credit-Card Wall Signup
This is perhaps the worst of all signup mistakes. You get the customer to sign up, even share some very personal details, and before they get a chance to play with the platform, bam! You hit them with a form that asks for their credit card information.
This is the worst because the designers of such flows wouldn’t use software that asks for their credit card up front. Unless you’re absolutely sure you’ve earned the customer’s trust, keep the credit card form hidden. The customers who do convert, you’ll keep.
Finally
To borrow from the retail industry, you would not ask the customer to wait for someone to call them to shop the store. You would not ask a customer for their business card to let them browse the store, and you wouldn’t ask to see their credit card to let them try out the samples. Why then would you ask your online customer to do the same?
The online signup is a journey in storytelling. Like the best retail experiences, the best signups bring majesty to their storytelling, carefully curating a lead to sign up to a paying customer. That’s lost when you treat the signup flow as a series of checklists.
The fix for the three signup mistakes is easy–try it yourself. Any software leader can see how annoyingly apparent the three issues are for any prospective customer. Empathy is the ultimate fix, and the only way to gain empathy is to try out the signup flow yourself. Would you jump through the hoops you created to use your product?