How we increased landing page conversion from 5% to 55%

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.

That is a great question. We spent a lot of time designing our signup flow and are currently on the third major iteration. The one thing that we find works consistently well is to give the user something to do as soon as they sign up. For Sidelines, that something is selecting your teams. The drop rate on that screen is extremely low and we speculate it will approach zero as soon as we add more sports. We are also working on implementing a "tour" of the site as part of onboarding, showcasing the various features because we did get the feedback that things can be confusing initially.

You really should link to the actual blog post as this will be totally useless when you add another one.

http://quicksprints.com/post/32792397474/how-we-increased-la...

We bought licenses for the photos from Getty.

I find a couple of the conclusions of this article very misleading. A couple of the lesson are great, but I feel the need to point out a few conclusions that are not quite spot-on:

1. Random photos are better than screenshots

Everything is better than straight screenshots. 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? Photos that have relevant content and even a minor emotional effect will say more than your screenshots ever will. I don't think I would call a football and baseball image "random" on a sports site, though. They are more relevant to a sports fan than a screenshot.

2. Large Background Photos Convert Really Well

That is not universally true. The two screenshots you have provided demonstrate the effect of focus in a design, not the effect of background images. You have used a background that is not only relevant, but is high-contrast colors and blurred, which creates a "foreground" out of your form. That will make the user's eyes go directly to the form rather than getting lost in your boring headlines, etc.

3. Inciting curiosity works better than clarity

It's interesting that you interpreted this as "curiosity" rather than benefits vs. features. Your original headline was a classic mistake. "A social network for sports fans" is a useless statement. No benefit, no motivation, no reason to click. "Follow sports together" is inherently more appealing because it describes the benefit of the service and has a social motivation built in. THAT is what you have done. Curiosity is not relevant.

4. Focus on the value proposition for brand new users, not advanced users

Duh. I don't want to be disrespectful, but this is a pure numbers rationale. In any market there will always be a small minority of advanced users compared to the vast majority of basic users. This will be true for every service, ever, unless the only people that could possibly understand the offer are advanced users.

5. Allowing users to sign up with their email increases FB/Twitter sign-ups

This was a good one. It is usually less effective to give people an ultimatum (register or leave) than to give them options to compare (would you rather register with FB or email?). Users will focus on the choice rather than the "yes or no" if you give them useful options to choose from. I once read an example test where more people were willing to pay for an a set of partially broken dishes if they were compared to an incomplete set than if they were sold alone. Same principle.

6. Figure out and optimize for the target demographics that convert the best

In the age of analytics, it is futile to define target audiences before statistics are available. It is much better to do as you have done: launch it and let your target audience identify itself. Good lesson.