Improving user engagement through a free trial offer on limited premium asset downloads
TIMELINE
2 weeks
MY ROLE
Research,
Strategy,
UX Design,
Visual/UI
TEAM
Vincent Le Moign
Victor Carvalho
Khushi Lunkad
TOOLS
LINK
CONTEXT
About Streamline
About the project
Offering visitors 10 premium downloads for free for signing up with us to improve user engagement and our email collection process.
Problem
Streamline took a pretty open approach right from the start. Users could wander through our entire library, pick an icon, customize it, and download it without having to give us anything in return. Not even an email or a nod of attribution. But, this super open-door policy started to hurt us a bit. We realized we were missing out on collecting emails from our users and weren't getting nearly as many backlinks to our website as we could have.
Let's be real, though – no one likes handing out their emails these days. And honestly, I get it. It does come off a bit too pushy for a first time visitor who's only there to explore.
Goals
How might we capture user emails with an intention to offer something back in exchange?
Research
On a research call where we were finding out ways to encourage users to upgrade, a user new to Streamline offered a thought that really stayed with us. They wondered, why not let people test out our service before buying, similar to a gym membership trial?
It seemed like a fair approach – giving users a taste of what we offer before asking them to commit. Inspired by this trial analogy, we started thinking: how could we offer value that users would be happy to exchange their emails with us?
Customer feedback on Slack
What we launched
We designed a straightforward process that begins with a floating banner shown to any signed-out visitor browsing through premium sets. If the user encounters a premium feature or asset, we prompt a signup modal to guide them through signing up to receive 10 free credits. This achieves our goal of collecting feedback.
So, how do we offer value to users? We simply ask them to verify their email to ensure it's a verified account, and voila, they're in!
What's more, we offer users a choice. They can upgrade or stick with the free plan once their credits run out. This way, we ensure there's no pressure to upgrade, especially if they didn't enjoy their free trial.
How did we prevent the abusers?
Our dev team really put in the effort to safeguard our free credit system from misuse. We took every step necessary to spot similar email IDs and stop users from registering multiple times with the same email. We even tracked IP addresses to prevent users from creating more than one account. Of course, it's challenging to halt all forms of abuse completely, but through these measures, we've managed to significantly reduce it.
Impact
40%
Increase in sign ups
19k
emails collected
8%
increase in upgrades
Although we initially shipped this as a test under a feature flag, it ended up exceeding our expectations significantly, achieving what we aimed for and beyond!
Learnings
