Improving Activation Rates by Up to 50% Through Dedicated Pathways

Challenge

When GoTo Resolve went live in February 2022, it was positioned as an all-in-one IT management platform that can solve all of your IT needs such as device monitoring, remote support, and ticketing under a single umbrella platform. However, product activation was initially slower than expected, so we had to understand why and put plans in place to adjust our approach.

Solution

To better understand customer motivations for considering GoTo Resolve, our UX team ran interviews with participants that were in-market for an IT management solution. What we discovered is that while we had positioned GoTo Resolve as an “all of your tools in one place” type offering, the interviewees were looking for solutions to address a very specific problem.

With this insight in hand, a cross-functional team worked collaboratively to create a project internally named “Dedicated Pathways”. The goal of the project was to:

• Create advertising and content that focused on specific customer pain points

• Guide those users to free trial landing pages that reinforced how GoTo Resolve could address those pain points

• Upon trial account creation, direct the user into the relevant area in-product for solving their pain point instead of the main dashboard

• Provide pathway specific onboarding flows

As the web lead, my team focused on developing pathway specific content, creating pathway specific free trial landing pages, and ensuring that those landing pages were able to signify the appropriate in-product destination for each specific pathway.

We developed pathway specific content that focused on addressing customer pain points instead of broad, all-in-one platform messaging. Moreover, the primary CTAs drove users to a pathway specific trial sign up landing page, instead of a generic sign up page. As an example, a customer looking for ticketing oriented solutions might start their web journey on a page like this:

For users that wanted to take a trial, we created pathway specific sign up pages. Following the ticketing example from above, a user who clicks "Free 14-Day Trial" would be directed to a ticketing centric sign up pages featured UI imagery and messaging relevant to ticketing.

Upon successful signup, the user is led to the most appropriate area of the product for their pain point. For a ticketing pathway, they would start their product journey in the Helpdesk tab, instead of the main Dashboard tab.

Results

• On average, users that enter a dedicated pathway were 28% more likely to complete the trial signup form relative to users exposed to broad platform messaging.

• The activation rate, when a user completes a desired action in the product, increased by as much as 50% for users that entered the product via a dedicated pathway.

• Improvements to the retention rate, when an activated user completes a second desired action in the product, were minimal. However, in-product onboarding work was underway, and we expected that to help significantly once it was in place.

Takeaways

• Customers rarely seek out a platform that can solve all of their needs. Instead, they tend to have a particular problem or two and are seeking out the best solution.

• Showing customers that you can solve their current problem, seems to give them confidence in your ability to solve their other problems as they arise.

• Selling a user on all-in-one platform benefits is difficult for a few reasons:

  • If they already have a fragmented solution stack, it’s possible that different tools are owned by different teams.

  • On the same note, contracts for every tool usually don’t line up nicely and no one wants to pay twice.

  • Switching tools can be burdensome for teams due to staff re-training. Now multiply that burden across multiple tools.

  • For customers that only need to solve 1-2 problems, a platform comes with additional functionality that they’re paying for but are unlikely to use.