I was not the only one to find this series of steps to be unacceptable
As I was writing that post and explaining the process, I realized how unacceptable the login system was. It was just too many steps and too many redirects for you to sign up for alerts.
The new user login system
The new user login system
- Click on any “Get Price Alerts” (or equivalent) button, such as the one on the hot deals page.
- A popup asks for your email
- Submit and you are in!
A nice, green alert will show up below that.
Note that price alerts do not begin until you activate your account via the link in your email. This prevents us from spamming people who never requested it.
The success confirmation you should see. There’s some wild stuff on this site…….
Why we did this: the historical data
Perhaps this belongs on a personal blog, but I’ll throw it here for now:
Looking at the data over the past month, only 47% of the users who we plopped at the old registration page actually tried registering. This is despite the fact that the only thing we asked for was an email address.
In my opinion, that’s quite awful, and represents a few things:
- Confusion
You request to sign up for price updates / notifications, and are thrown over to a new page that doesn’t really mention what we’re about to do with your information.*
- Lack of trust
We know we’re not a major brand, so there’s only so much BS someone is going to take from a “no-namer”
- Time to reconsider
Every extra step you have is extra time you have to be like “Meh, I don’t want to do this”.
My goal is to decrease the speed so that we look legit, you trust us, and don’t have time to say “meh”.
Going further: less restrictions on activation
As mentioned above, we can’t legally/ethically send you emails until you actually activate your account. I’d love to just start blindly sending price update emails to users, but it’s just too risky for a multitude of reasons.
But before this update, we actually required you to provide your full name upon activation. That’s yet another point of attrition in the “funnel”.
This is the “funnel” that marketers talk about. With each step, you lose eyeballs. The goal is to make it as easy and painless as possible for users. Image courtesy Tony Wright
That’s a terrible final 17% of users who actually trusted us enough to follow through with the entire process.
These numbers will never be 100%, for several reasons:
- Some people simply will think twice and not activate their accounts,
- Some of them may be bots,
- Some of you will not see the activation email, which we’ll have to investigate,
- Some may have given a fake email, negating the entire purpose of the price updates in the first place, and
Forget the full name!
My guess is that we lost the extra 5% of users due to the full name requirement, and perhaps a lack of privacy policy linkage, which I’ll need to take care of.
Why did we need a name from you? The simple fact is that we don’t.
Y’all got any more of them cheap protein deals?
So that restriction is lifted. Put in your full name, any name you want, or none at all, I don’t care. Just use the system and send feedback as we continue to improve and we’re happy!
Known Issues
Still a few things to clean up:
- Logins don’t work from the big red buttons on the homepage
- After activation, you get brashly redirected to the homepage. We’ll make a better screen/page/confirmation instead.
- Logout isn’t working
- Lack of privacy policy linkage, as discussed in the footnote below
Again, most of this probably belongs on a personal blog about business, but it’s here. Let me know if you have any feedback!
In good health, Mike
* Writing this makes me realize that it’s time for us to revisit our privacy policy and link to it from the new user login popup.
** This seems extremely low, I must investigate this
Comments and Discussion (Powered by the PricePlow Forum)