Designing the shift from a freemium product for publishers into a successful SAAS platform for marketers.
Playbuzz was a company that had a suite of products for publishers and content creators. One of those products was a freemium platform that offered a set of interactive content tools to help its users to better engage their readers. A business shift was decided upon and while the marketing team was busy with rebranding Playbuzz into becoming EX.CO, my team and I had a mission to transform the entire product into a platform that could give brands real value through highly effective marketing tools and help the transition from a freemium model into a Saas model with paid subscriptions.
In the course of a month or so, we made an extensive competitors research, questioned relevant stakeholders, conducted interviews with existing and new potential users, made endless whiteboard sessions, created relevant personas, sketched user flows and rough wireframes. All in search for the best possible user funnel that could give our users a system that shows the best value as early on as possible and as a result, help convert them into happy paying customers.
When users arrive at our platform, either from a retargeting campaign, from pressing on a watermark at the bottom of a content built in the platform or organically, they’re asked to share a bit about themselves in order to make the rest of the experience more suited for their needs. For example, on the templates page, users can choose templates based on their specific vertical and kickstart their creation process quickly and effectively.
We tested a few approaches for the trial period - At first we gave access only to the basic features of the platform and locked the premium ones. When users tried to use a premium feature, we showed a modal that encouraged them to upgrade their plan in order to use this feature. After a while, we decided to try a different approach and give users access to all premium features during their 14-day trial period. We assumed that giving our users the access to all the most advanced features, could help them understand the value that they could get out of using our platform and as a result increase the conversion rate.
By focusing the effort on a target audience of content marketing personas, we could reach out to relevant professionals and learn what makes them tick. We understood some key insights and one of the things we did was to change the platform to be more performance oriented. During the creation process the users can test a different variant of the content, add integrations to their preferred tools like Hubspot and after they publish they can see at a very early stage data on how well the content they created performs: engagement rates, dwell time, how many leads they received etc.
We could see improvements in various metrics:
・ Increase in published content created
・Increase of users with more than 100 views on the first day
・Increase of dwell time to the published content
・Increase of engagement rates on interactive content
・Annual Recurring Revenue above expectations
After about a year since launching the redesigned platform, we still have a lot to do and learn. We keep listening to feedback users give us in order to improve our existing system and add new features that could bring real value to them. simultaneously, we try to optimise the user funnel in order to convert more into paying customers and grow the business.