How Brightpod Doubled It’s Signup Conversions in 9 Months

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:57 am

Brightpod is a Project Management Software for Marketing teams – an interesting tool I stumbled upon sometime back. Having seen them pretty often in search results and on social media, I caught up with their CEO and Founder Sahil Parikh to find out what was going on with their online marketing efforts. Apparently they increased their website traffic 100% in the last 6 months and almost doubled their visitor > signup conversion rate in less than 9 months.

I thought that was pretty impressive and asked Sahil a few more questions to find more about their online marketing strategies.

Here’s the interview.

1. Please explain your role and what you do at your organization/startup?

I am the Founder & CEO of Brightpod. I mainly focus on product marketing, product UI/UX, customer service and business dev. I wear multiple hats and that’s what makes my week interesting.

2. How is your website helping other people?

Brightpod takes the chaos out of marketing collaboration. It helps marketers get clarity on their everyday projects, tasks and deadlines.

3. Explain a recent challenge you faced with online marketing and how you cracked it.

Before November 2013, Brightpod’s website to signup conversion rate was a stagnant 4% – 6%. This meant that for every 1000 people coming to the site, only 40-60 of them would signup to take the trial.

We had designed our website in December 2012. The website was functional but it didn’t have the design crispness that I had hoped for. Plus we had made considerable progress in our development so there were a lot of new things that should have been showcased on the site. It was time for a complete makeover.

We had to take the signup conversion a notch up.

Our goal for the revamp was to have a simple, clean website that make people feel awesome and build trust. Brightpod’s customer base was growing so putting up quotes and testimonials a.k.a. social proof was paramount.

I kept the pages to a minimum. The goal of the website is to convert and not to distract.

I implemented a bunch of things on the Accounts Page (within the app once you signup). For the pricing page I:

• Kept the price in a small font
• Put a quote from a customer.
• Specified that our pricing is not per user per month.
• Did not complicate the visitor with a complex matrix comparing different plans. Instead, I chose only the top features they would be interested in and decided to keep the plans simple to understand. Everyone who signs up will be automatically on the Agency plan for 14 days. I rather have them make a decision on which plan they would like to keep while they are upgrading or downgrading (from within the app) than right now.

I got the site completed by end of November 2013. Next, I tested sites page loading speed and ensured that Brightpod got pretty high scores on all aspects.

Soon enough, we started to get better conversions. Here’s the proof. From ~5% to~10% in less than 9 months!

What in my opinion helped us improve our conversion rates.

• Make your visitors feel awesome.
• Keep your site simple, clean and clutter-free.
• Include quotes from customers and media.
• Make sure your site loads fast.
• Build trust.

I recently blogged about this here.

4. What tools do you use for online marketing?

I use Buffer to schedule tweets, SEMRush to do competitor keyword research, Intercom/ Campaign Monitor to send out email marketing newsletters and Mention to monitor what people are talking about on the social web.

5. Which blogs do you subscribe to?

The blogs I follow are mostly business, SaaS and tech related. Here is what I have setup on Reeder – AVC, The Intercom Blog, Groove Blog, Signal vs Noise, A Smart Bear, Daring Fireball, Both Sides of the Table, Chris Dixon, Derek Sivers, SaaStr, Shawn Blanc, The Angel VC.

6. What has been your biggest challenges with SEO?

I get disappointed when I need to know how a customer found us and I see “(not provided)” under Google Keywords. Why, Google, why?

Another challenge has been to wait for the changes to kick-in. Being in the web business I am used to immediate changes and feedback :)

Edit: Here’s a solution/work around to the (Not Provided) problem.

7. What is your content strategy like?

We don’t have a strategy as such. I try to get content on interesting topics and cater to our target audience – marketing teams.

We have a section on the blog called “How I Stay Productive Series” where we interview startup marketers and learn from how they manage their day. Some of the people we have interviewed are Robby of RescueTime, Thomas of Blossom, Laure of Olark, Christophe of GetApp, Nathan of Draft, Natalie of Wildbit and Rob of Kashflow.

8. How do you measure success in your online marketing efforts?

I try to keep it simple. My top goal is to get qualified traffic flowing to the site and then having them try out Brightpod. So, all our online marketing efforts must translate to increased traffic and better conversion to trial.

I measure traffic to the site (and blog) and conversion to trial at the start of every month.

9. What has been your growth like in terms of traffic in 2014?

Traffic has increased 100% in the last 6 months. There is still long way to go.

10. Any Google Panda/Penguin issues you ran into? If yes, how did you tackle it?

Not yet.

11. What is your product/website roadmap like? Anything new we can expect?

We just added Insights last week.

Next up, we will be working on an API, Mobile version, Notes, Integrations with other apps and improving the on-boarding process.

12. If you were to choose between SEO, PPC, Display and Social Media, which one channel would you choose and why?

SEO anyday. Organic traffic is very very valuable and can feed your site for years to come. It does take a lot of work and patience but if you can nail it then there is nothing like having a steady stream of qualified organic traffic to your site.

If I had another choice then I would choose Social. It’s awesome to know what people are thinking about :)

13. What is your best advice for SEO/Content/Inbound Managers?

Work smart, have fun and stay organized.

Thanks for the interview Sahil. All the best! Keep those numbers up.