DocSend Doubles Website Conversion Rate In Less Than a Year.

Docsend provides real-time sharing, secure access and engagement tracking for business critical documents. Their target market has drastically different use cases and buyer personas, from entrepreneurs to sales reps to finance professionals. DocSend consistently invests in deep understanding of their customers' needs, and consequently is able to quickly iterate and deliver value across personas and verticals.

Recipe for Success

On every personalization journey, naturally questions come up around what to do and in what order to create consistent results. It’s almost like cooking. While the particulars of your business like your industry, ICP, number of target accounts, etc. will play a role, certain recipes rise to the top.

DocSend’s strategic recipe for achieving its fantastic results was led by Jenny Miller, on DocSend’s Growth team. The strategy included several layered iterations, meaning DocSend tried a tactic, saw the results and then layered in a new tactic to keep increasing the lift in conversion.

Identifying the Core Ingredients

DocSend is a horizontal SaaS product that serves many diverse use cases and personas. That makes personalization of the DocSend experience on the company’s website––and inside the DocSend application––a key part of the company’s marketing strategy.

DocSend first started by focusing on two of their core customer segments––startups and VCs. They then customized the copy and value props for those core segments. For example, when a startup visited the DocSend home page, the headline specifically called out startups, and the sub-header touted the benefits of using DocSend to send pitch decks to investors. When VCs visited, they saw a similar treatment for their specific use case.

Beginning Iterations

DocSend continued by adding an enterprise segment, and personalizing the ‘social proof’ section to include logos of enterprise customers. This tactic earned them a 260% conversion lift on these pages. DocSend then included the same ‘social proof’ personalization for the Startup and VC segments.

Until this point, DocSend had been using Clearbit to identify users. DocSend was also able to  expand its audience coverage by including behavioral data. Behavioral data in Mutiny allowed Jenny and her team to define use cases by creating an audience of visitors who clicked on specific URLs or visited specific pages on DocSend’s site. For example DocSend could map its ‘Startup Fundraising’ pillar page to a use case named ‘Startups’ and its ‘Sales Engagement’ pillar page to a use case named ‘Sales professionals’. Then when someone that was not identified by Clearbit visits one of these URLs, they are served the appropriate personalization.

Another instance where DocSend used behavioral data was to identify visitors who are sales professionals. This is important because sales is also one of DocSend’s core use cases, but it is a role and not an industry. Behavioral data allowed DocSend to personalize for this audience as well.

To add richness and depth to their recipe by expanding audience coverage even further, DocSend included a modal where visitors without an IP or Behavioral tag could self-identify. But this didn’t just expand coverage for personalization, it contributed to a nearly 29% conversion to trial from these modals.

Keep Adding Spice

You can begin to see how DocSend started with a base and then began layering in elements, almost like making a cake––a very smart cake that converts leads into customers.

The next step after personalizing for their core customer segments and roles was to focus on upselling and delivering more value to current customers. Part of how Jenny and her team did this was by segmenting by product plan type. This works by Mutiny identifying the visitor's company through IP and matching it to Salesforce records to identify the current product or plan the visitor is using. Users on DocSend’s free plan saw a prompt to upgrade, and users on the basic tier saw an offer to move to the next tier. To add more nuance to the experience, DocSend used first-party data (gathered when the user signed up) to further personalize by their use case.

Jenny and her team wanted to be sure that they really were delivering value to DocSend customers. Not only because they believe in realizing the potential of a great product but also because they are keenly aware that as businesses grow, their needs change and their use cases multiply. For example, while a founder might buy DocSend to send pitch decks while fundraising, they might need other use cases like sales enablement down the line. So, the DocSend Growth team created banners that drive customers to a personalized resource center where they can explore how DocSend meets their growing needs.

Once the customer lands on the page, they are greeted with a resource center that is customized to their use case and includes their name on the page. This is a simple personalization inside of Mutiny, but it feels 1:1.

Final Touches

Finally, DocSend has several pages translated for different languages. The Growth team’s initial approach was to automatically redirect users from countries where those languages are spoken to the appropriate translated pages. But they saw better results by creating a banner that asked if the user wanted to be sent to the translated page.

For the most part, these personalizations are simple to execute, and take less than an hour a week to manage. And individually they got great results, like 260% conversion lift on personalized logos in a social proof section, or 29% conversions to trial from a modal that asks customers their interests. But the process of learning and optimizing combined with these tactics is what led to DocSend’s overall website conversion rate to double for visitors that were offered these personalization experiences. And like any great recipe, the ingredients and the process are equally important when it comes to making something exceptional.

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