What customer segment should you focus on when you begin to have both SMB customers (small and medium size) and large enterprise accounts? This is a crossroad that many SaaS companies face as their product reaches maturity and they begin to move up-market. 

Thanks to their deep understanding of their users and their buying patterns, Sprig created a simple solution: two distinct customer journeys depending on the size of the customer. 

1. A product-led motion for SMBs: accounts with less than 150 employees sign up for a free trial that automatically onboards them onto the product.

2. A sales-led motion for enterprise: accounts with over 150 employees must first speak with sales before getting set up with the product.

But Brynne Burgess, Sprig’s Director of Growth Marketing, didn’t want to simply route inbound trial requests to the sales team. Brynne wanted a more elegant way to separate out these two buyer experience flows.

To do so, Sprig used Mutiny to create distinct journeys based on the company size of the visitor. Enterprise accounts would see a CTA button (call to action) on the homepage that says ‘Get started’, while SMB visitors would see ‘Start for free’. 

But as Brynne looked through the conversion results, the data coming in was surprising.

“We were seeing a decrease in our conversion rate when we changed the CTA for SMB visitors from ‘Get started’ to ‘Start for free’”.

“This was very strange, because we typically see CTAs that include the word free out-perform all other variations,” recalled Brynne.

Conversion rate before personalizing customer journey...

Brynne was surprised to see a 12% decrease in conversion rate when the CTA was changed to 'Start for free'

And after personalizing the customer journey.

Once the visitor journey was personalized, Brynne saw a huge lift in conversion rates.

Together with a Mutiny Growth Strategist, Brynne took a close look at the customer journey to see what was going on.

What she found was when website visitors in the SMB segment (less than 150 employees) clicked the 'Start for free' CTA button, they were shown a trial signup page with similar content as enterprise customers.

“We realized that the trial signup page included language tailored to enterprise customers requesting a demo from a sales representative. Although anyone with less than 150 employees starts for free by default, the copy made it seem like they still needed to talk to sales before getting started.”

The landing page form that SMB customers would see after clicking 'Get started free'. Notice how the copy suggests they still need to talk to sales and there's no mention of getting started free.

Brynne and the Sprig team hypothesized that they could improve trial conversion rates by: 

1. Showing a relevant personalized CTA to website visitors based on their company size.

2. Sending visitors to a signup page with content relevant to the customer segment.

Get clear on your customer’s website journey

As your SaaS product matures, the amount of use-cases that it serves will begin to grow as well. Sprig knows this challenge all too well as they’ve recently experienced explosive user growth and product development.

“We now have the ability to funnel SMBs into a free account plan. This greatly frees up the time of our sales team who can now focus on converting larger enterprise customers. But both those customer journeys are totally different, so we needed to be very purposeful with what CTAs and messaging we put in front of our customer segments so they go through the right buying journey,” said Brynne.

Brynne realized that it was crucial for visitors from the SMB segment to be shown content relating to getting a free trial, not scheduling a demo. This insight allowed her and her team to simplify the customer journey to focus on a single conversion action for each segment.

Align landing page messaging with the CTA

With a clear customer journey mapped, Brynne shifted her focus to the content on the trial landing page. 

“SMB customers were taken to a landing page once they clicked a button with the prompt: ‘Start for free’. But once they arrived on the trial landing page, the language was very general. That misalignment led to a -12% decrease in our conversion rate.”

The CTA that SMB traffic saw said 'Start for free', but then they were taken to a general signup page. This misalignment led to -12% conversion rate.

Write segment-specific landing page copy

With the source of the problem diagnosed, Brynne went to work creating a variation of Sprig’s trial landing page with content relevant to her SMB segment. Using Mutiny, she created an experience that changes the landing page copy based on the segment of the visitor. Now, when an SMB visitor lands on the trial landing page, they’re shown a page with messaging aligned to their expectations: answer a few questions before creating their free account. And visitors who fall into the enterprise segment get shown a landing page that sets visitors up to speak with a Sprig expert.

Learn from Benoit Leggieri at Livestorm how to approach segmenting your self-serve and enterprise visitors.