Plan

All prospective customers of Smartsheet start their trials in the same place: the Smartsheet website’s trial signup form. One of the key challenges with this form experience is that the sales team needs good data to properly score and route prospective leads, but asking for all this information upfront greatly reduces form submission rates.

Partnering with the demand generation team, the web team developed a strategic A/B testing plan to validate the integration of the ZoomInfo FormComplete API. This API serves as a data augmentation solution designed to:

  1. Reduce friction: Allow users to submit a shorter form (reduced field count).
  2. Maintain data quality: Leverage the API to retrieve and append supplementary, GDPR-compliant, publicly available firmographic and contact data to the submission record.

Process

For the A/B test, I turned the single-step form into a two-step experience with the augmentation of data from the API. Within Optimizely, our A/B testing platform, I integrated the API via JavaScript and built the updated UI/UX of the two-step experience using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

With the API integrated, the second step of the form experience is dynamic: it only prompts the user for data that ZoomInfo was unable to augment. This means that for the second step of the form experience, the user would likely enter less information than on the original full contact form.

Visual of form, with email input empty
Step one: user is prompted for email (app region and SSO options are also presented).
Visual of same form with email input completed and two additional inputs presented to the user
Step two: user is only asked for additional data not augmented by ZoomInfo.

Impact

This API integration and two-step redesign boosted form submission rates by 22% for users submitting with non-ISP (business) email addresses, which resulted in sales getting a much higher volume of qualified leads. It is estimated that for organizations with over 50 employees, this initial test added over 3,800 new trials per month. This integration was considered a pivotal change to our trial experience at Smartsheet.

Following this A/B test, I continued to iterate on the trial form functionality on several additional projects:

  1. Worked closely with our Principal Engineer and MarTech team to integrate the FormComplete API to into nearly all forms on the primary Smartsheet site.
  2. A/B tested an email-only form that still sends any ZoomInfo augmented data to sales, which reduced the need for user input even further.
  3. Tested how the business requirement to implement different Smartsheet app regions impacts the UI/UX of the form.
  4. Currently, I'm working with UI/UX designers and numerous Smartsheet app stakeholders to A/B test the best way to present SSO options to users in lieu of the traditional form fill. The first round of testing has further increased trials by up to 29%.