Onsite Opt-in
Postscript
Objective
In the world of SMS marketing, there are many compliance rules in place that must be adhered to. One of these is verifying a subscriber’s identity before they can be opted in to marketing messages. Postscript’s customers were experiencing significant drop-off for visitors who had submitted their phone number but not completed verification.
Role
I was the sole designer for the discovery and design phase of this project, working with a product manager and engineering team. My product manager, engineering manager, and I also worked closely with our legal team to ensure compliance throughout the process.
Postscript’s existing method of verifying subscribers was as follows:
A site visitor would enter their phone number into a popup or opt-in form, then they would receive a text message at the number provided. The final step required them to reply “Y” from their device to verify their identity. We call this method “double opt-in.” The average double opt-in completion rate is between 25 and 40%.
Double opt-in also requires visitors to leave the merchant’s site to complete opt-in, and leaves room for confusion (do I reply ‘Y’ or just Y?), resulting in fewer completed opt-ins. Our team was tasked with making this process more seamless and improving the opt-in completion rate.
There were several stakeholders on this project, so communication and alignment were key to make sure everyone was on the same page for what we were building and how it would work. Because of this, I generated many visuals like the one below to share out every step of what an onsite opt-in popup would look like.
I started with a 6-digit code, however I cleared with legal that we could move down to a 4-digit code, which is what is used in the final implementation. I explored various styles of inputs for the verification codes as well. Since a customer’s popup is customizable, I wanted the pattern to work in different contexts, and I also kept the mockups plain as to not style anything in a specific way that would misguide viewers.
As the team was aligning on the visitor/subscriber experience, I was also making affordances for this new pattern within the popup editor. Before we rolled out Onsite Opt-in as our default opt-in method, we offered this method as an option from within the popup editor in the phone number capture section.
The final flow focused on streamlining the verification process, keeping the visitor on the merchant’s site. Using the built-in capabilities of iOS and Android, visitors could easily paste in one-time passcodes from text messages. We know from our data that the majority of merchant traffic (avg ~80%) occurs on mobile, so this solution felt very optimized for our user base. Because of relative the lack of disruption to the visitor experience, as well as the familiarity the average person has with using one-time passcodes for 2FA, this flow was more seamless and less confusing than the previous solution.
Due to the importance of keeping the visitor on the merchant’s site and not forcing them to go to their messaging app to complete verification, we named this feature Onsite Opt-in.
Results 🎉
We initially launched with a beta to a subset of our customers who wanted to try out this new opt-in method. The data coming in was significant: this project was a success. Some of our customers were seeing triple their previous opt-in rates. As a reminder, the previous opt-in method (double opt-in) was seeing an average 25%–40% completion rate. With Onsite Opt-in, the completion rate was 89%.
This project was so successful that Onsite Opt-in is now the only opt-in method for all Postscript popups. Once this launched more broadly, new popups were defaulted to use this pattern, and as we saw more success, we migrated existing popups to use it as well. The graph below shows an example customer’s opt-ins compared across Black Friday Cyber Monday (traditionally the highest peak of opt-ins for merchants all year), and when Onsite Opt-in was turned on.
Here is a case study profiling the experience of one of our biggest customers, who saw up to 3x more opt-ins once they switched to Onsite Opt-in.
“We have gained more subscribers in the last two months using Onsite Opt-in than we have all year.”
For more information on Onsite Opt-in, you can visit the marketing site. Currently, my team continues to support and improve Onsite Opt-in. One of the more recent improvements sends a reminder message to visitors who requested the one-time passcode but never completed opt-in. This has helped to capture some of the ~11% of subscribers that drop off after requesting a code.