How we increased our SaaS conversions by 40% with low-code Checkout flow experiments

We've been working with Mitch Flindell on an exciting new project at Bonjoro; a low/no code solution to test and improve all our in app conversion & expansion rates.

Its early days but what we've been able to do in very little time is kind of mind-blowing - initial results show a 40% increase in conversion from trial upgrade pathways, and we're just getting started, read on to learn more!

Like all great ideas, it started over beers

I've always been a little obsessed by pricing and packaging strategy, and over the years on Bonjoro, and ran hundreds of small pricing tests.

Over a beer with Mitch (who built Bonjoro V1 alongside me), I was venting about how I wanted to test some new upgrade and checkout experiences, but kept getting deprioritized in favour of feature development due to our limited resources. Whilst I understood the priorities, this test was purely front-end, so why did it end up sitting in the backlog for months - it wasn't an engineering problem?

We kept talking about this, one beer turned into a few more, and at the end of the evening we decided to see if we could build a quick "no-code" checkout builder for Bonjoro, that I could experiment with, without disturbing our engineers.

The project was named Plandalf.

No (low) code Conversion experiences live in minutes....

I handed over our designs, and over the next few months, we built a crude system that would allow me to push up new upgrade experiences to our users, without roping in our engineers (well, apart from 2 lines of code).

The idea? If product owned the checkout flow, we could rapidly test different designs and targeting strategies to boost conversions—without blocking the product roadmap. More experiments, faster insights, and a happier team. ??

Evaluating our existing checkout flow

We knew our existing checkout experience was pretty clunky and believed we could improve conversions and upgrades with a few tactical changes:

• As much as I rate stripe, bouncing users out of the platform to pay on the stripe landing page caused a bunch of frustration for users as they would lose half built templates and setup
• The Stripe page has minimal design control, even simple things like including a monthly / annual toggle are not possible.
• We used our default multi-plan upgrade path for all upgrade flows, could a more targeted approach convert better?

So we decided to look at an in-line upgrade experience that kept users in the platform while they upgraded, and further more, could offer different plans and messaging depending on the feature and user type.

Change 1: A feature led approach

We started with one of our upgrade features called "Rollups" (group video sending). When a user clicked to upgrade for this feature, rather than show all plans and all features, we would focus on that specific feature and why they might want to upgrade for this.

• Less distraction from plan & feature comparison tables
• More focus on offer, design and a single CTA

Change 2: In-line upgrade experience

Next, instead of bouncing users out to the Stripe checkout page, we built an in-line checkout experience so that users could flow through without ever leaving the platform.

• We specifically built this with our Templates feature in mind - where upgrade is often prompted "Mid-template build". Now users could upgrade and return to editing - no data lost!
• The in-line approach also allows us to experiment with showing targeted social proof alongside the payment window, and test other things such as Annual / Monthly toggle designs.

Change 3: Targeted variants

Mitch surprised us with a variant function that allow us to show different messaging, design or even pricing, to different customers. We started relatively simply with slightly different offers present to users:

• If they were a Solo or Team user
• If they were converting from a Free plan, or upgrading from an existing paid plan.

We could take this much further, targeting users based on location, product usage, company size etc...but small steps to start.

Launching these new flows live.

As promised - once Mitch had the system in place, I could upload my Figma designs, and they were up on the test server to experiment with minutes later. We pulled in Bonjoro's stripe data to direct users to plans, and setup took our engineering time around 30minutes (its now down to 5!)

We first tested our new flows on the staging server, and then slowly rolled these out to the live server over a week or so.

The results - 40% uplift on our first test!

Our baseline conversion from free to paid fluctuates around 10-12%. Our new workflow for the badge upgrade came in at 16.6%, and we haven't even started refining this yet.

I don't think we ran another test in the last year that got a 40%+ uplift

Its early days, and we are still digging into the data but already this has completely changed the product teams approach to how we look at conversions and upgrades.

• We are already designing our next tests to see if we can beat these numbers
• Starting to roll this out across all our upgrade paths
• Taking an iterative approach to conversion experiences vs changing once a year (maybe) if we have spare resources.

More insight into user behaviour, pricing and packaging strategy:

Perhaps the biggest unexpected benefit from this experiment has been the new insight we've started to gather from this next level view of user conversion behaviour.

We can now specifically track revenue to journeys and, and just this week we launched a third experience, and we're seeing wildly different behaviour, which is super interesting. Why do some features convert so much better? Why do some drive more annuals and others more monthlys?

It’s making us rethink not just conversion flows, but our entire pricing and packaging strategy.

Interested in experimenting with your own experiences?

Its early days, but anyone interested in checkout experiences and improving conversions, you should check out Plandalf Checkout Experiences or reach out to me directly, would love to see if this is something we can help more teams with.