Streamlining Hubspot’s checkout experience

Setting the stage
When customers (free and paid) are using HubSpot’s marketing tools, they will occasionally see upgrade banners prompting them to upgrade to a more advanced version of Marketing Hub. For free users specifically, the most common reason they would see these banners is to remove HubSpot branding by purchasing Marketing Hub Starter.

Working group

This project was being run by the Growth Embedded Buying Experience triad, consisting of:

• Senior Product Designer

• Product Manager 

• Me (UX Lead, Senior Content Designer)

• Tech Lead

We also worked closely with partners like:

• Legal Council 

• Senior UX Researcher 

• Product Analyst

Identifying the opportunities

While our upgrade points for removing branding were fairly profitable (4.7% monetization rate), the user flow was long and the drop-off rates were high.

Forming a hypothesis

We hypothesized that a significant number of users who were interested in upgrading to Marketing Hub Starter were not doing so because their path to purchase was unclear and/or overwhelming.

Finding a solution

Based on that hypothesis, we theorized that by decreasing the number of steps it took to make a Starter purchase and clarifying some of the content along the way, we could increase ecommerce monetization rates.

It was important, however, that we increase ecommerce monetization rates without causing a net decrease in revenue by reducing product-qualified leads (PQLs), which often lead to cross-sells and upsells. 

Evaluating and mitigating risk

The checkout process was as lengthy as it was because HubSpot isn’t just selling $50 per month products. We also allow users to purchase Professional products online, which are $800+ with annual commitments. Therefore, largely for the latter audience, certain legal and compliance standards had to be met.

For that reason, we would not make these design changes across all ecommerce purchase flows—only Starter. We would also only conduct this experiment on the specific Marketing Hub Starter purchase flows from remove branding upgrade points to mitigate risks while evaluating potential gains.

Following the data

I worked closely with the designer, analyst, and researcher to identify key data points that would inform our design:

• The largest point of drop-off was our pricing page. User feedback suggested it became unclear what they needed to purchase in order to remove branding. 

• User research suggested the upgrade modal that appears after the banner was redundant to banner copy. 

• Confirming your contacts is very important when you have a lot of contacts to import, but not as important for Starter users, who tend to come in with far fewer contacts. 

• User research suggested the ‘Getting Started’ guide is important to new Starter customers, but disruptive to those who purchase Starter to remove branding when they are in the middle of a task.

Creating a design

The ‘Getting Started’ guide was emailed to users so it would not disrupt them from completing their tasks.

Analyzing the results

After running the experiment for two weeks, we found the results supported our hypothesis.

• Ecommerce monetization rates for Marketing Hub Starter increased by 69% at 95% significance with no noticeable cannibalization in PQLs or assisted monetization.

Additionally, during the experiment we saw no increase in Support tickets and no legal issues. 

After doing a final check-in with Legal, we decided to implement this change.