What Strava’s bold approach can teach you about conversion

Fitness tracker Strava needs little introduction. It’s one of the most popular apps for cyclists and runners, with unique features that both challenge users whilst bringing the community together around the sports they love - even going so far as to bill themselves as the ‘social network for athletes’.

Subscription is central to Strava’s business model, with two distinct tiers - a base level free tier and a paid tier. Whilst creating an account can be achieved through email or social sign on, it’s only when users download the app that they get access to the high value feature set. For Strava the app download and use is critical as it’s the point at which they are able to learn behavioral data on their customers and drive deeper engagement and progress from the free to the paid tier.

As a result of their subscription model Strava has taken a bold approach to driving conversion, which has a lot of applicable learnings for businesses of any size.

A clearly defined center of their ecosystem

To develop an effective conversion strategy Strava has clearly defined the center of their business ecosystem - the paid membership and app download. Whilst this may seem obvious, many businesses fail to clearly define where they are ultimately pathing users to. Without defining this it’s impossible to establish a streamlined approach to move users through. All of their conversion approach is designed around maximizing the efficiency of moving users to the center point of the paid membership

Streamlined pathing

Strava knows they need no introduction and it’s pivotal to how they have built out an effective pathing strategy. Too often brands clutter their homepage with options, potentially giving users the option to go in multiple different directions. This creates both the potential for overwhelming confusing messaging but also a leaky funnel as there are too many places to lose users. After defining the center of their ecosystem Strava made a bold choice for their homepage. Knowing anyone who was coming to the homepage directly would already have an understanding of the brand and be close to converting, they made that conversion as easy as possible.

The Strava homepage has two very simple roles, convert people into known users and let current members log in, that’s it. There is one very simple value proposition ‘The #1 app for runners and cyclists’, no brand imagery other than the product you can experience if you sign up. It’s actually very hard to explore the strava site any further from here, because they want users who are on the verge of converting to become members.

No options barrier

Strava knows the importance of converting a user from anonymous to known, they want to get you into their ecosystem as quickly as possible. Their pathing approach makes this streamlined but they also don’t put a choice barrier in front of you. Your first option is not to chose free or paid, it’s to create an account. Options can be a barrier so they’ve removed them from your initial choice and made that part of the later onboarding.

Simple sign up

The sign up process is as simple as it can possibly be, age verification and then a number of the most used one click sign on options. Brands often put multiple elements in the sign up form that ultimately can be gathered at a later part of the onboarding process. Every extra form you ask a user to fill in creates another potential leak in the funnel where they can fall off and Strava knows this, so they avoid it.

Content to expand acquisition

Whilst their homepage pathing is as simple and efficient as it could be, they haven’t neglected other entry points for acquisition. They have pages that describe in depth the features that are available, the community you can connect with, the subscription options and a full content marketing blog for SEO and social distribution. These are all designed with what is best described as sideways traffic in mind.

When people go to a homepage they go directly to it through typing the URL, but when people search for something, hit a social link or an advert they drop sideways into a particular page. Strava has built out an effective content strategy to drive this type of acquisition - they just don’t clutter their homepage with those pages as navigation options in the homepage header.

Ultimately by clearly defining their ecosystem and the role of each page Strava is able to maximize the efficiency of its funnel. It’s also important to recognize that by organizing it’s owned platform in such a structured way it can more effectively spend its paid marketing budget to drive conversion.

THE TAKEAWAY:

Define your ecosystem and be clear on where you are establishing the known relationship with users

Create the simplest possible path to sign up

Develop an ecosystem approach to acquisition through the right pages and content.

GO DEEPER: