The WordPress Reviews Nightmare. How We Lost 50% Of Our WordPress Sign-ups Overnight

I really enjoyed sharing our branding journey last time and thought we’d make it a habit to share more personal stories on Medium.

I shared how we messed up our brand last time. Today, I am going to share how 1 review sank our WordPress sign-ups and how we could have avoided that.

(Promise, I’ll write about more positive things in the future)

The Story Of A WordPress Integration

Our live chat plugin really started taking off after we integrated with WordPress. For a young company like us, it was the occasion to reach a ginormous audience almost effortlessly.

Few words on how the integration works for more context

It is important to note that we are not a WordPress plugin.

The plugin is a way for us to integrate our SaaS solution with WordPress and allow users to add the chat plugin to their website more easily.

So when people install the plugin, they are asked to create a CustomerIcare account or log in to our app with an existing account. They will then use the same admin panel as all our customers.

So, how well did that work for us?

The answer is… very well.

We went from about a hundred sign-ups a month to almost 500 in 5 months. Most signups (you guessed it) came from WordPress.

As you can see, we were experiencing pretty steady growth. Most importantly our paying customers base was growing as well.

Good times!

What changed? The switch from freemium to paid-only

As most startups, we are constantly running new experiments to see what works best for us.

We started at the end of 2014 by launching a Free forever plan. It had some limits but still offered more options than most of our competitors. WordPress users loved it!

… a little too much. And we were having a hard time acquiring paying customers.

So we launched a 1-time payment offer for WordPress users only. Users could get a lifetime license for about $50.

The goal was mostly for us to gain new active customers and verify the hypothesis that people would be ready to pay for more features.

A lot of users retrieved the offer and we validated our hypothesis. It just wasn’t a sustainable pricing model for us.

That’s when we decided to get rid of the free plan all together and have 1 simple paid plan. It worked and we saw a big jump in month to month paid subscriptions.

What Happened? What About The WP Review?

I’m getting there…

The reason why the freemium model didn’t work for us is because we didn’t build the software for a freemium model. We didn’t integrate strong enough incentives to upgrade so no one felt the need to do so.

So the free trial + paid-only option is a good one for us at this stage.

There just were few setbacks we didn’t think would affect us so much:

• Our conversion rate dropped from 3.7% to 2.4%
• We lost super target SEO traffic from the “free live chat” keywords (+ users still reaching our website from these keyword didn’t convert)
• We pissed off users looking for a free tool because of poor communication. And we got a 1 star review on WordPress

We deserved this. And we’ve used the comment as a wake up call to change our copy and be more transparent about our pricing model.

And, here’s what we replied:

The problem? You can’t revert the negative effect of a bad comment. So downloads and signups from WordPress dropped!

I can’t tell what part of it is pure psychology and what part is due to ranking inside WordPress. I’m sure it’s a little bit of both and it’s probably the biggest “crisis” we’ve had so far.

Now, What Did We Learn And What’s Next?

I’ve always been a big fan of transparency and this came as a huge blow for us. We were misleading customers and, deep down, we knew it.

The main problem wasn’t that we wanted to lie, it was that we were slow to react and we were not all on the same page.

Let me tell you how we transitioned from freemium to paid-only options

The short story is that it was bad.

Our main problem was that, since we optimized for the “free” keywords, we had bits of copy advertising free live chat literally everywhere.

We also had articles about our free plan. Comparison with other freemium softwares… You got it, it took us a while to take the free out of everything (and we still missed a lot).

The WordPress 1-star comment was just a time bomb waiting to explode.

Ok, there was the copy to change, that’s understandable. But that’s not it. We didn’t communicate well with potential customers about why the free plan disappeared.

A lot of people who didn’t sign up yet just came asking where our free plan went and we had to deal with the problem on a case-by-case basis.

What would we do differently if you were given a chance to start over?

The key point here is that we would get organized before making the change.

We would communicate better with customers and make sure our descriptions aren’t deceptive.

We knew WordPress users were tough with premium plugins that aren’t clear about their pricing. We knew it, yet we failed.

It’s no use obsessing over the past. Here’s our plan to make things right!

We want to gather more positive reviews from our satisfied WordPress customers.

We are planning few actions in order to do so:

• an email sent through Intercom to engaged users, asking them to share the love and leave a review
• a pop-up inside our application that is shows to WordPress users after they spent few days using the app

We are going to test both methods with different timings and parameters and see what works best. This should help us get our average rating back on track and get more reviews and feedback which is always a good thing.

We are also working hard on optimizing communication within the team to make sure we communicate better about big changes.

We set up a trello board that’s accessible to everyone on the team and where we track new tests, new implementations and new features.

We know there’s a long road ahead of us but we are learning and improving every day.