Framer: Increasing Sign Ups Masterclass

Henry here, welcome to B2B Growth Insights, where I take my learnings from being at Pricepoint Partners to showcase how the best B2B SaaS companies do monetisation, unique top of funnel strategies, and funnel optimisation. 

A summary of today’s article: 

• 🏠 Framer’s Landing Page: What they get right and wrong with 4 tips on how to increase CVR by tailoring landing pages for different customer segments & using copy from their best ad campaigns. 

• 💰 Framer’s Signup Flow: Breaking down their current process and what they could learn from Spotify to dramatically boost the number of new sites launched. 

• 📧 Email follow up sequences: Examining 3 UI concepts for how Framer could get better at converting enterprise clients. 

Who are Framer?

Framer launched in 2014 by Dutch entrepreneurs Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, and has transformed into a full-fledged website builder with a freemium business model democratising access to professional-grade web design tools. 

They’ve set themself apart from other site builders offering static templates by being known for gorgeous pre-built animations and transitions without writing code, attracting clients like Zapier, Dribble, and Perplexity. 

Framer’s Landing Page 

Now don’t get me wrong, Framer’s site is predictably gorgeous. They have some beautiful animations, one clear CTA, and even show off some great examples of sites built with Framer below the fold. 

However, I think a lot could be done to improve this to better convince new users to sign up. 

First up is their copy, “the internet is your canvas”. For an audience of non-nerds who may not know Framer this doesn’t do a great job explaining what they do - is it a whiteboard tool? Can you annotate interesting web pages? The sub-headline is much clearer but presumes people are thorough enough to not skip past this. 

The importance of this shouldn’t be underestimated as improving your landing page is one of the most effective ways to drive improved ROI of your marketing. It’s much easier to get your homepage conversion rate from 3% -> 4% adjusting your copy than trying to reduce your cost per lead on Facebook by 33%. 

One great way to do this is to see which ads are performing best as this shows what messaging is resonating most with prospective customers (a rough proxy to find these is to look in Facebook’s Ad Library to see which ads have been running the longest). It’s also a great way to reduce a common issue with onboarding, where there’s fundamental misalignment between promises made in ads and what they see on your homepage. 

For Framer we can see their best performing ads are focused around low cost website launching and pre-built templates. 

So why not instead try to use these learnings and highlight this value prop with dead simple copy?

Further add in some social proof to highlight their prestige and reduce the commitment associated with your CTA, e.g. ‘Browse Templates’ vs “Start your site” which immediately makes the user know they’ll have to give over their personal info and Framer will be off to the races! 

2 ways to improve even further:

✅ Tailor landing pages to the use case: Instead of lighting money on fire by sending every user to the same, generic landing page they should tailor ads to the different ICPs they serve (SaaS, agencies, blogs, e-commerce etc.) before directing you to a niche landing page. 

This helps Framer feel like a solution tailor made for each ICP and enables them to recommend more relevant templates. 

✅ Show templates on the homepage: Whilst “Browse Templates” is certainly lower commitment than “Start your site” it’s still a traditional button meaning users may recognise this will start an account creation process. Instead get them excited first by allowing them to browse 3-5 templates relevant for their use case where each has the option to start using it. 

Framer’s Current Onboarding

For those that create an account it’s a pretty painless process for the most part. It’s simple, despite their email verification requirement, consisting of only 4 screens with no unnecessary info requested such as phone numbers. 

Pick whether to sign up via Google or email, tell them your name before agreeing to their T&Cs and in under 2 minutes you’ll have access. Not bad, not bad at all. 

The strengths surrounding their simple signup continue into onboarding, providing you with a tutorial to watch and a checklist of actions to get your first site up and running. 

This is pretty good! Instead of showing you 5 onboarding screens with nice graphics that everyone and their mother’s skip this makes it more interactive and forces you to learn by doing. 

However, despite all this the UI still has a pretty steep learning curve, and Framer doesn’t do a great job at explaining how to get started or what all these buttons to the left are (what are collection lists exactly?) 

3 Ways Framer Could Skyrocket Revenue

Instead I think Framer has the opportunity to fundamentally reinvent their onboarding flow to not only boost new accounts created but skyrocket their ‘New Sites Launched’ metric. 

1. Tailor activation & sign up nudges based on pages viewed 

Whilst PLG is a great business to help reduce CAC the enterprise sale is where the real money comes which means they need to do a much better job at personalising the journey for these clients. 

One of the most impactful quick wins we’ve found with clients at Pricepoint was building them custom software that helps identify anonymous web visitors and which pages they’ve viewed. 

Because roughly only 3% of visitors contact sales this means you miss out on the other 97% of high intent leads visiting your site. 

De-anonymising traffic only works in the US but means you can see their name, but more importantly their job title and the company they work at. Pair this with the pages they were visiting before they bounced (e.g. pricing page, contact sales or even technical pages like documentation) and you can set up incredibly powerful email nurture sequences highlighting your differentiation and handling their specific objections. 

1. Launch a loginless experience

Following on from previous recommendations on reducing the initial commitment of getting started there’s an opportunity to help users create a site ready for publishing before asking for account details so they can save the progress they have made. 

This is what makes Spotify special. Whilst typical SaaS companies' free-to-paid conversion rate ranges between 2-7%, Spotify converts 42% of free users to their paid plan! 🤯

They achieve this by letting users test out Spotify before having to sign up, massively reducing the time-to-value and energy spent to seeing the value of Spotify. 

This is an extreme version of the sunk cost bias SaaS companies leverage in onboarding asking for personal info at the end. If you’ve spent 5-10 minutes designing your site it’s now a tiny ask for your email address to save your progress. 

Best practices suggest that to optimise onboarding, you should sort each action in descending completion rate. Your lowest converting actions will have a far greater chance of converting if placed at the end of onboarding due to a user’s sunk cost bias. - Jake Mor

Personal information like name, age, email and phone number all fit into this bucket of low completion rates because you know you’ll be contacted by marketers for eternities to come so Framer’s flow is doing this the wrong way round. 

3. Email next steps to users who haven’t published

But no matter how good your onboarding is you can’t expect every new user to complete the necessary actions which is where email follow up sequences come in. 

PLG is incredibly tough to make work for companies with complex products which is where email follow up sequences come in, which have to be absolutely dialed in. 

The vast majority of users won’t complete all the steps needing to launch their site the first time they create a Framer account but it’s imperative to keep momentum high because a user’s motivation will only decrease and the likelihood they find another solution gets higher and higher. 

To counter this effective email sequences contain the following:

✅ Positive affirmation: Include some affirmation that they’ve taken a great first step/made great progress to make them feel good about Framer and give motivation to keep going. 

✅ Non-sales emails: Not everything has to be a transaction. Help users reach their goal by showing them great & relevant video tutorials that humanise the brand and you’ll get users excited to open emails. 

✅ Highlight next steps: Guide users through your product with emails suggesting one simple action. Don’t overcomplicate it for them!

✅ Show off case studies: Help visualise success by telling stories of Framer’s positive impact on companies similar to theirs. 

If you found this article interesting and would like some help improving your companies monetisation or top of funnel book a chat with me. We only work with B2B SaaS companies but if this fits you I’d love to provide some 3 actionable tips, free of charge.