See what happens between a visit and an account.
For marketers at software companies
Plain guides to the steps a visitor takes before and after signing up, one stage at a time. The guides cover the landing page, the signup form, the free trial and the first session of a new account.
Four stops between a visit and an account
Stop 1
Landing pages
This is the first page a visitor sees. A reader learns what it says in its opening lines, what it asks the visitor to do, and how to check that it helped the right person decide.
Stop 2
Form design
This is the stretch between a visitor and an account. A reader learns which fields to ask for and in what order, and what to look at when people stop halfway through.
Stop 3
Free trials
A trial is a promise about time and access. A reader learns how long it runs, what it lets someone do, and how the trial and the pricing page can say the same thing.
Stop 4
Activation
This is the first session of a new account. A reader learns what the account does there, and how to tell when it has reached a result that is useful to its owner.
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Who this is for
- Written for
- Anyone in charge of signups at a software company. That is usually a marketer, a growth lead, or whoever looks after the website and its signup form.
- Not written for
- Coaching a sales team, building a forecast, or hiring marketers. Nothing here can promise that your signups will go up.
General reading, not advice. Where a choice carries legal weight, such as how a form handles personal data, speak to a lawyer first.
How a guide reaches the page
- An AI program on our own server composes the guide.
- A script pairs every claim with a source that the guide lists at the bottom of the page.
- A checking model run by another lab reads the guide one time before the guide goes live.
- If a reader finds a mistake, the corrections page says how to report it and what we do next.
No person rewrites the text. The full method is on the editorial standards page, and the rules for fixing errors are on the corrections page.
What you can check in a guide
A signup is an account. It is not proof that anyone used the product, and it is not the same thing as revenue. So each guide shows where its facts came from:
- Sources
- Each guide ends with a list of its sources and the date we last checked every one.
- Figures
- A figure arrives with its source and a date. Rates from other companies are not borrowed and called typical.
- Examples
- An invented example is labelled as one. There are no made-up customers, quotes or readers.
- Screenshots
- A screenshot shows the date it was taken, because the page it shows may have changed since then.
- Honest gaps
- If we cannot confirm a point, we say so in the guide or we leave that point out.
Who writes it
Every guide carries the SignupFolio Editorial Team name. An AI program composes each one, in the way described in the steps above this section. Questions and corrections go to the team inbox.