Redesigning our signup form

A few months ago we set out to redesign Clearbit's signup form from the ground up. Self-service is a key aspect of our business, so we wanted to make the registration process as painless as possible. We also wanted to use this as an opportunity to show off our own data and automatically pre-fill fields wherever we could.

Step one, the basics

It is universally acknowledged that the less fields in a form, the higher the conversion rate. So we decided to start out with two, just email and password. Here's what it looks like.

The fact that we let anyone sign up for Clearbit for free, and that we're a data company, means we're the focus of quite a few automated signup attacks. An unfortunate side effect of this this is that we have to require a captcha upon signup.

Nobody likes filling these in, so we decided to use our Reveal API to look up the IP of the visitor and only show the captcha to non-corporate IP addresses. One less step for the majority of our customers.

Step two, autofill

Now that we have an email address, we can use it to automatically fill out the rest of the form for our users. We take the email submitted in the first step, look it up with our Enrichment API and then use the response to pre-fill the rest of the form fields on the fly, including the user's name, title, and company information.

This increases conversion by removing friction and shortening the signup process, and gives us an opportunity to showcase some of our demographic and firmographic data. While users have the ability to change any of the autofilled information, the vast majority of users get to just click next.

Step three, questionnaire

The last step is an optional questionnaire. There are lots of ways to use Clearbit, so it helps us to understand the problems our customers are looking to solve. We use the answers to this questionnaire to customize the rest of the logged-in dashboard as well as the email drip campaigns we send out.

Email confirmation for risky signups

As users progress during the signup we do a quick browser fingerprint and profiling to calculate a risk score. We look at factors such as the age of their email, ip location, timezone, and whether they're using a proxy server.

For users with high risk scores, we ask them to go through an email confirmation step. For all others, they progress straight to their dashboard.

Final Thoughts

While there are always improvements to be made, we're pretty excited with this re-design. The 'happy path' for most legitimate users will be to simply enter an email and password to immediately start using the product.

This is a big improvement on our previous signup process and lets us show off our product while simultaneously collecting more data on each signup, and increasing conversion by dramatically shortening the signup experience for our users.