Case Study: Split Dragon
What They Do
Split Dragon is a SaaS platform helping sellers on Shopee and Lazada optimize their listings and drive sales. Trusted by over 3,000 brands, sellers, and agencies across Southeast Asia — comparable to Helium10 but built specifically for these two marketplaces. The platform combines listing optimisation tools, product launch support, and PPC management services.
How I Got Involved
Referral. I worked directly with the CEO and a small group of core stakeholders: the head of sales, head of ops, and a marketing manager who handled content production.
The Challenge
Split Dragon operated a 7-day free trial with no credit card required — a deliberate and correct decision for the Southeast Asian market, where sellers move fast, sign up for everything that might help, and won't put down a card just to get started. Trying to introduce payment at signup would have killed acquisition. This is a fundamental difference from markets like the US, where tools like Ahrefs can require a credit card upfront and still convert. SEA doesn't work that way.
The problem: that same eagerness to sign up produced a littered list. People registered, barely engaged, and churned — consuming resources from the sales team and dragging down email engagement metrics, which compounded the deliverability and conversion problem over time. The platform had real value for the right users, but it was being obscured by volume without qualification.
The existing onboarding was generic. Every user got the same emails regardless of why they'd signed up, what they were trying to do, or which part of the platform was actually relevant to them. A seller launching a new product and a seller trying to improve an existing listing have completely different needs — treating them identically meant neither got what they needed in the trial window.
What We Did
Narrowing the Segments
Split Dragon actually had many more use cases than three — the platform was broad. The first task was helping them identify which segments made the most money and deserved dedicated funnel investment. We landed on three:
- Product Launch: Notoriously complex on Shopee and Lazada — high intent, high value
- Listing Optimization: The largest segment but also the most diluted — hundreds of thousands of sellers on these platforms have listings they want to improve
- PPC Growth: The highest-value segment — clients here needed the platform, the listing optimization service, and PPC management together. Pure service revenue.
Everything else — the remaining use cases — fell into a fourth general funnel covering platform benefits and features. That branch was never turned off; it remained the catch-all for anyone who didn't fit neatly into the three priority segments.
Post-Registration Survey
Introduced a short survey immediately after signup asking users about their primary goal. This added a small amount of friction — intentionally. The argument to the CEO was straightforward: adding friction here filters out the least committed signups, reduces wasted sales rep time, produces more qualified leads, and improves email engagement metrics across the board. Less volume, more focus, more revenue. He understood it immediately.
Segmented Funnels in ActiveCampaign
Built four parallel automation branches — one per segment plus the general branch — using the 9 Steps of Email methodology. Each of the three priority funnels was tailored to the specific use case: the right features highlighted, the right objections addressed, the right educational content delivered in the right order.
Within each branch, behaviour-based branching added further logic: if a user engaged heavily with certain content or went quiet, the sequence adapted. Four main branches, each with several sub-branches based on activity — complex enough to be effective, not so complex it became unmaintainable.
The goal of every sequence was education and value demonstration before the trial expired — not direct conversion pressure. Get them to understand what Split Dragon could do for their specific situation, and the conversion followed naturally.
Results
- 50% increase in lead-to-customer conversion from website traffic
- Higher engagement rates across all priority segments compared to the previous generic sequence
- Improved trial-to-paid ratios through focused onboarding
- Sales reps spent time on qualified leads rather than chasing disengaged trial users
- Segmentation model remained in use and was expanded as the platform grew
Stack
ActiveCampaign · Post-registration survey · Behavioral segmentation · IF-THEN-ELSE branching automation · 9 Steps of Email methodology