Case Study: Split Dragon
The Short Version
- A SaaS for Shopee and Lazada sellers with a free trial anyone could start, which meant a trial list full of people who signed up for everything and engaged with nothing.
- We narrowed to the three segments that made money, added one survey question after signup and built a segmented onboarding funnel per segment in ActiveCampaign on the 9 Steps method.
- 50% more website leads became customers, and sales reps stopped chasing the disengaged.
What They Do
Split Dragon helps sellers on Shopee and Lazada optimize listings and drive sales. Over 3,000 brands, sellers and agencies across Southeast Asia. Think Helium10, built for these two marketplaces: listing optimization tools, product launch support and PPC management.
How I Got Involved
A referral. I worked with the CEO, the head of sales, the head of ops and the marketing manager who ran content.
The Challenge
A 7-day free trial, no credit card. The right call for Southeast Asia, where sellers move fast, sign up for anything that might help and won't put a card down to look around. Ahrefs can ask for a card upfront in the US and still convert. SEA doesn't work that way.
The cost of that choice: a littered list. People registered, barely touched the product and churned, eating sales time and dragging engagement down, which dragged deliverability down with it. The product was valuable to the right users and buried under the wrong ones.
Onboarding was one sequence for everyone. A seller launching a product and a seller fixing an old listing got the same emails, so neither got what they needed inside the trial window.
What We Did
Narrowing the Segments
The platform had far more than three use cases. The first job was finding which ones made the money. Three did:
- Product Launch: notoriously hard on Shopee and Lazada, high intent, high value
- Listing Optimization: the biggest segment and the most diluted, hundreds of thousands of sellers with a listing to improve
- PPC Growth: the most valuable, clients who needed the platform, the optimization service and PPC management together. Pure service revenue
Everything else went to a fourth, general funnel on platform benefits and features. Never turned off: the catch-all for anyone who didn't fit.
Post-Registration Survey
One short survey right after signup: what are you here to do? Friction, on purpose. The argument to the CEO was short: friction here filters out the least committed, saves rep time, produces qualified leads and lifts engagement across the board. Less volume, more focus, more revenue. He got it immediately.
Segmented Funnels in ActiveCampaign
Four parallel branches, one per segment plus the general one, built on the 9 Steps of Email. Each priority funnel showed the right features, handled the right objections and taught in the right order. Inside each branch, behavior did the rest: heavy engagement with certain content or going quiet changed the path. Four branches, a few sub-branches each. Complex enough to work, simple enough to maintain.
Every sequence aimed at education and value before the trial ran out, not conversion pressure. Show them what Split Dragon does for their situation and the conversion follows.
Results
- 50% increase in lead-to-customer conversion from website traffic
- Higher engagement in every priority segment than under the generic sequence
- Better trial-to-paid ratios through focused onboarding
- Sales reps on qualified leads, not disengaged trials
- The segmentation model stayed in use and grew with the platform
Stack
ActiveCampaign · Post-registration survey · Behavioral segmentation · IF-THEN-ELSE branching automation · 9 Steps of Email methodology