Short answer: how we multiplied conversion 16x at ARX: we made the website funnel our top priority and kept optimizing it. Traffic grew 4x, conversion grew 16x, and leads went from 150 a month to 10,000. In 2015 DocuSign acquired ARX for nearly $100M. Since 2018, Convert2x has applied the same method to Shopify app funnels.
People tend to think funnel optimization is for B2C startups. It is just as important in B2B. ARX (Algorithmic Research) proved it.
ARX built CoSign, an enterprise digital signature solution for paperless, compliant, secure signature workflows. I joined as Head of Marketing in 2009, four years after CoSign launched.
| Starting point (2009) | |
|---|---|
| CoSign sales | ~$150K a month |
| Customers | 70, paying ~$25K each |
| Website visitors | 15K a month |
| Visitor to lead | 1%, mostly the contact form |
| Leads | 150 a month, for 4 sales managers and a VP |
Within a few months I had a go-to-market strategy with two parts. Conquer the market one niche at a time. Perfect a lead generation machine. Each got about half of the budget and effort.
The niche strategy came from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. Target one niche with a critical, underserved common use case. Concentrate your resources on it. Deliver a full solution. Then expand to adjacent niches.
Our beachhead was clinical trials. Several customers already used CoSign for clinical site visit reports. A monitor visits a trial site, writes and signs a report, and a manager countersigns it and sends it to the pharmaceutical company, all within 10 days. Two express couriers cost $30 per report. A compliant digital signature saved that money.
Every prospect had to pass through our site, so the conversion funnel was the top priority. As I wrote then:
“If we could double our conversion rate, we would double the efficiency of all our digital marketing efforts with a single stroke.”
The old site had no clear funnel. Many navigation options, no hierarchy, no path. Almost every lead came through the contact form. Those are the best leads, but we didn’t want relevant visitors who weren’t ready for sales to disappear. So we created ebooks and white papers as lead capture assets.
We surveyed users, interviewed customers, collected insights from sales managers and analyzed the CRM for the job functions and company types most likely to convert. Three personas came out, in priority order:
The homepage became a gateway for each persona, by priority. The top strip took advanced line managers to our best pitch and a contact form. A Learning Center offered beginners a white paper for their details. The IT pros got their own technology section. Numbers and logos added credibility. An ebook captured details fast. A new free trial sat at the very bottom.
As soon as the new funnel went live, the conversion rate doubled to 2%, mostly from premium content downloads. Then we got obsessed with what wasn’t working. We collected every data point we could: clicks, page views, exits. We spent hours watching user videos. After three months, conversion reached 3%.
We kept testing texts, calls to action, offers, even steps. The free trial, hidden at the bottom of the homepage, did surprisingly well. We made it more prominent and users flocked to it. It became the main call to action and our top lead capture mechanism. We fine-tuned the whole trial funnel: registration page, pricing plans, activation, onboarding. Its success pushed the company to a SaaS model.
Next came landing pages. Every page with significant incoming traffic was optimized to feed a relevant funnel. One surprise: much of our traffic came from Microsoft Office. Signing an Office document needs a certificate from a third party, such as ARX. We traced the steps those users took before reaching us and made the right offer in the right way. Their lead capture rate jumped from 20% to 50%.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Traffic | 4x |
| Conversion rate | 16x |
| Leads per month | 150 to 10,000 |
| Sales | almost 10x |
| Exit | Acquired by DocuSign for nearly $100M (2015) |
Higher conversion slashed our customer acquisition cost. Campaigns became very efficient, and the budget multiplied. Within a couple of years we were closing multi-year seven-figure deals in clinical trials, then expanded to healthcare and to engineering drawing approvals, each with its own landing pages. Most of the 10,000 monthly leads weren’t sales-ready, so we added marketing automation for lead scoring and email flows per persona and industry, then inside sales reps.
I have done funnel optimization for 15 years, and twice achieved a funnel improvement of more than 10x. Since 2018, Convert2x has brought the method to Shopify apps, hands-on with 100+ of them.
The core logic hasn’t changed. Funnel conversion optimization is your best growth hack. Conversion is a series of multiplications: lift one step by 50% and the whole funnel lifts 50%, on every traffic source, with no extra acquisition cost. Improve three steps by 25% each and the funnel doubles (1.25 × 1.25 × 1.25 ≈ 2).
The ARX jump from 1% to 2% has a direct Shopify app version:
| Scenario | At 1% | At 2% |
|---|---|---|
| 10,000 visitors | 100 customers | 200 customers |
| $5,000 of ads, 1,000 visits | 10 customers, $500 each | 20 customers, $250 each |
A Shopify app funnel has about 20 steps between the app store visit and a paying merchant. We start where the gap to benchmark is widest (2026 benchmarks, 400+ active Shopify apps):
| Funnel step | Average | Top quartile |
|---|---|---|
| Visit to install | 19.34% | 30.67% |
| Install to subscribe / trial | 29.89% | 49.96% |
| Visit to new paying customer | 2.12% | 3.41% |
Then comes the same discipline as at ARX. Narrow the leak to one screen. Measure every sub-step. Watch session recordings. Interview the support team. Study competitors. Validate before building, then test the step and the stage. Sometimes the fix is to cut a step, not polish it.
Most Shopify apps can at least double their funnel conversion rate, and doubling can triple new-customer growth. That is the work behind our Shopify app funnel optimization service. When conversion is one part of a bigger push across traffic, conversion and monetization, the Full Growth Project sequences all three. To see where your funnel leaks, get a free Shopify app growth assessment.
We rebuilt the website as a funnel. We defined and prioritized personas, turned the homepage into a gateway for each one, added ebooks and white papers as lead capture assets, then kept fixing what the data and user videos showed was broken. The free trial became the main call to action, and every landing page with real traffic fed a relevant funnel. Conversion grew 16x and traffic 4x.
Traffic grew 4x, conversion rate grew 16x, and leads grew from 150 a month to 10,000. Sales grew by almost 10x, and in 2015 DocuSign acquired ARX for nearly $100M.
Yes. Conversion is a series of multiplications, so a lift in one step lifts every traffic source. Convert2x has applied the method to Shopify app funnels since 2018: benchmark each step, find the weakest, narrow it to one screen, fix it, measure it. Most Shopify apps can at least double their funnel conversion rate.
At the weakest steps against benchmarks. Across 400+ active Shopify apps in 2026, the average app turns 2.12% of app store visitors into new paying customers, and the top quartile 3.41%. Focus first on the steps with the biggest gap to benchmark.
Because doubling conversion doubles the efficiency of every marketing dollar at once. At 1%, $5,000 of ads that bring 1,000 visits buy 10 customers at $500 each. At 2%, the same spend buys 20 customers at $250 each, and you can market more aggressively.
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