When you download the Meetup app—on both Android and iOS—the first screen to greet you gives you the option to sign in and not much else. That’s fine for people who are familiar with Meetup, say on a desktop browser. But it doesn’t give new users the opportunity to explore the app and understand what it has to offer. That’s what we set out to fix.
Exploring the Meetup app
If you’re coming from an app store or a Google search with no or little experience using Meetup, there’s a lot you can learn from exploring the app. A first-time user may want to know if there are any events or groups in their area that might interest them before they sign up. Making someone sign up first can mean fewer people will give the app a try.
In order to give these prospective users a “taste” of what they can find on Meetup before having to jump through the sign-up hoops, we added the “Continue as guest” button to our Android splash screen.
Meetup guests now have immediate access to the Explore tab of the app, which allows them to browse through events and groups in their area, search for specific topics, and view event details (for non-private events). This is similar to what web users have access to the first time they land on Meetup.
If a guest finds something they’re interested in and tries to take an action like RSVPing to an event, joining a group, or navigating to personalized areas of the app (messages or notifications), they’re presented with a registration pop-up prompting them to sign up.
How Android users are using the new feature
It’s been a few weeks since we launched this feature and we can see that over half of Android users who don’t yet have a Meetup account choose to browse the app before registering when offered the opportunity. Almost half of the people who already have an account go straight to the Log in button.
What happens after a guest signs up?
We were also curious about how those who browse the app before signing up compare to those who don’t. We’re most interested in how often they RSVP to an event, one of our core metrics.
Users who browsed as guests before signing-up are more likely to RSVP within the first day (~52% end up RSVPing after browsing as a guest vs. 41% of users who sign up right away). This suggests that they found a group or event they were interested in, and were more likely to take action after signing up.
Conversely, and as expected, some users don’t sign up after browsing, which means that the overall total number of RSVPs is less for users who experienced the app as a guest. The guest experience allows users to make a more informed decision, and the resulting new registrations are considered higher-intent users.
Our next steps
Given these results, we’ll be expanding our analysis to better understand how guests are using this new feature, what specifically they’re finding useful, and what functionality is missing or causing them to drop off before registering. We can then determine what other parts of the logged-in experience would be good candidates for making available to guests.
We’ll continue iterating on Android and, once we feel we have it right, we’ll be bringing those learnings to our iOS app too. New to Meetup? Give it a try!
Last modified on June 23, 2021
