‘One Click Better’ Strategy: How the Small Change Boosted Active Subscriber Base by 16%

Jooble is a job aggregator: we attract users to various types and categories of job listings and monetize traffic through job seekers’ active engagement with relevant job content that matches their interests — including clicks, detailed views, and applications.

When users visit our site, they encounter both paid and free content.

While we don’t monetize free content directly, it serves as an excellent source for expanding our retention channel base, specifically, our email subscribers.

For these free job listings, users can subscribe to similar job opportunities via pop-ups that appear when they open a vacancy or attempt to apply for it. We’ll dive into our testing of these pop-ups below.

The Challenge: Understanding User Journey

The user journey in Jooble can be broken down into three key stages:

1. Attracting visitors to the website (acquisition)
2. Viewing vacancies and providing feedback (engagement)
3. Subscribing to the vacancy digest (activation)

After subscribing, users enter our email channel, which is crucial to our business model, so we pay close attention to optimizing this stage. One of our primary sources of subscriptions comes from free job description pages. In our product, these jobs are presented on dedicated pages with complete descriptions and all vacancy details. Users can apply and get suggestions to subscribe to more relevant job content.

Users can subscribe to job alerts in three ways:

• First visit pop-up: When they first open the page, we show a subscription pop-up

• Application pop-up: When they try to apply for a vacancy, we display a pop-up with a call-to-action to subscribe, which also contains other recommended vacancies

• End-of-page subscription: At the bottom of the page, after other recommended vacancies

The “One Click Better” Philosophy

We were actively seeking ways to enhance the user experience, particularly around subscribing to our vacancy digest. As a complex and stable product for almost 20 years, Jooble already has many highly performing practices on board, so radical flow changes are not the best solution for our users. Instead, we decided to focus on identifying growth opportunities within our current system.

This approach was inspired by something Lenny Rachitsky mentioned in one of his podcasts: “Rather than pursuing big changes right away, focus on making things ‘one click better.’ Identify the most significant constraints in your strategy and refine those elements accordingly. Over time, these small adjustments can lead to substantial improvements in outcomes.”

We started hunting for improvement opportunities based on this principle.

Read also: Why 30% of Job Seekers Struggle to Find the Right Job — and How We Change That

Our Hypothesis: Friction Was the Enemy

With the “one click better” mindset, we began reviewing our current subscription funnel and investigating where users most frequently encountered problems. We analyzed how users interacted with subscription pop-ups — specifically, how and when they closed them without completing the subscription process.

The hypothesis emerged naturally: if we make registration easier for users by adding one-click registration solutions, we can positively influence the subscription rate and increase the number of newly created accounts.

The Experiment: Two Simple Changes, Big Impact

We prepared two test groups:

• Group 1: Integration of the “Subscribe via Google” button — allowing users to bypass manual email entry and registration 
• Group 2: Modified interaction with the first pop-up by removing the “Skip” button and leaving only the option to close via the X button

The usage of the first pop-up that users see when opening the page increased dramatically by an average of 40%, meaning far fewer users were dismissing it without taking action.

Results That Surprised

The test results were impressive:

• Overall growth of new accounts: +5.72%
• Overall growth of new verified accounts: +5.02%

It’s worth noting that we evaluate and analyze test results separately for each country. In some countries, we observed a 16% increase in newly created verified accounts. Users often struggled with manual email entry, but one-click registration streamlined the process and significantly reduced drop-off rates.

We also discovered that test group #2, with the change to the first pop-up, was the most successful. The ~40% increase in the usage of this pop-up contributed significantly to the overall growth in new verified accounts. Yes, removing the “Skip” button seems obvious in hindsight, but it made it possible for users to quickly and painlessly navigate through this stage and access the content they came for.

Read also: Jooble Establishes a New Expansion Team to Strengthen Global Market Presence

The Not-So-Obvious Lessons We Learned

Here are the key insights we gained from this experiment:

1. Small changes can deliver massive results: Achieving 5% growth in new verified accounts across our entire product is a significant accomplishment, given our scale. We also didn’t notice any drop in this metric even months after implementing the test, which confirms that we genuinely made the subscription process easier for users.
2. Look for opportunities within your existing system: Don’t be afraid to propose seemingly obvious solutions that can make your users even slightly happier. Sometimes the most impactful changes are hiding in plain sight.
3. Local nuances matter more than you think: Examine the linguistic and cultural characteristics of each country where your product operates. Sometimes user problems are directly related to these factors, and solutions that work in one market may be even more effective in others.

The beauty of this experiment lies in its simplicity — we didn’t rebuild our entire system or create complex new features. Instead, we identified friction points and removed them with minimal changes that had maximum impact.

Ready to Tap into Our Growing, Highly-Engaged User Base?

With millions of job seekers discovering opportunities through our platform daily, Jooble offers unparalleled reach for your hiring needs. Whether you’re looking to fill technical roles, attract top talent, or scale your recruitment efforts, our proven engagement strategies can put your vacancies in front of the right candidates. 

Ready to get started? Contact our Sales Team today to discover how we can assist you in connecting with your next great hire: sales.teamwork@jooble.team