Not heroine…

Not Cocaína….

Not legalised Marijuana….

But Venture Capital…. is the drug that flows through the veins of most Silicon Valley’startup’s…

As fresh-faced founders are having money thrown at them, in hopes that their company will rise to unicorn status and be the next Uber, Dropbox or Facebook…

Seed round, pre-revenue, pre-product, no patents, no team… doesn’t matter.

So much so, that recent years have everyone saying “we’re in another bubble”…

“This can’t be sustained much longer”…”It’s looking like the dot com crash 2.0″…

Still VC money flows like Niagara Falls….

VC’s are extremely trigger happy when it comes to backing highly-scalable SaaS startups (Software As A Service) and that’s exactly what today’s case study is, enter Grammarly.

Grammarly ticks all of the boxes for a VC to get all hot and bothered, clambering to sign yet another term sheet.

However, this start up didn’t raise any venture capital for its first 8 years of existence and has been quietly building it’s proofreading subscription service to 6.9 millions daily users, without VC’s making it rain on them with funding.

Instead, like a stealth fighter plane…this underground growth behemoth had to be scrappy…and has used world-class digital marketing to DOMINATE its space, in almost every channel imaginable.

We’ll go through EXACTLY how they built their business to this point with no venture capital and then how they used this solid base to go onto to raise one of the biggest Series A Funding rounds in history…

So what do they do?

Grammarly is an online spelling and grammar checking tool.

What about it? We have Microsoft Word for that, don’t we?

Sure. But Word doesn’t have a plugin to install directly to your browser, checking emails or social media posts. Nor does it use machine learning and AI to improve it’s understanding of the English language.

People across the web are debating whether the spell check is better between Word or Grammarly. To be honest, that’s beyond the point. They’re not mutually exclusive and Grammarly is just more convenient when working online.

But my question is: why haven’t we heard about them before?

Grammarly is an underground monster who has silently been building an online empire. We have been very impressed whilst building this case study, and you will quickly understand why.

Grammarly makes it easy for all businesses to sound and look professional. Imagine if you were to start a consulting business, but your grammar skills were not up to par. Not many people or potential clients would take you seriously. Grammarly assists by minimising the risk of grammar issues making it an extremely valuable piece of software.

As a teaser, I’ll just tell you that the website ranks for 250k keywords on the US market (32k in Australia), with over 19k of those ranking in position 1-3.

Nineteen. Thousand.

So let’s begin with their analysis and start with the core of their online success: their Content Marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Grammarly’s Content Marketing strategy is on another level.

Let’s start by having a look at the platform that displays this content: the blog.

Blog home page

The blog home page is fairly simple and could do with a few improvements. There is no newsletter signup option and the CTA button at the bottom of the page is barely visible.

UPDATE: While I was writing this article, something on the home page changed. And I love it.

 Grammarly blog

Can you spot it?

In the top right corner of the home page, Grammarly has added a new CTA “Get Grammarly”. Clicking this button will directly ask you if you want to add the plugin to your browser.

That’s awesome. I was just saying that they should change the CTA button at the bottom of the page to make it more visible, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.

It’s still not very flashy, but it’s higher on the page and above the fold, which surely will lead to more conversions.

Well done!

Grammarly wants to keep users focused on the main topic of the blog: the content.

The blog has over 2,000 blog posts. That’s a substantial amount of posts.

But more interestingly, all of these posts are targeting specific subjects, from writing tips to workplace behaviour.

Let’s have a look at their top performing content pieces.

best blog posts

Look at all those shares!

In previous reviews, we’ve spoken about how important it is for content to spark emotion and prompt people to engage with it.

And the number 1 priority to creating engaging content is creating a killer headline.

The top content piece, “What Novel Are You? Quiz”, is a great example of a good headline. It’s simple, stirs up curiosity, and is engaging.

Are you feeling it? Don’t you want to click on this immediately to know what Novel you are?

The second and third headlines, “10 Words and Phrases to Never, Ever use at Work” and “31 Words and Phrases You No Longer Need” play with another strategy. They tell us what NOT to do.

This has proved to work in the past. Instead of giving people knowledge of what they should do, it works interestingly well to give advice to people on what they shouldn’t do. These two headlines are great examples of that.

The fourth headline, “How to End an Email: 9 Never-Fail Sign-Offs and 9 to Avoid” uses the famous “How To…” tactic, which is the most shared headline types in B2B content, according to Buzzsumo.

B2b headlines

All of these headlines use powerful psychological elements such as numbers and power words to urge users who read them to click on them.

Phrases such as “Never, Ever”, “Never-Fail” or “You No Longer Need” are strong and create some kind of special power. They give punch to your headline, adding extra credibility and trust that the content is going to be interesting.

Once the users are on a blog post, Grammarly have intelligently included a CTA banner at the bottom of each page.

blog cta

This is a great way to ensure that users who are reading the blog get the opportunity to install the Grammarly plugin. With the incredible amount of traffic that comes through the blog, one of the greatest ways to take this traffic from a reader to a customer, is to include a CTA button on the page.

I would even suggest testing, putting this banner higher up on the page, or in the sidebar for example, to increase the number of leads.

So why is this Content Marketing strategy so successful? We’ll have a more detailed explanation in the SEO section, where I will show you what incredible results these blog posts have brought to Grammarly online.

But before I go there I must remind you of something. Content marketing is not all about writing blog posts on a blog. Content can be delivered in various ways; videos, photos, podcasts, interviews… writing articles is only a part of the content world.

And Grammarly knows that. So before we go on to understand the power of a good content marketing strategy on a website, we must analyse how important their content strategy is on another very important channel: Social Media.

Social Media

social sources

No business today can survive online without Social Media. It’s the best way to connect with potential customers and grow visibility, whether through paid advertising or organic reach.

In today’s age, being present on as many social media channels as possible is very important, as different audiences can be targeted in different ways depending on what platform they prefer.

And Grammarly knows that.

Correcting grammar is not the most fun. It probably sparks bad memories of essays you wrote during your school days or stresses you experience every time you are writing an email.

It definitely stresses me out while I’m writing these articles!

But Grammarly has managed to make something incredible; making a subject that is unpleasant and stressful, fun and amusing. To do this, they have built a social media empire sharing tips, jokes and comics about grammar and writing to millions of followers.

Let’s brake their strategy down platform by platform.

YouTube

The video sharing platform is the social media channel bringing the most traffic to Grammarly. As seen in the Social Network Sources picture above, it’s responsible for 54.43% of their social traffic. That’s 1.2 million visitors entering Grammarly’s website from YouTube every month.

Their channel only contains 41 videos, a mix of educational videos, testimonials and advertisements.

So how come it brings in so much traffic?

The success of their page is mostly due to their awesome ads that have brought over 200 million views combined.

Three video ads have been the motor of their success. All three videos show very realistic situations where Grammarly would be of great use. Managing social media, writing school papers for exams, important emails to colleagues, resumes, messaging a crush… Basically, the videos show that Grammarly will help you anytime you need to write anything.

During these videos, Grammarly have smartly introduced a CTA button leading to the website’s home page, where users can install the plugin.

youtube video

youtube cta

Notice the incredible amount of views each of these videos have? YouTube traffic must have a great conversion rate for Grammarly to have pushed their ads to this level. The ads are great, so I’m not surprised.

Let’s move on look at their second biggest platform, Facebook.

Facebook

Grammarly’s Facebook page is very impressive. I’ve been studying it for the last few days and I’m really amazed by the interaction the page has.

Here is a quick example:

facebook post

This post has been up for 4 hours, has 4.1k likes, 1k shares and almost 300 comments.

What. The…

Scroll down on the page and it just keeps going. Here’s an even more impressive post:

facebook post 2

11 hours. 14k likes, over 5.3k shares and almost 550 comments.

I’m feeling dizzy.

What’s interesting: these posts have nothing to do with Grammarly’s product or even with their industry, whether it is SaaS or writing.

It’s just great content that resonates with their audience.

There is an important lesson to be learned here. It’s not all about selling your product. It’s not all about making people aware of what you do or how awesome your tool is.

It’s about interaction and engagement. It’s about creating a connection with your audience. It’s about making people love you and what you do, but most importantly who you are.

That’s what content is about.

Grammarly does have the advantage of their audience being pretty much anyone who writes anything in English (so about half of the planet), but this concept is applicable to any business in any industry.

But even when Grammarly posts stuff somewhat related to their business, they do it with a great sense of humour.

facebook post 3

(Once again, look at those incredible numbers.)

They’re also doing great with their headlines, as we saw in the Content section. Check this out.

facebook pinned post

“WARNING: Reading this may cause feelings of elation, excitement, or ecstasy”

I love it!

Overall, Grammarly posts on Facebook more than 5 times per day, with an average of 7,550 engagements (Likes/Comments/Shares) per post.  The engagement rate of almost 5%. Out of 7 million page followers, that’s almost 350k PTAT (people talking about this).

Those are very high numbers. Grammarly definitely has a highly engaged audience on their page. Also, most of this social traffic is organic, as Grammarly reports their average organic reach is 10% of their total followers.

According to our Social Network Sources graph, Facebook brings in 41.06% of total social traffic every month. That’s 950k visitors.

Quora

quora

Quora is an interesting platform that we haven’t covered in previous reviews. In Grammarly’s case, it brings in 40k visitors every month, so it’s worth having a look.

As we can see on the screenshot above, 23k people follow Grammarly’s profile and 150 questions have been asked about Grammarly. The tool seems to spark some discussions on the platform, as people are asking what benefits the tool brings and also use Grammarly as a reference to answer grammar questions.

Interestingly, Grammarly doesn’t support Quora. For a platform based on writing, it surely would have been useful.

Grammarly also uses the platform to promote their tool, as seen in the Ad below.

quora ads

Twitter

twitter

Just like Facebook, Grammarly is very active on Twitter, posting an average of 7.5 tweets per day.

Let’s look at some impressive stats from Twitonomy.

twitter analytics

Grammarly’s tweets are retweeted 88.7% of the time and favorited 91.5% of the time. That’s a strong stat showing that their content resonates with their audience.

Overall, their Twitter account brings in 16k visitors per month, which isn’t the most impressive but still a lot of visitors.

WhatsApp Web

This is also a very interesting social media source. Just like Quora, we haven’t covered this platform before, simply because it mostly isn’t relevant to other websites.

whatsapp web

If you’re a WhatsApp user, you know what WhatsApp Web is.

If not, WhatsApp Web is basically the Desktop version of the mobile chat tool WhatsApp. Through a QR code, users connect their phones with their Desktop device to receive messages directly on their Desktop (quite an impressive technology, by the way). It’s commonly used in offices for example, to avoid looking like you’re chatting on your phone all the time (a friend told me this, ehem…)

WhatsApp Web is compatible with Grammarly, which is the reason why it brings in traffic. Users get instant corrections of their grammar before sending their texts. If they want more information on why this mistake should be corrected, they get redirected directly to the Grammarly website.

In short, Texting + Grammar Mistake = Grammarly visitor

Social Media Summary

Grammarly brings in a whopping 2.3 million visitors every month through their social media channels. That shows how impressive their social strategy is.

Social Media proves once again how important a strong content strategy is for an online business, as the platforms bring in 7.5% of the total traffic to the website.

Recently, Social signals have also become an important ranking factor in Google. The search engine understands that strong social media platforms are a sign of authority for a brand, and thus for its website.

With a strong content marketing and social media strategy, Google understands that Grammarly is a highly authoritative website. This is very clearly shown in the website’s rankings.

Let’s have a look.

SEO

In terms of SEO, a great Content Marketing strategy translates into two things

  • A large number of keyword rankings
  • High rankings for those keywords

High keyword rankings on a large number of keywords ultimately translates into more traffic, more users, and more sales. And remember one very important thing; high keyword rankings bring in organic traffic, and organic traffic is free.

That’s how powerful a successful content marketing strategy can be.

And Grammarly has nailed it.

Let’s look at the numbers.

Traffic & keyword rankings

The website has an incredible amount of monthly visitors, as we can see on the graph below.

traffic

31 million people visit the Grammarly website every month.

Because Grammarly’s used mainly through its online app, a large portion of this traffic is attributed to the 6.9 million daily app users. But the tool is also used without accessing the website, which leaves us with a big chunk of monthly visitors that are not app users.

And where do these people land? Mainly two places, the home page or anywhere on the blog.

The stat that impresses me the most on the graph above is not the incredible 31 million visitors, or that the website is globally ranked 1,547. No, it’s the bounce rate of 50.8%.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which users only viewed one page before exiting the website. Basically, the user lands on the website, sees the page and doesn’t decide to go any further.

A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing if your website is not designed to have people interact with it. But a 50.8% bounce rate translates into every 2 users interacting with the website. That’s a great stat, because a low bounce rate is always a good indicator of an attractive domain.

But let’s look at the keyword rankings that bring in all this organic traffic.

keyword rankings au

As I mentioned in the intro of this article, Grammarly is ranking for an insane amount of 250k keywords on the US market. As you can see above, they’re even ranking for 32k keywords on the Australian market.

In the US, Grammarly ranks #1 for keywords such as “nevermind” (90,500 Search Volume), “cancelled” (also 90,500 Search Volume), “oxford comma” (74,000 Search Volume) “ax” (60,500 Search Volume or “what is a metaphor” (40,500 Search Volume).

By themselves, these 5 keywords combine to a Search Volume of 356,000.

And there are 249,995 keywords left.

As you can see, these keywords are not related to Grammarly’s tool itself, but a more generic subject: grammar.

Grammarly knows people have issues with these misspellings, so they have created specific articles for them on their blog.

Here are some of the headlines for the articles related to our high-Search Volume keywords.

With these articles, Grammarly is using a strategy called…

Direct Response Marketing

Let’s use the “cancelled vs. canceled” article as an example to examine a content marketing strategy called direct response marketing.

The idea is that instead of creating content about their product and what they offer, Grammarly have researched common every day problems and offered solutions to them by creating content that specifically answers people’s questions.

They are tailoring the content they produce on their blog according to people’s needs. And by answering people’s questions, they bring more people on their website.

Let me explain how this works and why it’s so effective:

Imagine you’re a user that has never heard of Grammarly before and you’re looking for an answer to the “cancelled vs. canceled” question.

What would you do? Most probably go to Google and search for an answer.

You type in the search query “cancelled” in Google and get to the search results page. You click on the first organic result, leading you to the Grammarly article which provides you the answer you were looking for.

Okay, so you have your answer. You didn’t really care if you received this answer from Grammarly or anyone else. But Grammarly does, and here’s why:

When you land on its website for the first time through a non-branded organic search result, Grammarly gains 2 things:

  • You are now aware of the existence of Grammarly
  • You now have a cookie placed on you, which allows Grammarly to retarget you with advertising

Here’s an example of what a remarketing Ad looks like, but I’ll get into that more later.

As a user, you are now inside Grammarly’s Sales funnel. The company has won a potential customer, a “prospect”.

And with effective strategies in place such as Display Remarketing and Facebook Ads, Grammarly will be able to turn a large number of prospects into customers.

Obviously, it’s not easy. You and I couldn’t simply create a blog with an article like this from one day to another, rank #1 and acquire a large amount of traffic. No, Grammarly has worked on this strategy for years.

Good content is only one part of it, you will not rank #1 on Google by just writing good articles. A large part of it is also due to the website’s authority, largely defined by the backlink profile.

Let’s have a look at it.

Backlink Profile

The Grammarly website has a constantly growing Referring domains count, with a huge total of 6.43k referring domains and 80k backlinks. But the company has another advantage over other online businesses.

Grammarly has the ability to draw a large number of .edu links, which are very coveted in the online marketing world, as they have proven to increase website authority more than traditional .com websites.

The achieved this due to the nature of the business, Grammarly has the opportunity to appear on school websites, who recommend their students to use Grammarly to improve their writing.

The schools have most likely not done this by accident, as Grammarly has contacted institutions across the US and the world to promote their useful tool to students. Some of those schools appear on the website.

The 14 .gov backlinks are also providing powerful juice to their rankings. These links are very hard to get as not many government websites will link to outside sources. However, grammar checking is important for them, too.

But what’s also important in the authority of a website is the distribution of anchor text for these backlinks.

Let’s break it down.

Anchor Text

The reason anchor text distribution is important for website authority is that it will avoid a domain from being subject to a Google Penguin penalty.

The more evenly and naturally distributed the anchor texts, the safer the website.

Grammarly has about 10,500 different anchor texts, which is a very large and natural distribution.

The branded keyword “grammarly” is responsible for 42% of that total, which should be increased to fit the 70% that Google considers as natural.

All naked links (i.e www.grammarly.com) together are responsible for 15% of the anchor texts, which is relatively close to the advised 20%.

The anchor texts “grammar check” and “grammar checker” are exact match anchors, responsible for a combined 2% of the total distribution. That’s slightly higher than the recommended 1%, and I would advise Grammarly to keep an eye on this to make sure it doesn’t grow higher than that.

Overall, Grammarly’s anchor text is well distributed and doesn’t show any signs of artificially building backlinks. As long as Grammarly keeps this distribution even, Google has no reason to penalise the website with the Penguin algorithm.

This shows their rankings are safe.

Aside from the boost that backlinks provide to rankings, they also bring large amounts of traffic to the website from users clicking on them. But how big of an impact do these backlinks have?

Let’s have a look

Traffic Sources

Incoming traffic for Grammarly is mostly coming in from direct traffic, links, organic and paid search, and social media.

The 55.15% of direct traffic is largely attributed to the Grammarly app. People who are using Grammarly daily will often go to the website to use the tool.

As we just uncovered, Search is a major part of Grammarly’s traffic thanks to their content marketing strategy. Their strong rankings for high search volume keywords bring a whopping 6.8 million visitors to their website every month.

But the third source of traffic comes from links, or what we also call referrals. These visitors are landing on the website through a link from another website. And this is what backlinks are good for.

Let’s have a look at their top referring websites.

Referrals

These are very interesting referrals, as they are all business partners with Grammarly.

How do I know this? I simply visited their websites and had a look at what the links look like.

Let me show you.

Grammarcheck.net brings in 22.7% of the total referring traffic. That’s around 700k visitors every month. Why does such a large amount of traffic come through this website?

At the bottom of every page in the footer, Grammarcheck.com displays a banner for a 20% discount on a paid Grammarly subscription.

This is an Affiliation Marketing link.

How do I know this?

Just look at the URL of the page I get redirected to when I click on this image

Grammarly pays a commission to Grammarcheck for every user that comes through their website and subscribes, making the deal interesting for all parties:

  • Users receive a 20% discount
  • Grammarcheck gets a commission
  • Grammarly gets more traffic and more sales

Grammarcheck works hard to bring users to their website and prompt them to subscribe to a paid Grammarly subscription. That’s why so many users come from this website.

Wordcounter.net uses the exact same strategy, as seen below

SmallSEOTools and Spellchecker.net use a slightly different strategy, showing a pop up when trying to leave the page instead of a banner.

Citethisforme.com uses yet another strategy, called “placements”.

As an online writing tool looking very similar to Microsoft Word, some of the buttons in the tool bar are actually hidden links.

Referral ad

 

All together, these referrals bring in over 3 million website visitors every month, so these strategies seem to be working well for Grammarly.

The big difference between this traffic and organic search traffic, is that this one isn’t free. Which brings me to our next chapter, paid marketing.

Paid Marketing

Paid Marketing has many different aspects, as we just uncovered with the Affiliate Marketing strategy that Grammarly uses.

The great thing about Affiliation Marketing as opposed to Display or Search advertising is that it’s often based on a Cost Per Acquisition basis instead of Cost Per Click. This of course, varies a lot from business to business and between deals, but it’s very common in Affiliation Marketing to make CPA deals.

What does it mean?

It means that Grammarly pays the traffic source’s commission only if this traffic has led to a sale.

This is very different from Adwords for example, where traffic is paid for every time a user clicks on an ad, whether that users stays for a fraction of a second on the website or becomes a long-term customer.

Online businesses still use CPC channels because they bring in huge amounts of good quality traffic. So like everyone else, Grammarly uses Adwords.

Let’s break down their strategy.

Google Ads

Grammarly is on top of their Adwords accounts, clearly working closely with this strategy.

According to Ahrefs, the company bids on almost 20k keywords across all markets, 25% of them in the US and 6% in Australia.

That’s 540k monthly visitors coming through Google Ads.

Let’s look at their top performing ones.

Google ads

 

Like I thought, Grammarly are very advanced in their overall online marketing strategy, I’m assuming that they have tested many different ad texts and optimised them to end up with these results.

If that wasn’t the case, I would strongly advise Grammarly to test longer ad texts. As we can see, the ads are not even using Headline 2, which is completely empty.

Their Headline 1’s are short and simple, straight to the point. But once again, I would advise to test longer headlines that fill up the 30-character space.

Descriptions are optimised with numbers, signs, trustworthy text such as “Trusted by over 4 Million Users!” and call to actions. These are very well written.

Clicking on any of these ads will bring you to one of two places: the home page or the Grammarly plagiarism checker.

Here’s another tool that Grammarly provides users to promote their product. With this easy to use plagiarism checker, users are given the chance to test the tool before installing it to the browser.

This is very smart, because users who are searching for “free plagiarism checker” are not necessarily ready to install a plugin for their browser and even less to download a software on their computers. They just want a quick and easy online checker to make sure their text doesn’t contain plagiarism.

Here’s what the result of a free and quick plagiarism check looks like.

Now, Grammarly shows how many issues and what categories they are in, but it doesn’t show the exact errors or how to fix them. For that, the user needs to get Grammarly.

The page looks clean and professional. Thanks to the review and the high social media numbers, it also inspires trust. As a user that has never heard of Grammarly, I feel safe installing this plugin.

Very smart move to get new users to Grammarly.

However, there are users who decide not to sign up. They use the plagiarism checker and move on, or they decide that Grammarly isn’t for them, or they were simply distracted by something else.

What happens to these users? Are they lost?

No, Grammarly remarkets them to bring them back.

Remarketing

I briefly mentioned Remarketing in the Content section, because a strong content marketing strategy allows to build remarketing lists.

So, what is remarketing?

Have you ever felt like ads are following you across the web? That you see the same ads across different websites?

That’s remarketing.

Basically, when you visit a website, a cookie gets placed on you. This cookie allows the website who has tagged you to feed your browser with ads across the web.

As I have visited Grammarly many times, I have been tagged with a cookie. Therefore, I have been remarketed by Grammarly to prompt me to go back to the website.

Here’s an example of what it looks like.

These ads allow Grammarly to keep users inside the sales funnel. They remain aware of the existence of the tool and are constantly reminded to come back to the website and install the plugin. This highly increases the chance of the users coming back.

This strategy is proven very effective, and here’s why.

  • Users are already aware of the brand so the ads feel less intrusive.
  • Users have visited the website in the past, proving they have some interest in the product
  • Remarketing ads are cheap, making them one of the most cost effective type of advertisements
  • The ads can appear in many different places across the web
  • Most of the time, advertisers pay publishers on a CPC basis, meaning the ads cost nothing until a user clicks on them

In Grammarly’s case, these ads bring the user to a free tool. So if I’m a user I might think, “why not?”, click on the ad, and install the plugin.

Alright, now that I’ve searched for Grammarly on Google, clicked on their ads, read their content, used the plagiarism checker, seen their promotions on referral websites, been remarketed……… I can finally see what their website looks like.

Let’s have a look.

User Experience

Grammarly has great strategies across the board to bring both cold and warm users to their website. Now is the time where the company needs these users to convert into customers.

To do that, Grammarly needs to create a great online experience. And it all starts with the Home Page.

The Home Page

The home page that I will analyse in this review is brand new. Grammarly recently got rid of their old home page to replace it with this clean, straight-forward design.

As clean as it gets, the background is white with only the CTA button being in another colour. The user’s full attention will be drawn towards the button when first viewing this page above the fold.

The page is very clearly designed to prompt the user to click the CTA button. Clicking this button will direct the user to a page where the plugin can be installed.

When scrolling down, we distinguish a few features that Grammarly have put in place to convince users to use their product.

Presenting the Product

This cool feature briefly shows how the tool works. By scrolling down, the user will see this text’s spelling and grammar mistakes being spotted by the Grammarly plugin.

It allows the user to understand what Grammarly is about and what this website is for. It presents the product to the user by explaining what value it brings.

The Benefits

Further down, we have three benefits of adding Grammarly to your browser. This helps to add value to the product and show prospects what they will gain from installing the plugin.

By showing benefits, Grammarly is increasing the customer’s trust, basically saying “look, you can have all these awesome things to help you, for FREE”.

The Review

After providing the user with the benefits of installing the plugin, Grammarly gives examples by showing short video testimonials.

These videos have the power of providing trust to the users. Reviews, testimonials and product testings are a great way of building user’s trust. They show that other people have used the tool in the past and been successful with it.

The Offer

Lastly, Grammarly will once again prompt the user to add the plugin to their browser with a call-to-action button.

Now that Grammarly has warmed their users with explanations of the tool, its benefits, and positive testimonials, they should be ready to get started with the plugin.

To add a little extra trust to the call-to-action button, a short text provides the user with an impressive stat; 8 million users are already using this tool.

I am now ready to click on the CTA button, which will lead me to the page where I can finally install the Grammarly plugin.

The Plugin Page

The Plugin Page has one single purpose: to make you install the plugin. There is basically no other option on this page as it is fully designed to make you click on the “Add Extension” button.

This is a very important step of the website, as it is where a user goes from being a prospect to a Grammarly user.

Once the plugin is installed, you are officially a part of that group.

But this is the free version. So how does Grammarly convert the free plugin users to paying customers?

Converting Free users to Paying Customers

My answer to the question above will be surprisingly simple and unsatisfying: I’m not quite sure.

Grammarly has a paid plan, as you can see on the above screenshot. However, I haven’t fully understood what the advantages are.

They are promising more corrections, better results and more plagiarism check. That doesn’t mean that the free version isn’t catching my mistakes, but it’s not catching ALL of my mistakes. Some of the issues will also be kept secret in the free version and unveiled only once the paid version is unlocked.

I haven’t tried the paid version out myself, but according to this product review, Grammarly’s paid version isn’t really worth it. The free version is sufficient and will help you improve your writing. For the rest, there’s nothing like a human proof-reader.

The issue is, even though Grammarly is working hard on AI and machine learning, a computer will never be able to understand a text the same way a human does. As the review cites, some mistakes that Grammarly will point out in the paid version are questionable, and humans might disagree with the corrections.

This is the part where Grammarly needs to improve. The free product seems to be satisfying every user who has ever installed the plugin or used the app. However, the paid version is costly for what you will gain from it.

Conclusion

An improved paid product offering will increase Grammarly’s revenue. I believe this is the reason why they decided to raise funds to continue growing their company instead of going on themselves.

Grammarly has one of the most impressive digital marketing presences I have ever seen. They’re performing great in every channel and have such a strong base to build on. If they manage to create a top-notch paid version of the tool, there is no doubt that the company will bring is big bags of $.

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What You Should Do Now

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