An Exciting New B2B Partnership with ZeroBounce

Last year I wrote about a huge bet I made when I decided to move our software to the emerging Cloudflare Workers platform.

I thought it would be a good move for us so I’m glad it actually turned out to be a game changer!

The main benefit has been that it has allowed us to put all our efforts into building the product I’ve envisioned vs being slowed down with marketing/sales and infrastructure.

We don’t need to worry about infrastructure management, CDN technical support or even marketing our product (for now). We get plenty of users from the app marketplace, which allows us to confirm when our features are valuable (or not).

I recently had the opportunity to tell my story on Cloudflare TV. Make sure to tune in to one of the pre-recordings.

Partnering with an Email Validation Provider

On a separate note.

Our partnership with Cloudflare led to an exciting new one. They recommended us to one of their enterprise customers, a leading email verification company called ZeroBounce.

ZeroBounce has more than 100k customers and signs up many new ones per day. 

They started first as a client, but we have quickly evolved the relationship as we also use their service in our sign-up forms. More importantly, we signed a cross-promotional partnership to refer business to each other.

As we both use each other’s services, we can speak from experience. The screenshot above is from our dashboard of their services running on ranksense.com.

As we have a free tier, we get all sorts of people signing up for the software. Some choose to abuse our offering, so we started putting some filters in place like email and phone number verification. 

We found that requiring a business email and using ZeroBounce for enforcement improved the quality of signups tenfold. 

Our sales development team spends far less time finding users that qualify for personalized walkthroughs.

We get fewer signups, but B2B is not a volume game, but quality over quantity. 

Borrowing ZeroBounce Onboarding Strategy

You might be wondering: why am I partnering with security and email vendors instead of other SEO vendors that would be more logical?

Because when you partner with completely different, but complementary industries you can more easily innovate. You can borrow successful ideas from each other’s domains.

You can learn a lot from each other.

For example, RankSense’s current product was inspired by a security product: the web application firewall (WAF). A WAF patches security issues on the fly and our Cloudflare app patches SEO issues on the fly as well!

You can now see why my partnership with Cloudflare was a no brainer. 

I’ve learned a lot from our partnership with Cloudflare, and I’m already learning a lot from ZeroBounce. 

For example, we are working on a new exciting automation feature in our product.

After I learned ZeroBounce was doing so well, I signed up for an account and mapped out their whole onboarding strategy and messaging. 

My notes became the requirements document for our UX designer, who quickly produced high fidelity mockups and our team is almost done with the first phase of this new capability.

I simply borrowed the same ideas I saw ZeroBounce implement; and changed emails for URLs and validations for meta tag generations. 

The new changes map really well with our existing features that validate SEO changes and implement them quickly without code.

If you are curious about these new capabilities, make sure to join our community where you can track our progress building this out.