All of our acquisition methods specifically target sports fans and are zero cost. For instance, we have partnerships with some sports content sites that run our ads for free. We also drive quite a bit of traffic by posting links to Sidelines in team fan forms.
The on-boarding process for Sidelines takes a few steps. One of the things we do, is as soon as you sign-up via the landing page we ask you to select your teams. This gives the user something to do and we find that 95% who sign up complete this step. In the sign up flow, we automatically subscribe new users to other users on the site who are active and follow the same teams, and this is explained clearly to the user in the sign up flow. Once the user completes the sign up flow, he lands on the feed, which shows interesting stuff the people he is following have shared about his teams. Since the feed is such a universally well-understood UI construct, users get it, and we see a good percentage of our first time users reshare an item or comment on an item on their first visit.
We also send out a welcome email (which we’ve been experimenting with) which explains more details about the site and how to get the most out of it. We’ve had fairly good success in bringing users back to the site with the welcome email.
We’re currently in the process of implementing a tour which will walk the new users through the features of the site, that should further drive engagement on the first visit.