Achieving Giant Conversion Rate Gains – 5 Case Studies
Conversions drive a business forward and fuel growth. Yet for every $92 companies spend acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them, according to Bryan Eisenberg. That just makes no sense. Any company looking to grow should be focusing their energies on maximizing their conversion rates.
To that end, we are sharing the following examples of companies that made critical adjustments in their marketing to achieve absolutely, completely, ridiculous conversion rate improvements. As you’ll see, there’s no single formula for driving massive conversion gains. However, the spirit of experimentation is strong in every example, and the process of testing multiple on-the-page factors is something to learn from for your own conversion rate improvements.
Buffer Improves Email Sign-ups by 130% in 30 Days through 9 Sign-up Mechanisms
Buffer, developers of the Buffer social media publishing tool, was hell-bent on making the email sign-up process ridiculously easy. To that end, Buffer increased the number of ways a blog visitor could subscribe to their blog by 9X:
- Slide Up Box
- Hellobar
- Home Page Calls-to-Action
- Postscript
- Sidebar
- Twitter Lead Gen Cards
- SlideShare
- Qzzr
The slide up produced the most conversions, with the Hellobar also producing large conversions gains. The other seven tactics provided incremental conversions, but calculated together the group of tactics moved the needle, as well. In May and June of this year, Buffer had 2,349 email sign-ups. After making the changes to the blog in July, monthly sign-ups skyrocketed to 5,450, a 130% improvement in just 30 days!
Takipi Increases Blog Conversion Rate by 260% through 7 Tactics
Takipi uncovers errors in software production code, and the company also uncovered a way to dramatically improve its blog conversion rate. First, it changed its conversion event from blog subscription to bringing readers to its home page with an offer of a free trial – a conversion event that meant much more to their bottom line. They added a cascading set of links at the end of each post, ultimately pointing to product-specific pages and more detailed how-to information. They included a simple banner in the blog right rail, and they started remarketing to their blog readers, customizing the display ads based on the content of the post they read. The number one converting element on the blog was the application of the website’s main navigation system at the top of the page, responsible for 30% of conversions. Overall, across seven major conversion optimization tactics, Takipi increased conversions by 260%.
Groove Almost Doubles Conversion Rate by Rethinking Its Home Page
Groove is a customer support SaaS provider. Although customers seemed to love the product, the company was frustrated with the 2.3% conversion rate from its website. Their original headline (“SaaS and eCommerce Customer Support”) atop the home page spoke to their product. But then they realized they needed to speak to the problem they solved for customers instead. Their old subheading spoke about the ease of setup, but it had not been communicating the compelling reasons to set it up in the first place. By asking customers at the time of signup for their reasons for signing up (requesting that they hit “reply” on an email from the Groove CEO), they uncovered the right message for the right people. They brainstormed more than 50 potential headlines and tested the top five. They designed a new long-form landing page, starting with the copy first, ensuring that they got the full customer story they wanted to tell. Realizing that they wanted the site to speak to new visitors in the customer’s own language, they recorded a video of an actual customer explaining why Groove was so critical to his business. The result of all of this labor in transforming their home page into a customer-centric page? The conversion rate increased from 2.3% to 4.3%!
Basecamp Increases Conversion Rate by 102.5% by Adding a Smiling Customer to the Web Page
Basecamp, developer of the popular project management software by the same name, had tested a number of key changes to its website for a CRM product it offered at the time called Highrise. First it tested long-form text vs. short-form, and the long-form produced a 37% increase in conversions. Even so, they ditched all assumptions and tested a radically different design, comparing the baseline black text on white background long-form design vs. a short-form design with a large photo of a smiling customer. The latter produced a 102.5% increase in conversions over the original. Combining the photo of a smiling customer with the long-form content page was the logical next step, yet produced 22% fewer conversions than the short-form design. The company ultimately went with the short-form version of the page design with the smiling customer, enjoying a conversion rate more than double its historical numbers!
Property Management Company Improves Conversion Rate by 83.23% through Relentless Testing
For a client in the property management space, we inherited a paid search campaign that was actually already performing well. One could have assumed that the campaign had already maxed out on its conversion rate. We identified new opportunities for conversion rate improvements, though, by completely revamping the landing page and conducting ongoing A/B landing page testing. We increased the visuals on the page, moved the form to the top of the page, added multiple client testimonials, tested colors, added a client benefit statement to the top of the page and added trust icons. Each of these tests was conducted both nationally as well as in the client’s priority regions. The most critical aspect of all of this was that as soon as one A/B test generated sufficient data, we moved on to another test. Then another. And then another. No test was too insignificant. The result: an 83.23% conversion rate increase!