|
SUMMARY:
Angelina Jolie. Dolly Parton. Princess Di. I don’t know any of them personally of course. But from a distance, they seem like the kind of people who make things better wherever they go. You probably know someone like this in your life. I’m going to make a bold (and impossible to prove) statement now – if these kinds of people worked in marketing, they’d be CROs (conversion rate optimizers). Because that’s what CROs do – make things better. The goal is often monetary results for a business and not humanitarian aid to relieve human suffering. But to improve results, you must serve a customers’ needs better. And that is a (very small) public good. You can take a CRO mindset with your marketing as well. To help you do that, in this article we bring you examples from a tax firm, outsourcing firm, SaaS, and hotel. |
This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.
Precision Tax Relief wanted to improve the conversion rate of its landing pages. The leaders of this organization decided to take part in a Quick Win Intensive with MECLABS Institute (MECLABS is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa).
The MECLABS team worked with the Precision Tax team to formulate hypotheses for experiments that could help the team better understand how to serve potential customers and increase the website’s conversion rate.
Here is a look at one of the experiments that came out of this effort.
This page format was used for several campaigns, and the headline of the pages changed based on which campaign was targeted. The team wanted to test which overall landing page approach would produce the highest conversion rate.
The original landing page the Precision Tax Relief team was using is known as the control in the experiment, and you can see it in Creative Sample #1.
Creative Sample #1: Mobile landing page for tax debt resolution firm (control)
The goal of the page was to get prospective customers to book a 15-minute free consultation call with Precision Tax Relief. Part of the hypothesis of the experiment was that putting more emphasis on the process-level value proposition of that consultation call versus the primary value proposition of Precision Tax would increase the conversion rate.
The team created this treatment (see Creative Sample #2) to test that hypothesis.
Creative Sample #2: Mobile landing page for tax debt resolution firm (treatment from experiment #1)
The treatment had a 12% lower conversion rate than the control.
After the first experiment ran, the team used the discoveries from those results to inform a new hypothesis and tested the treatment you can see below in Creative Sample #3.
Creative Sample #3: Mobile landing page for tax debt resolution firm (treatment from experiment #2)
Thanks to the discoveries from the first experiment, the treatment in the second experiment produced a 12% higher conversion rate than the control.
You can watch Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute discuss this case study and conduct live optimization on homepages, landing pages, and category pages submitted by the audience in the below Conversion Rate Optimization Live Stream replay. See his conversion optimization advice for these real-world examples to get ideas for improving conversion on your website.
Daxx is an outsourcing company and its team felt that typical outsourcing blogs all wrote the same thing. To generate traffic, the team took a different approach by targeting informational queries that are related to tech and have a high search volume. Over the course of five years, they successfully grew blog traffic tenfold.
Creative Sample #4: Traffic to Daxx.com 2016-2021
The team started receiving a steady flow of traffic, reaching 40,000 monthly visitors. However, they were not converting this traffic into leads because a lot of articles were in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey due to the traffic-driving strategy.
So, the team created a lead magnet strategy using whitepapers. They created whitepapers for each stage of company’s funnel: awareness, consideration, and decision. The goal of these whitepapers was to move the awareness blog post readers down the funnel.
For example, in an awareness article about the developer shortage in the United States and other parts of the world the blog offers readers a whitepaper about offshore developer rates.
Creative Sample #5: Awareness article about developer shortage
Creative Sample #6: Whitepaper promoted in the awareness article
Whitepaper downloaders then received an email nurturing sequence. The team built three email sequences for each stage: awareness, consideration, and decision. The potential customer’s stage was determined with the help of a lead scoring system the team built in their email marketing tool. The prospects that had a high score were immediately contacted by the sales team.
Creative Sample #7: An email sample with consideration content sent to contacts in the awareness stage
Over the course of this years-long campaign, the team collected 5,000 contacts that matched its target audience profile. The lead magnet and email nurturing sequences helped them convert more of these contacts into leads. As a result, they saw a 40% increase in leads from organic traffic. “In October we have already reached the yearly target of leads number from the website!” said Elena Ruchko, Head of Digital Marketing, Daxx.
“We are a SaaS [software-as-a-service] company, making a server control panel for WordPress. The main offer on our home page has a call-to-action (CTA) button inviting users to, ‘Start a Free Trial with Google,’” said Brad Touesnard, Founder & CEO, SpinupWP.
Although the team felt they were achieving decent conversion rate at 3.7%, they wanted to see if they could increase conversions by tweaking the text or design.
“Our surveys showed that 71% of our visitors used Google, and thus would be able to sign up for our free trial. However, that still left 29% of our visitors who chose not to use Google, for whatever reason, and would not be able to sign up for the free trial of our product. By running additional surveys, we found quite a few of our visitors were on GitHub and Twitter,” Touesnard said.
“This information led us to create an additional link below our main CTA button inviting visitors to use Github or Twitter to sign in instead of Google,” he said. The additional link also allowed users to sign up via email with a chosen password.
Creative Sample #8: Main CTA button with additional link on SaaS company’s homepage
This small change increased the company’s conversion rates to 5.1%, a 37.8% improvement.
Penta Hotels tested the impact of changes aimed at getting more on-site bookings (to compete against bookings made on third-party sites like online travel agencies) by running an A/B test on the websites of a sample of six properties for one month.
“The online experience plays a major role for consumers today, which is why the optimization of our branded channels such as our own website, app and social media channels are at the forefront of our priorities here,” said Heiko Rieder, Vice President of Revenue Management & Reservations, Penta Hotels.
On the hotels’ homepage, the team added a note promoting a five percent discount with a promo code.
Creative Sample #9: Promocode note for hotels
Creative Sample #10: Promocode note on hotel homepage
On the hotels’ booking engines, the team added a note highlighting how many people booked that day, a price comparison widget, and an exit intent message reminding the user of the five percent discount.
Creative Sample #11: Hotel price comparison widget
Creative Sample #12: Price comparison widget in hotel booking engine
These changes resulted in an average 17% uplift in conversion rate across the six hotel websites.
“One of the best ways to increase the ROI (return on investment) on all your acquisition channels is to leverage conversion technology on your website,” said Michael J. Goldrich, Chief Experience Officer, The Hotels Network (Penta’s growth tools).
Live Streaming Session: The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer – Join Flint McGlaughlin, CEO, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute on Thursday, November 18th at 1 p.m. EDT (replay is available immediately after the live session at the same link)
Become a master at creating and optimizing high-converting web pages – The course is fully underwritten by MECLABS Institute, with no monetary cost to participants
Conversion Rate Optimization: 7 tips to improve your ecommerce conversion rates
Join our thousands of weekly case study readers.
Enter your email below to receive MarketingSherpa news, updates, and promotions:
Note: Already a subscriber? Want to add a subscription?
Click Here to Manage Subscriptions
Get Better Business Results With a Skillfully Applied Customer-first Marketing Strategy
The customer-first approach of MarketingSherpa’s agency services can help you build the most effective strategy to serve customers and improve results, and then implement it across every customer touchpoint.
Get More Info >MECLABS AI
Get headlines, value prop, competitive analysis, and more.
Use the AI for FREE (for now) >Marketer Vs Machine
Marketer Vs Machine: We need to train the marketer to train the machine.
Watch Now >Free Marketing Course
Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (with this free online marketing course)
See Course >Project and Ideas Pitch Template
A free template to help you win approval for your proposed projects and campaigns
Get the Template >Six Quick CTA checklists
These CTA checklists are specifically designed for your team — something practical to hold up against your CTAs to help the time-pressed marketer quickly consider the customer psychology of your “asks” and how you can improve them.
Get the Checklists >Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind
You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.
Get the Infographic >Infographic: 21 Psychological Elements that Power Effective Web Design
To build an effective page from scratch, you need to begin with the psychology of your customer. This infographic can get you started.
Get the Infographic >Receive the latest case studies and data on email, lead gen, and social media along with MarketingSherpa updates and promotions.
