When I started out as a marketer 11 years ago, online marketing was easier to leverage and more affordable. Over the years, the cost has drastically risen. From your pay-per-click ads to your expenses for organic marketing, costs continually rise.
For example, if you wanted to increase your search engine rankings five years ago, you would manually email sites begging for backlinks, which was an affordable SEO tactic. Now, you have to spend your SEO dollars on content marketing, which is effective but more costly.
So, how do you get the most out of your marketing dollars? Well, you can’t cut your marketing spend because that will decrease the number of sign-ups you get.
The real solution is to increase your conversion rate. Here are some things I’ve tested and learned from over the years.
As a business owner, you want someone to buy from you as soon as possible, right? Who wouldn’t?
Sadly, the web doesn’t work that way. People want to make sure that you are a reputable brand, that you are offering a good product or service and that you have a good price.
One way to increase your conversion rate is to get your visitors to engage with your product or service offering first.
For example, Optimizely does a great job of this on its homepage: over 20% of its visitors put in a URL.
Once you put in a URL, it takes you to a WYSIWYG editor where you can modify your website and run an A/B test.
But before you can start your test, you have to pay. And because you have already invested the time into modifying your site through Optimizely’s editor, you are more likely to pay.
It works so well that roughly 12% of the people who use the editor end up signing up.
It’s not easy to come up with a solution that engages your visitors before they buy, like Optimizely did, but if you think outside the box, the possibilities are endless.
Did you know that you are more likely to get people to buy from you if you customize your offering to your customer? No one likes buying generic solutions. We all want products or services that are tailored to us.
A simple way for you to do this is to ask your visitors questions, like Athletic Greens did.
By asking your visitors questions and by sending them a solution that is tailored to them, you are more likely to get them to convert as customers.
I’ve seen similar results on Quick Sprout. I know many of you hate pop-ups, and I am working on fixing when they show up, but they are effective.
My old pop-ups collected around 150 emails a day, which wasn’t that great. But through Bounce Exchange, I was able to ask you a question before asking for your email address.
The difference was huge. My email collection rate has gone up to 500 emails a day.
Who says homepages have to be filled with tons of pictures and text? I’ve found that simple homepages tend to convert better, assuming you can come up with the right headline to describe your product or service.
The Quick Sprout homepage converts at 32.6%. That means 32.6% of all visitors put in a URL… that’s not too bad.
We also simplified the Hellobar homepage and achieved similar results. We took the old homepage, which looked something like this:
And we tested a simpler variation that looked like this:
The result was a lift of over 40% in sign-ups.
By creating a bigger top of the funnel, you will be able to run A/B tests faster and come up with more unique ways to convert your visitors into customers. Keep in mind that just creating a larger top of the funnel through a simpler homepage won’t necessarily increase the number of paid customers you are getting unless you optimize the rest of your funnel.
If you take a kid to a candy store, what happens? The kid doesn’t know what to get, and in many cases he or she becomes overwhelmed and confused as there are too many options.
A Columbia University professor did a study in which she tested if more options lead to great sales.
In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.
Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.
This study shows that offering more options isn’t necessarily the smartest thing out there. By reducing the number of options you are giving your visitors and by only offering them your best options, you are more likely to get them to convert into paid customers.
We did a test recently at KISSmetrics in which we let users authenticate their accounts through Google. In other words, if you have a Google account, you can just click a button, and you will automatically be signed up for a KISSmetrics trial.
What do you think happened to our conversion rate after that one simple change? Our conversion rate went up by 59.4%.
If you want to test using a 3rd party authentication, you can try using Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other popular service out there.
For example, Buffer lets you sign up to their service through Twitter or Facebook.
They also give you a LinkedIn and email option, but they don’t place much emphasis on them. This makes me assume that those options don’t convert as well.
Chances are most of your visitors have accounts on Twitter, Facebook or even Google. So, you might as well give them the option of signing up using their existing logins instead of creating a new one on your website.
Godaddy is notorious for this. But they have no choice as the domain business has low margins. Through upsells, however, they are able to increase their average order value.
If you notice, they tend to do this on checkout because customers are more likely to buy more from you right after they make their first purchase. If you drag out pushing your upsells, you’ll notice a drastic decrease in take rate.
For example, with Crazy Egg, a user is more likely to purchase an upsell (or upgrade) within the first 15 days of using the product. If we wait to show them an upsell offer till 15 to 30 days of them using the product, they are 813% less likely to take it.
If you are going to offer upsells and downsells, make sure you do it upon checkout. If you can’t do that, offer the upsells and downsells within the first 15 days of people being your customers.
Did you know that you have shopping cart and checkout abandonment? Everyone does.
If 100 people visit your checkout page, it doesn’t mean you’ll have 100 new customers. There is a good chance that at least 50 of them, if not more, will end up dropping off.
So, what should you do? Capture partial sign-ups.
Through programs like Rejoiner, you can capture the names and email addresses of people who don’t fully complete the order. In other words, if they just enter in their names and emails but not their credit card details, Rejoiner can capture that for you.
By using programs like Rejoiner or by changing your checkout process to a 2-step, where the first step just asks for your customer’s email address, you can typically boost your conversion rate by at least 10%.
Once you have a list of all people who partially signed up, you would want to create an email drip sequence that convinces them to come back and complete the sign-up. You would also want to test remarketing to those users through AdRoll.
By focusing on conversion optimization, you can get more out of your marketing dollars. You just have to think outside the box and start testing elements that aren’t as basic as button colors and text.
The basics can get you a nice lift, but it’s the creative tests, like the ones above, that will really make a huge difference.
So, in what other ways can you get more out of your marketing dollars?
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