Marketing Strategy: Improve Conversion Rates

This is a story of how we doubled our signup conversion rates with some string, sticky notes, and a marker. Yes, this is web marketing strategy.

In online marketing strategy converting visitor traffic is just as important as driving visitor traffic.  Spending time improving signup or sales conversion rates a few percentage points could increase sales more than marketing the site to thousands of new visitors. This is often an overlooked and under valued aspect of online marketing.

Our marketing strategy here at Arkayne is shaped in large part by the concept of continous improvement.  Steven Blank’s book, “The Four Steps To The Epiphany” refers to this process as iteration and consider it the make or break for online businesses. Experts cooler than I will use the word “pivot” to describe these business evolutions.  Online it typically means changing a website and its message to better serve the customer.

At Arkayne, we want to better serve our customers, so we started by creating a giant strings, notes, and tacks map of our website.  We wanted to see everything work together, not one page or piece at a time. In about 30 minutes we had the website mapped. Even though the website map was built from Google Analytics data it presented so much more hidden information than KissMetrics or Google Analytics could convey one page or path at a time.  Then we sat back and absorbed…

Being able to see the whole Arkayne website was instrumental in generating ideas. Things like traffic dead ends, poorly performing pages, visitor paths, and effects of cross links became very visible very quickly all at once.  Within minutes we could identify and track where our efforts must be spent and how much we expect to gain from the time invested.

What we noticed first was that people were coming into the Arkayne website and moving to the conversion page very well.  The conversion page however was not doing such a great job realtive to the rest of the site.  Our first instinct was to work on the conversion page, and thats what we would have done if we were looking only at that page.  Seeing the whole website laid out like that made us realize that the problem was actually upstream.

The problem was that our visitors did not know what they were buying when the arrived at the conversion page.  Instead of burning time on improving the conversion page we decided to ensure the customers frame of mind was ready to engage our product by the time the decision came up.

The pages upsteam were feature description pages. Those pages already had short descriptive videos, what could be better? As it turns out, photos or more specifically screen shots of the Arkayne product with short informative value propositions.  We simply went through and exposed every aspect of our product and its value to the visitor.  The website turned the product inside out and presented one complete piece to the customer at a time.  This had the desired effect of doubling our conversion rate one or two clicks down the funnel.

Why not a demo?  We guessed that if customers wanted a demo they would have engaged in our free offer on the conversion page.  Why pictures?  Looking back I’d guess that because humans have such a great ability to take in every aspect of an image at once, a photo allows the brain to pick instantly what its interested in.  Video and demos force brains to remember a series of images while comprehending audio information.  I guess you could say images are more satisfying.  That feeling contributes to the engagement rate on the conversion page.

So if you’re looking for a marketing strategy, we suggest:

1.  Step back look at the whole website.
2.  Identify the weakest conversions point.
3.  Look up stream from your weak spot.
4.  Understand the visitors frame of mind.
5.  Address their need to feel comfortable.

Checking back a two weeks later on our analytics as we update our wall of website, we noticed that our signup rate had literally doubled on the pricing page.   We would have spent weeks trying to double our traffic, I guess thats next…