You might be wondering why don’t I have an article with quick tips for tripling your conversion rate in 3 days instead of 3 weeks. The truth is that tripling of conversion in 3 days is just not possible unless you are a really very high traffic website and can get statistically significant number of visitors to accurately measure you improvements. So if somebody tells you that they can hep you double or triple your conversion rate quickly, don’t believe them.
Now getting back to the topic at hand, one of the biggest ongoing challenges of any web based company is to increase the conversion rate of the users coming to their website or landing pages. We at Apptivo face the same challenge and are always trying to improve conversion rates so that our cost per acquisition is low.
So in this blog post I will tell you about our experience around trying to increase the conversion rate and how we more than tripled our conversion rates. I used a tool called unbounce (http://unbounce.com) to achieve this. I have no vested interest in promoting them so you can take my word when I tell you that their tool is really good for this purpose. I will not be telling you what our conversion rates actually are now, so don’t ask me about that in the comments.
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How we Started
Our earliest landing page was very basic and we did not have much faith in the best practices for landing pages. We did not realize that having too many links on the landing page just distracts the users and that we needed to have testimonials to provide social proof etc. We did not think that such small things could make such a huge difference to the conversion rate. Our first major jump in the conversion rate was by just following these best practices. To achieve this we added a testimonial, we decreased the number of links on the site, added a video explaining about the product, and tried to keep the page simple.
Major Breakthrough
Our first major breakthrough was when we realized that the people coming to the landing page were really impressed when we told them that they get 40+ other business apps on the cloud, for free, when they sign up with Apptivo. This is when our conversion rate increased to almost 2.5 times of what it was when we started out.
K.I.S.S
If you see our current landing page you will see that we have got rid of most of the additional info which we were displaying earlier. We are highlighting the 40+ apps, the fact that Apptivo is free and that we do not need your credit card info etc. We are no longer trying desperately to convince people in the landing page, about why they should use Apptivo. We have a simple headline and this works great. So if you didn’t get it by now, the next thing we learned is that, it is important to Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Key Takeaways
The key takeaways from our experience are:
1. You cannot ignore the best practices. They are there for a reason. You can leave out the ones you are uncomfortable with, but definitely don’t leave them out altogether.
2. Testing is important. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you don’t test there is no way you will know how to measure your progress or reach your full potential.
3. Figure out what really works for your target audience. For us it was the fact that they get 40+ other business apps for free along with the invoice management software when they sign up.
4. Keep it as simple as possible. Landing page optimization is like a mini elevator pitch ( elevator pitch is 30 seconds, people usually decide whether to close the page or continue reading in 5-10 seconds), so make sure that it is short and sweet, and just concentrates on the points that sell and nothing more.
Now with this learning we are trying to re-do our website https://www.apptivo.com and have collected feedback from users over the last few weeks. Let me know if you see something on our website which needs to be changed by adding them as comments.
