How We Doubled Our Conversion Rate In Two Days
Posted: August 23rd, 2010 | Author: noah | Filed under: Optimization | 12 Comments »Tweet
We are using the current AppSumo optimization bundle to increase our conversion rate and managed to double it in two days. I’ll tell you how below but while walking around Paris yesterday I realized that we could leverage the power of people to increase our conversion rate even more.
So here’s what we are going to do:
Leave a comment or tweet to @appsumo on how we can increase our appsumo.com homepage conversion rate. We are going to take our 3 favorites, test them and report back the results. All tweets / Comments must be submitted by Friday 3pm (so we have enough time to test).
If there is an increase in conversion rate we will give the difference to the top person. The other 2 people selected will get a free bundle.
Huh? Yea, we are currently hovering around ~3% conversion rate. If you do a mock up, that makes it easier to choose and do your test as well.
Here’s how the numbers work out:
$250 for a comment is not a bad deal:) Contest ends Friday at 3pm PST, go leave a comment / tweet now.
Disclaimer: There are no disclaimers.
Why are we doing this?
This is helpful to increase our conversion rates going forward. It compounds. So if we increase it to 5%, then it’s always 5% for all future bundles and we can keep increasing that to my personal goal of 10%.
So far we’ve doubled our conversion rate from 1.5 to 3%. Here are a few things we’ve done so far:
Here are some things we changed based on CrazyEgg, SnapABug and general feedback.
- Moved buy now from right to left side
- Changed the share links to social proof since no one was clicking
- Too many people were clicking on our. No Thanks, tell me when the next bundle is so we pushed it down further on the page and removed the background color
- We added a testimonial to show that people like what we are offering.
- Displayed company logos based on which got the most clicks (also on who had most the twitter followers).
- The timer wasn’t prominent so we moved it higher:
- Our conversion on the checkout page is very high (80%+), ie. so we want more clicks. Hence we made more things that made sense clickable to the checkout page, like the timer.
- Peoples mouse movements were in the middle of the page so we moved our buy now buttons there. Learned from Clicktale.com.
- People were confused whether they were getting one or all bundles so we changed the text from buy now to buy all 5 now >
- Removed the tell us what you want and app directory link from the tip. Distracting from what we want users to do, buy.
- Clarified redemption times. Got great feedback using SnapABug.com that people didn’t have a need for the bundle right now. So we realized we could clarify that almost all the services can be redeemed whenever.
- Feedback was that text sucks and images rule. Removed text and updated with images.
- People kept asking if our charge was monthly or one time. we added an faq page.
- Bonus tip! Use google analytics and setup goals. this was AMAZINGLY helpful. you can see the $ per each referral as well as how much $ you make from specific page visits. This will teach you if people to go to your faq then buy or which sites you should try to buy more traffic from.
Thanks Sudhanshu Aggarwal, Jason Baptiste, Ruben Gamez, Gabe Weinberg, Jeff Clark, Jerome Breche and everyone who talked to us for help on this article and optimizing.
Contests ends Friday at 3pm. Go leave a tweet / comment with what we should test, it can be anything.
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Main thing to try: turn the main page into the checkout page.
How I would do it:
1) drop all the videos and info and put them on individual pages with info links for each part of the bundle.
2) Make it one column (drop the left column).
3) Put the checkout form right under the logos and the big price strikeout thing.
4) Make the strikeout price as big as the regular price.
5) Cut all the AVS crap out of the checkout form. Just collect email, card number & expiration date (if you can).
Lots of other little design tweak ideas I could come up with
I forgot to mention that if you make the main page the checkout page, you should make it default to https. Actually, I’ve eeked out a few % in the past converting whole sites to https.
Gabriel’s suggestions are really good. My thoughts:
1) Remove “Get notified of next deal/Refer friends, get $5″ stuff from header.
2) Make “My Account” less prominent.
3) Move up the “deal ends etc etc” where the get notified stuff was
4) Change “Only $25 for $528 worth of Optimization Tools” to
“$528 worth of Optimization Tools for only $25!”
(Hit them with a high reference price first!)
5) Once in checkout process, remove everything from header except AppSumo logo
6) “So close to getting the deal…” change that to: “You will be saving $503!!!”
Best,
Patrick
Crowdsourcing landing page optimization strategy…interesting concept.
Noah, the landing page still feels confusing, in my opinion.
I think you need a clear top section that quickly communicates what this is.
Like this:
http://www.woothemes.com/demo/?name=optimize
I know Jason Baptiste gave you feedback. Check out how he uses a similar format:
http://padpressed.com/
1) Remind your base that there is an appsumo going on.
2) Get more people on the live chat and popping up. That worked on me.
3) I needed a lot of time to figure out if this was worth the price of admission because I didn’t have a site that I thought I could use it on right now. 4 out of 5 are redeemable whenever you want. I think that needs to be emphasized more to up the conversions. At the lower price its worth the risk.
Now to go search the couch cushions…
Looking at your page, there’s a lot going on. Lots of things fighting for my attention and I’m not sure which ones are the most important. Difficult to get a feel for the visual hierarchy.
This is what I’m seeing:
http://www.bidsketch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/appsumo-before.png
If you blur the page, you’ll see that it’s tough to glance at the page and see what’s most important right away:
http://www.bidsketch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/appsumo-blur-before.png
I made a few changes:
* More whitespace in between elements
* Slightly larger title (ignore the wording there…)
* Larger pricing and used Amazon’s sale price colors and savings detail (I figured they already tested the hell out of that)
* Larger call to action (the buy button)
* Pushed down the details about the apps further down the page and changed the layout of the app logos.
Here’s what it looks like:
http://www.bidsketch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/appsumo-after.png
Bluring this page gives me a better feel for what matters at a glance:
http://www.bidsketch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/appsumo-blur-after.png
Hi,
I’ve summed up my comment in the wireframe below. Hope you get something useful out of it. This is the way I would do it.
Drop everything (EVERYTHING) that is not absolutely vital to the costumer. The videos, the text, the search, the account … All of it. The main objecive is to capture the attention of the passing user. I remember walking by your site once or twice, and just closing it cause its a mess
. Sorry if I’m a bit hard on you.
The thing you have to stick to is AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. You draw attention with colors, contrasts and illustrations. Meaning, the best illustration will be color contrasted to your background. In your case though you dont get much from an illustration, so get a really kickass icon for your bundle. If your background is cold colors (green), then the icon has to be warm colored (like red, orange, yellow).
Interest is created with the arrows and the offer. You give the costumer a 470% discount. The end price just reinforces the %. And the first price has to be the big one, so the constumer see’s that he/she’s getting a steal.
Next you try to convert the sceptics with handpicked Quotes from reviews. If you dont have them, try to get at least three or replace them with Quotes from the companies you get your bargains from – talk about your partnership. Get a bit creative here
The last step is closing the deal. The costumer is now ready to click the big shiny button. After doing so, you have to ease the conversion with as little required fields as possible. If they are not 100% absolutely needed – trash them. Or try the multiple steps approach. Just dont put it all on one screen, its daunting. Try to stop at 3-4 fields per step.
Hope you find this comment helpful,
And sorry for the grammar
http://www.shrani.si/f/1g/7K/2kKBpRL0/appsumo.png
First of all, I LOVE your tagline: Giant deals on amazing apps. I’d clean up the header to let it stand out more, moving the “get notified” and “refer a friend” lower on the page, maybe in the left column. “My Account” could just be a link, without the color behind it.
From a design perspective I also might move the Twitter/FB share links to below the contents of the deal (and center the countdown timer), however it looks like you get good clicks so the data might dictate otherwise.
I would suggest upping the quality on your Buy Now button — there is some distortion in there that cheapens the feel a bit.
There could be an alternative to the “logo farm”approach. I’m thinking more of a list, with a value statement next to each line item. This could be the company tagline, or something in your own words to describe why it’s so awesome. To the left of each item you could have the dollar value, and tally up the total at the bottom of the list with a big ‘ol slash through it –> appsumo special deal price!
Hope this is of some value to you. Good catching up with you on chat today!
Some great comments so far. The biggest thing I would focus on is simplifying. Here’s what I’d do:
1. This is general, but important I think. Consider using design principles from sites like GroupOn who are also selling discounted items for a limited time. A lot of the design concepts will carry over. Woot and Yugster also come to mind.
1. Move all detailed information about the services to a separate page. If I want information about a particular service, I’ll click on the image of that service to learn more. Also, this may just be my impression, but with bundles like this, I’m willing to be a little less rigorous in learning about the services than I normally am. The idea is I’m getting a deal to try a bunch of apps out. Also you’re giving me a money back guarantee (more on that in a second).
2. Skip the sidebar on the left. Move that content to the main column under the logos.
3. Make the “Buy Now” button much larger. Scale it to half the width of the main column. Put the “as seen as” section underneath that. Include the price in the button, so the copy becomes: “Buy Now for only $25.”
4. Underneath the button, in fairly large text, include the money back guarantee. I didn’t even know you had one until I scrolled way down the page. That’s big for a lot of people. I’d also change the text from “Buy Deal Now, Use Whenever” to “Never expires.” So the complete tag line underneath the button might be: “Never expires and 100% money back guarantee.”
5. Make the images of the included products larger because that’s what I’m most interested in.
6. The timer shouldn’t take up so much space and should be less granular. It’s distracting to see the numbers change. GroupOn only goes down to the minute.
That’s kind of a hodge podge of advice, but hopefully there’s something helpful in there. Good luck!
I had some fun mocking this up last night. My approach was from an organizational perspective. I felt like the current layout was all over the place. The goal was to clarify the page and make it quickly digestible. The ‘deal site’ is a fairly established design pattern, so I took cues from Groupon, Living Social, Woot.com, Macheist, etc.
Here’s my re-imagined AppSumo front page: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31839/justins-appsumo-optimization.png
I chunked the info into 3 sections and added a light gray background to help define the sections.
Logo Section:
- Tweaked the headline slightly
- Added a big struck-out, regular price
- Increased the size of the logos
- Added 3-5 word descriptions for each product
- Added more white space
- Added a subtle shadow around the section to give it some prominence
Created a “Drawer” section to house all the deal details:
- Added a call to action “Get The Bundle”
- Moved the price and buy button next to each other
- Added a subtle shadow around the ‘buy box’ to give it added importance
- Added a Value/Discount/Savings table
- Simplified the countdown timer and added it to the drawer
- Placed in the “Buy The Deal Now, Redeem Whenever” text
- Made the ‘# bought’ section more prominent
- Added the sharing options below
Below the fold:
- Made The testimonial more prominent
- Added the company logo before each product description.
- Added more space between the product description and added a horizontal rule.
- Renamed button to “Buy The Bundle”
Oh yeah, check out this subliminal easter egg in my mockup. The arrow in the Clicky logo points to the ‘buy now’ button: http://img.skitch.com/20100827-8ww3a6ma6b9b5fyc4774b4qwbh.png
It came about by accident, but it’s pretty awesome, haha.