Two weeks ago, I got an email from Fabien, our CEO, giving me two months to grow our monthly leads by 50%. Since we run at 10.000 leads per month, I just have 8 weeks to find an extra 5000 leads per month!
Wow. I started to panic...
Then I thought deeply about it. Now, after having received the feedback of our firsts experiments, I think it's not that crazy. I even think we will beat these 50% increase in our monthly leads.
Optimizing landing pages
Since all leads are coming from visitors on our website, I don't need to chase outside visitors. So, I decided to focus on quick wins. My first experience has been to improve the conversion rates of landing page to grow the visitor to lead conversion rate.
A great landing page should contain:
- A clear headline showing the benefits of your offer, relevant with your visitors expectations. Talking about benefits and not features is key here. Try to focus on a single purpose and a single focused message.
- A big and clear call-to-action, above the fold. The simpler the better for efficient call to actions.
- Social proofs like logos of your customers and/or testimonials.
One thing I come across time and time again when reviewing landing page experiences is the company trying to sell me on the features of their product instead of how it actually improves my life.
People don't buy products; they buy better versions of themselves. When you're trying to win customers, don't try to list all attributes of your product, describe how awesome your customer will become with your product.
The experiment
I started to experiment on our CRM Application page. I created 6 variations of this landing page to experiment with. With the Odoo website Builder, it just took a few minutes to create these 6 pages.
Here is a video on how I created one of these landing page as well as an exercice to try to do it yourself.
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Exercise 1:
Don't forget to include:
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Visitors where redirected randomly to one of these variations of the same page to analyse the relative conversion rates. Two weeks and 3000 visitors later, we got enough data to reach a correct statistical significance. Here are the performance summary reports of these variations:
Conversion: 9.02%
Conversion: 14.39%
Conversion: 12.50%
Conversion: 9.38%
Conversion: 15.79%
Conversion: 9.56%
Here we are! The variation #1 got 59.5% more conversion into leads than the original version of the page. It's even more than what I expected on such a page.
My interpretation of such a great result is:
- Reinforcing the "Free" effect. The original page was not clear enough about the fact the it's an instant demo, that is free and without commitment. We got this feedback during our recruitment interviews; when we asked candidates whether they tested our application before the interview, a lot of them replied "No, because I did not know it was free".
- The fear of small hidden footnotes like in contracts... to be detailed...
Since the call to action "Start now! It's free" is used on all our landing pages, we replaced this block everywhere to benefit from a 59.5% higher conversion rates on all landing pages. That's a big win! This small change alone is bringing us 2700 extra leads per month!
You may have noticed that our landing page is not asking the name, email or phone number of the contacts in the form. We just ask a domain name to start the free trial process. But the next screen is a sign up form with name, phone number and email. As the visitor is already engaged in the testing process, they are more willing to give their data after having passed this small step. Our next experiment will be to improve the sign up form.
Copywriting for your visitors
Variation #1 allowed us to choose the best button to use in our call-to-action. It reduces frictions and motivates visitors to fill in the form (you get an instant trial, and it's free!).
But the variation #5 is interesting too as it outperforms the original version by 38.5%. The impact is not as important as the variation #1 but, as they both impact different parts of the screen, we can apply both improvements in our final page.
It looks like our visitors perfer the headline "The #1 Open Source CRM" rathen than "Boost Your Sales With Odoo CRM".
I had the idea to use the term "Open Source" in the header while using the promote tool of the Odoo Website Builder. The promote tool asks you to provide a few keywords describing your page content. For our CRM application, I used the following keywords: CRM, Open Source, leads, opportunities, sales pipeline.
For every keyword, the promote tool gives you the most searched tems in google related to your keyword. It turns out that the most searched term related to open source in Google is "Open Source CRM". It turns out that it's completly relevant to our application since Odoo is one of the rare open source CRM on the market.
This resulted on a 12% more increase of our leads on the CRM page. Do the test and try to optimize this product page with the promote tool:
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Exercise 2: Find a better page title Optimize Product Name for SEOOnce in the page:
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What's the next step?
My firsts improvements on the landing page allowed me to get 2700 extra leads per month. I still have to get 2300 leads to reach the 5000 target I received. I launched several optimization tasks, including: retargetting past visitors (using adroll), boost google adwords, create new blog posts like this one, testing livechat to discuss with some visitors in real time, using a manycontacts-like toolbar to optimize conversion on non-landing pages, etc.
I will report on this blog the feedback of these actions within the next weeks. Subscribe to this blog if you want to know the end of this story...
_________ put cta __________
Oh! Subscriptions to this blog does not create leads; we will just send you the next blog posts. No spam or salesperson that will phone you! We write blog to inform our audience, not to get more leads. (at least, not direcly :)
