Learn how we updated and improved our key membership pages to increase conversion and improve the quality of leads with simple customer-centric copy changes

To stay ahead of the competition, you need to keep monitoring and reviewing your key sales pages - are they converting, how much is it costing per user to convert and how can you improve conversions? At Smart Insights, we'll hold our hands up and admit our key Business Membership sales pages were due an update and so we started work on these at the beginning of the year. Here's how it went...

The problem

We had four landing pages that were designed to describe the value proposition of Business Membership and direct users to relevant pages to find out more: The overall generic filter page that is used to capture leads who would like to learn more about the different types of Business Membership, without delving too deep into…

Live chat is a key tool in your CRO arsenal

Generating and capturing leads is one of the best benefits of using live chat on your website. Not only you provide great customer service, responding to customer queries in no time, but you also capture potential visitors by starting a conversation with them. Why is that? According to LiveChat report, visitors invited to chat are 6.3 times more likely to convert into customers than those who don’t chat; with 61% of those customers converting within the first chat. So starting a chat with potential visitors, drastically increases the chances of turning them into customers. Did this catch your attention? Check out a few ways live chat can help you increase a conversion on your website.

1) Reach out to visitors by starting a chat with them

You…

An in-depth case study from our work with Conversion Rate Experts, including before and after images of winning A/B tests

It's fair to say we talk a lot about how you can improve your digital marketing results here at SmartInsights. It's kind of our thing. I like to think nobody does it better. But those who talk the talk should also be made to walk the walk, else how else do they know their advice is actually relevant and applicable to real business? Since we're always talking about the need to optimize across the whole customer journey and constantly test messaging to boost your conversion rate, we worked with Conversion Rate Experts to do exactly this. We wanted to share what we did and the changes we made with you so you can make similar improvements to your own sites which can deliver big boosts to your CRO.

Start out with deep research

Stripped…

How to boost CRO for non-ecommerce sites

When you think of Conversion Rate Optimisation and AB testing, what comes to mind first is probably ecommerce websites, product pages, baskets and checkouts. But the scope of optimisation programs is much wider than this. We work with several brands, from car dealership groups to home improvement to charities, where the objective is to create a lead, usually via a form – the sale or activity happens in a branch, over the phone or in a customer’s home, rather than on the website. The challenges when optimising these lead generation sites can be quite different to e-commerce. Here are some of the things we’ve learned over the years.

1. There is no such thing as ‘best practice’ in a lead generation websites

Arguably, there’s no such thing as best practice on any website, but, still, there are some conventions and expectations around checkouts and product pages that…

Recommendations and examples of using style guides to support a CRO programme

When we kick-off a Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) programme with a new client we always try and find out what existing guides or tools they have that we can use during our programme. These may be branding guidelines, style guidelines, UI Pattern libraries, etc. For example, here is a really good description of how Envato, who run the Tuts+ sites, carry out Style guide Driven Development. However, the responses we get from clients are wide-ranging. As Mark Boulton (@MarkBoulton) pointed out recently: We're not going to dive into that debate around whether style guidelines are a help or hindrance here, instead I wanted to give recommendations from a CRO angle and investigate how we can…

How and when to use A/B or Multivariate Test Design

When running a testing programme you will have to decide for each test whether it should be run as an A/B test or a multivariate test. The decisions you make when designing your experiments will significantly impact important variables such as the depth of the insights, the speed of testing and delivering winning variations and therefore the impact of your testing efforts.

The 1,024 Variation Test

So when should we run that 1,024 variation multivariate test (Google actually did this)  and when would an A/B test be more appropriate? First, let’s consider some of the important variables: Time to test - The number of variations in your experiment will affect the length that your test needs to run. Traffic required - Your traffic volumes will also determine how quickly you…