My new site design is finally performing better than the old design! But it took some tweaking and of course A/B split testing to get there.
Interestingly, the key changes were all related to the presentation and location of my main calls-to-action: try and buy.
Here’s an overview of the new design, the tweaks, the split tests and the test results.
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Nice message in my inbox, from a reader of this blog:
Hey Alwin,
I wanna thank you for your tips on “How to sell more stuff to your existing customers“.
I followed your advice and, as you can see, got some spectacular results:
I really needed that “do not hesitate to send reminder emails”.
Without your graph and that beautiful second peak I would never have sent the reminder mail. Was nice to see that with another product, other campaign, the impact is similar.
Perhaps marketing is science after all 🙂
The A/B split test for my new product page has been running for a week, but the new design isn’t working yet. The results after one week:
I am especially disappointed with the Sign-Up conversion rate. It has increased, but only slightly. I was expecting more from the strong focus on the calls-to-action in the top section. Maybe having two CTAs there (try and buy) is not the way to go. Let’s tweak and then test again:
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We just started an A/B split test for a major re-design of our product pages. The goal: higher conversion rates and more profits (duh…).
We have been tweaking and testing with small changes of the old design for a long time.
But now it’s time for a major overhaul, with a cleaner layout and a more “2012 looking” design.
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After running an A/B split test, when the results are in, you always have to make the decision:
Do I switch to the new version or not?
If the difference in conversion is large, the decision is easy: just switch to the best version.
If the difference is small, the decision may be harder, but then again, which way you go doesn’t matter much anyway.
However, I have just done an A/B test where the difference in results is large, but still it’s not clear whether I should stick with version A (my control), or switch to version B (my challenger). Here’s my test: Continue reading
You know your sales campaign is working when you
receive a worried email from your payment provider 🙂
Hi Sytske,
We noticed a significant increase on the nr transactions for collectorz.com, please see the table below.
Is there a particular reason for that?
Thanks in advance for your comments,
Jonas
For the past 2 years, our Movie Collector product page has shown a picture of me standing in front of my own DVD collection. Similarly, the Book Collector home had a picture of my wife Sytske and her book collection.
But then we had nice cartoon characters created, mainly for use in advertising material. Being happy with the results, we thought: let’s use these characters on our product home pages too. It would improve the “after-ad-click” recognition of the visuals and of course, it just looked nice.
So we replaced the photos with the cartoon characters, without split-testing.
Recently, while staring at our website, I started wondering: was this really a good idea? The cartoons may look nice but do they really work better than the photos?
So I finally did the A/B split-test: Cartoons (A) vs Photos (B). Continue reading
If you have been selling software for a while, you have probably built a considerable customer database. But to what extend are you taking advantage of that important asset?
How can you sell more stuff to your existing customers?
But before we move on to the HOW, let me first give you 3 reasons WHY you should sell more to your existing customers and some ideas on WHAT you could sell to them.
(this is a reworked and updated version of my presentation at the European Software Conference in London, November 2011)
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Earlier this week, Dave Collins asked for feedback on remarketing. I have already posted some remarks in the comments under his blog post, but then I thought, why not write about my experience with remarketing in a longer blog post. So here it is.
First, a quick reminder of what remarketing is:
Remarketing is a cookie-based advertising system that lets you show your ads to people who have already visited your website.
Your ads can appear on any site that the user visits after visiting yours.
For example: A user visits my Movie Collector product page (it doesn’t matter where he came from, an ad, organic result, a link on another website, etc…). Now after he visits my website, this user goes on to browse the internet, visiting other websites. And suddenly everywhere he goes, he sees Movie Collector ads. Leaderboards, towers, inline rectangles, even little text ads. My ads are following him around the web.
One important thing to understand: remarketing ads do not only appear on websites related to your product, like your regular display network ads. No, they appear everywhere, on any site. Remarketing lets you target specific users on any site, as opposed to all users on specific sites.
I started using Remarketing for our Collectorz.com software 2 years ago, when Adwords started offering it. Like most advertising and marketing tools, it didn’t work right out-of-the-box. It took a bit of tweaking and tuning to make it effective, but ultimately I found that remarketing can be a great fit for software vendors, especially if you use some kind of “try-before-you-buy” system.
Here’s some factors I played around with:
Let’s discuss these one by one: Continue reading
I love the mobile apps business. If done right, there’s a lot of money to be made here. At Collectorz.com, we’ve been selling apps since May 2009 and it’s a big part of our business now.
However, from a software marketing perspective, I keep running into 3 main problems of the current mobile apps biz (one of which is App Store specific):
Here’s the full story on all three, including my suggested workarounds:
