Hi Will, We’ve just published another case study. It’s about how we grew Crazy Egg’s business by 510%. In it, you’ll see specific methods for getting win after win from a site that already is an extremely strong performer. We believe it’s our most useful case study yet. Click here to see it.
The Conversion Rate Experts Team UK OFFICE: 222 Regent Street, London, W1B 5TR, UK. Phone: 0800 043 2650
Do you suspect that your conversion rate couldn’t be improved upon?
In this case study—which we believe is our most useful one yet—you’ll see specific methods for getting win after win from a site that already is an extremely strong performer.
Plus, we’ll tell you how to get a free, annotated PDF of all the persuasion techniques we used to create wins—so you can apply them to your own site.
Many people ask us if there’s a point at which conversion rate optimization gives diminishing returns. If that point does exist, Facebook, Amazon and Google don’t appear to have hit it yet. It’s astonishing what you can achieve with a sophisticated conversion strategy and a skilled team.
If you’re serious about conversion, you’ll most likely already know about Crazy Egg, the web-analytics service that allows you to see exactly where your website visitors click. We featured it in our list of tools that reveal why potential customers abandon your website. Crazy Egg came to us even though they already had an extremely strong site. In fact, they had even published case studies about it. They asked us if we could grow their business even further.
We have been able to engineer a long series of wins for them, which have increased their revenue well into the seven figures.
Note that “we” refers to a team effort between Conversion Rate Experts (with our proven system and expertise) and Crazy Egg (with its excellent tool and highly effective team).
In this document we’ll describe four of the wins that we believe can be directly useful to your business.
How we got those improvements
Given that we’ve published a list of 108 of the most effective conversion strategies, you might conclude that it’s difficult to know where to start the process of conversion optimization. We discovered long ago that our recommendations can never be better than our facts, so it’s critical to begin by gathering substantial visitor intelligence. That means.
- Gaining a deep understanding of what makes buyers buy
- Determining what makes some qualified visitors not buy
Here are the four primary objections we identified, and how we addressed them:
1. Some of Crazy Egg’s visitors were unclear about how heatmaps worked and exactly what sort of reports Crazy Egg would generate. If you’re not sure what a heatmap is, here’s a good explanation.
To counter this objection, we organized a case-study competition. We asked Crazy Egg’s customers to present particularly good examples of how they used Crazy Egg on their sites. This enabled us to use actual customers’ language on the site to help explain what heatmaps were and how they were used. We also got some great testimonials in the process.
2. As with many products, price was an objection. Prospects said that they weren’t sure whether they could justify paying Crazy Egg’s prices.
The fascinating thing about price is how one’s frame of reference makes all the difference. For example, $2,000 may sound like a lot of money for a shed, but when compared to the price of adding rooms to a home, it suddenly seems cheap.
We identified that Crazy Egg’s price could benefit from the principle of reframing. In order to prove what a bargain it was, we dived into academic research surrounding heatmaps and eye tracking. Though each technology has its champions and detractors, we discovered research from Carnegie Mellon University that indicated an 88 percent correlation between eye movement on a page and subsequent mouse movement in that zone. At the same time, we determined that the cost to conduct a formal eye-tracking study can run into six figures and take months to complete. Armed with this research, we described how Crazy Egg could deliver a great deal of visitor intelligence at a tiny fraction of the cost—and time—of other alternatives.
3. Some visitors thought that Crazy Egg was no different from overlay reports in Google Analytics. After having interviewed Crazy Egg’s customer-support people, we knew that they were experienced in describing the differences between Crazy Egg and Google Analytics, so we incorporated transcripts of their explanations into our new text.
4. A subset of visitors thought that Crazy Egg had fewer features than some competitors’ tools. We countered that objection by pointing out how the sheer number of features does not always translate into more insights. With web-analytics tools it’s easy to become overwhelmed by data overload. Sometimes “less is more.”
How we modified Crazy Egg’s homepage
Here is the original page or “control” from Crazy Egg’s site:
Crazy Egg’s homepage before our test.
Here’s a thumbnail image of our challenger page next to a similarly scaled image of the control:
The homepage challenger we tested was vastly longer than the control. If you’d like to get a free annotated PDF of it, subscribe to our free newsletter, and we’ll send you a copy when it’s ready. (We’re aiming for a release date of September 3.)
Your eyes are not playing tricks on you: The redesigned page is about 20 times as long as the control. If you’d like to see the full-size page visit Crazy Egg’s site.
To identify which of the two versions was most effective at persuading visitors to become customers, we carried out an A/B split-test. We carried out this and all of the other split-tests described on this page using Google’s split-testing tool, Google Website Optimizer, (which has recently been integrated into Google Analytics as Google Analytics Content Experiments).
The results: Our new page outperformed the control by 30%.
The media would have us believe that people no longer have any capacity to concentrate. In reality, you cannot have a page that’s too long—only one that’s too boring. In the case of Crazy Egg’s home page, visitors wanted their many questions answered and that’s what we delivered. (If you’d like more people to scroll down your long pages, see the guide we wrote on the topic.)
Same message + different medium = 64% more conversions
People have different learning styles. Though the written word is still the bread-and-butter persuasion medium on the Web, it’s also important to appeal to people who prefer to learn by watching.
We therefore created a video to see if it increased the conversion rate. We wrote a three-minute script that encapsulated the key points of the sales message. Although it’s now possible to “point and shoot” a high-definition video in just minutes, a mediocre video could lose our audience in seconds—so we used the video production company Demo Duck to create the video. And we think they did an excellent job.
The result? Even though the video’s message was similar to that of the rest of the page, the video increased conversions by nearly 64%.
Crazy Egg’s co-founder Neil Patel has published this excellent article, which describes in detail how we made this video. He gives a good argument as to why you should focus most of your efforts on creating an effective script.