A website is much like Madonna. It needs to constantly reinvent itself to stay relevant. This doesn’t have to mean a complete rebuild every few months, sometimes small tweaks can lead to hugely powerful results. We asked marketers to share some examples of quick changes they’ve made that are easy to replicate.
What was the situation?
In early 2019 we started a large-scale digital review. We have ambitious goals and wanted to understand where we could make improvements, but also what we had in place that we could enhance and develop further.
Our blog has long been our biggest traffic driver, and at the time of the review was approaching 1,000 individual posts. These posts, produced over the course of six years (and targeting our audience with everything from technical walkthroughs to industry discussions) accounted for two thirds of our site’s traffic in 2018. Yet we were doing nothing to convert these visitors.
What was the tweak?
Our first course of action was to make it quick and simple to download an associated resource from the posts themselves. We reviewed every single post, assigned it a relevant resource and added pop up download forms to each.
How easy was it to implement?
It wasn’t a revolutionary change, so it didn’t take us a huge amount of time to implement (in comparison to other activities). It was simply a case of making related resources available when visitors were most likely to engage with them.
What impact did the tweak have?
Coupled with embedding contact forms directly on our product pages, our organic traffic conversions rocketed. We’ve seen almost month-on-month growth since the implementation, and the past three months have set all-time records for us. In fact, August 2019 was a 215% increase on January 2019’s figures.
What was the situation?
We offer a free QR code generator on our site. When we originally launched the generator, users could not create a QR code that features a logo without signing up for a trial. We quickly realised that potential customers were unable to visualise how the QR code with the logo would look and were therefore unwilling to sign up.
What was the tweak?
We tweaked the UX flow of the QR code generator. Now, we allow users to experience that ‘aha’ moment so they can visualise how their QR Codes will eventually look. They have to sign up for the trial to download the QR Code, so we still gain the registrations but we have far more of them.
How easy was it to implement?
It took us less than a couple of hours to make this simple tweak.
What was the impact?
Before the tweak was made, our ‘visitor-to-trial’ conversion was hovering around 4-5%. This conversion percentage has shot up to 14.9% after this new workflow.
What was the situation?
After Google announced mobile-first indexing, we ran a speed test and noticed the slow mobile speed (and low score) of some of our pages. We also checked on the pages indexed in Google and noticed there were hundreds more that we had live. We investigated it and found the author pages, blog category pages, and tag pages were indexed. These had very thin content and were bad for SEO.
What was the tweak?
We ‘no-indexed’ our WordPress author tags and category pages and removed some mobile speed-slowing code. [No-indexing is a tag that can be used in the code to tell a search engine not to include that page in a list of search results].
How easy was it to implement?
Fairly simple. The website needed some tweaks and some of the coding was replaced with leaner code and language. The no-indexing was really very simple and almost instant in the Google index.
What was the result?
Our impressions and clicks in the Google Search Console doubled.
Not bad for some admin and a bit of insight
What was the situation?
In July this year, we decided to test a different layout for our pay-per-click landing pages, this was to better represent our product and increase our conversion rate.
What was the tweak?
The key changes we made were:
Visual header: We made better use of the space above the fold by using bold imagery.
More specific content: This ensures the reader knows they’re in the right place, whether they’re looking for a regional or hot spot heat map.
More competitive edge: The existing page had a small ‘about us’ section but didn’t give the reader any good reasons to follow through with a free trial. We now clearly outline the benefits of choosing us instead of our competitors.
How easy was it to implement these changes?
We have an in-house web developer, so it was relatively easy to get the changes made. It took approximately a week to get the experiment live.
What was the impact?
The A/B test ran for 38 days and consisted of 199 experiment sessions with a 50/50 split between the two variants. Throughout that time, we saw the variants play against each other.
The experiment ended with the original page seeing 17.78% conversion rate and the new variant seeing a 22.94% conversion rate – that’s a 29% improvement.
What was the situation?
Our client ADP realised its conversion-driving website needed a buyer-driven overhaul. As part of a full redesign, and through UX research, we learned that ADP’s existing site was littered with calls-to-action that buyers felt were too aggressive, too early, and too often. In many cases these numerous buttons were actually turning buyers away instead of converting them.
What was the tweak?
We trimmed the number and adjusted the placement of CTAs to strategic areas that fit naturally and logically at the right stages of persona-based user journeys. This made the call to actions helpful instead
of overbearing.
How easy was it to implement?
This was part of a complete site redesign, and was one of many UX, information architecture and content strategies we employed to help facilitate more conversions and fewer bounces.
What was the impact?
Two weeks after our launch, analytics showed a double-digit surge in performance – achieving a triple-digit MQL increase over the prior year and a double-digit increase over any previous two-week best.
Most impressively, the website performed better than imagined in its first six months. Lead conversion rates, lead quantity, and lead quality skyrocketed immediately and maintained double digit increases – with sales reporting double digit increases in SQLs, closed/won rates and quality of leads.
What was the situation?
Our initial business idea was a B2C app for the fashion industry called LookLocal. Very soon it became clear that the right data for the app was missing and that the exchange of data, such as product or stock information, between brands and retailers was very complicated. The idea for a B2B counterpart, Fashion Cloud, was born. It connects brands and retailers and enables wholesale partners to exchange data efficiently. The business idea, as well as the name, changed so a new domain was needed.
What was the tweak?
There were four reasons to use the domain ‘.cloud’:
The domain is international. It does not communicate any country affiliation with a country code like .de or .uk
It’s new. At Fashion Cloud we’re constantly working on improving processes by developing innovative solutions that help fashion brands and retailers co-operate more efficiently. A domain that hasn’t been used by many other companies helps attract attention and convey exactly this message.
The support we got from the .cloud organisation.
It is short, recognisable and easy to remember. Our domain is literally our company name, with only a dot in between.
How easy was it to implement?
The change itself was easy (at least as simple as a domain change can be). The only difficulty is that some customers don’t understand fashion.cloud is a website when it’s written somewhere. In some cases, for example in marketing material, we prefer to write “www.” in front so people understand that it’s a website.
What was the impact?
The biggest advantage is having a domain that’s universally valid across national borders. We’re an international company with offices in Hamburg and Amsterdam. On our platform are brands and retailers from over 70 countries, whose customers are represented internationally as well. With a website like fashion.cloud, our customers can use one universal website for communication. The link to our platform (app.fashion.cloud) fits our website (fashion.cloud) so the customers sees a cohesive overall picture.
