27 Feb
Our CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) expert Nick recently worked with one of his clients on a new homepage design that increased conversions by 69% month-on-month (and 59% year-on-year). Let’s take a look at Nick’s post on how he did it…
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As part of the ongoing CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) analysis that I perform as part of my role, I recently conducted a thorough review of a client’s homepage and the types of enquiries it was generating.
After a detailed review through the various tools I use, as well as in-depth discussions with those at the front-line of customer enquiries and calls, we found that payers made up a larger-than-expected percentage of enquiries from the website, due to an unclear navigational structure.
New features
After creating a number of test pages and tweaking them based on feedback, I came up with a new design that encompassed three key tabs ‘above the fold’;
The first tab allows users to;
- Make a sales enquiry
- Make a billing enquiry (ie. existing payers)
- Contact support (existing clients)
The second tab allows users to find out more about our;
- Direct Debit solutions
- BPAY solutions
- eCommerce solutions
The third tab within the new panel allows users to;
- Log into various client portals
Test, test, test!
As always, it’s important to run a comparison test to see if the changes make an impact, so an A/B test was run for a number of weeks. The main goals of this test were:
- To see how many sales enquiries each version of the homepage was responsible for
- To see whether the lead quality increased with the new page versions
- To compare the bounce-rate between both versions
After running the A/B test for four weeks, the results were astounding. The conversion rate on the new design increased by 69% month on month, and 59% yar on year.
Key Learnings
As we already knew, position is everything. On a homepage, it’s still incredibly vital that key content is placed above the fold (ie. must be visible on the page when it loads, without needing to ‘scroll’ in order to see it).
Think of the homepage as a transport hu (like Atlanta airport). When people have no idea where to click, they go to the homepage first. If they can’t find the information they need, they bounce.
We analysed the heatmap from the previous homepage layout, 80% of visitors didn’t scroll under the fold. Yep… 80% of people are lazy. With this new layout, we were able to provide most of the key information that our three main audiences want from us, and they don’t need to scroll to find it.
Quick note: Don’t get me wrong; long pages still work for more people and are key for some types of pages; such as enquiry pages, product page and, of course, blogs.
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So there you have it – a quick look at why it’s important to analyse visitor actions and visitor data and use it to feed into new design ideas and better content layouts.
For a confidential discussion on how Big Budda Boom can assist your business in increasing conversions, please get in touch with us via 1300 660 937, or visit our contact page.
