Ephricon Web Marketing

Example #1:  Design & Messaging Makeover

At Ephricon, we spend so much time focusing on increasing traffic and conversions for our clients, that we often neglect our own website.  See the cobbler’s children adage.

The current version of our website went live in February of this year (Feb 2011).  Prior to that, the version we were using was done in July of 2006.  That’s almost 5 years in between site designs.  That’s a fairly long time for most any company, especially one that offers internet marketing services.  But alas, we’ve been pretty busy the past 5 years and just didn’t get to it!

What makes that worse, however, is that like so many other firms it wasn’t just that the visual layout component was outdated.  So was the messaging.  The services weren’t accurate.  The selling points had changed a bit.  Much had changed about our service, how we help our clients, what we offer and what makes us unique over that 5 year window.  What didn’t change was our site.  Problem.

So finally we re-did the design, and along with it we redid the messaging too.  Here’s a list of what went live in February of this year as it compares to the prior version of the site:

• New visual layout (theme)
• New messaging and selling points
• Stronger focus on “calls to action”
• Video clips interlaced throughout the site
• More focus on our people

Let me be clear first… there is A LOT that I dislike about our current site and I’m already thinking about a new approach.  I figured 5 years was such a long time I might need to do two rounds of updates close together to really get myself up to speed.  So what you see now is far from perfect or even what it should be.  Thankfully though, I didn’t let “perfection” get in the way of “progress”.  Better to act with something that was an 80% improvement than to sit on something that would be a 100% improvement but never goes live.

Okay so with that said, here’s how it impacted our conversion rate:

The red line is when we switched to the new site.  Before the switch, we were averaging about 1.3% conversion rate (visits to quote form fills… doesn’t count calls).  After the switch, we’ve been around 2.3%.  That’s a 77% increase.  That’s almost double the number of leads each week or each month.

What’s also interesting is the the conversion rate spiked the first month with the new site, and then has settled a bit since then.  I haven’t yet identified the cause for this, but I do know that there have been a few items with compatibility that we’ve identified as issues and are addressing.  Its possible those have depressed the conversion rate more recently as they were not issues immediately following the launch.

So while we’re happy with this improvement from the new site, we can still get our conversion rate a lot better.  Enter example #2…

Example #2:  Tweaks to Conversion Page

So when we put the new site live we had several points of conversion, specific to web forms:

1. A short “quote request” form in the sidebar of all “services” pages and also directly on the “contact us” page.
2. A slightly longer “quote request” form on its own dedicated page, which is linked to from the contact page, from the main navigation and from non-service interior pages.

I had guesstimated that 90% of our leads would come from #1 above, and 10% from #2.  As such, we had launched the site before making #2 nice and pretty.  The form on that page was very rough.

It turns out its not a 90/10 split, rather its more of a  65/35 split.  I should have spent 2 minutes to have dug out that number sooner!

So 35% of our leads were coming from a page where the form was not nicely formatted, the page had no explanation to introduce the form, and generally it just looked poor.  Hmmm.  I wonder how that might increase if we made the page nicer looking and more credible?

So we gave it a shot.  We just launched the tweaks.  We probably only spent 30 minutes on it (thanks Alan!) and I believe its a big improvement.  I’ll monitor this over the next month or two and see.  Intuitively, we would expect an improvement in conversion rate from that dedicated quote page as the changes made the following improvements:

1. Credibility & Professionalism: The old page was never finished and the form fields didn’t line up, it looked unfinished.  That’s okay in some industries.  For us, it was just my laziness and not getting to it.  Making the page look visually professional is important.  It helps the perception of credibility for site visitors.
2. Trust Builders: We added a little testimonial from a client.  I’m not sold that testimonials are the end-all-be-all for building trust, but I think it can certainly help.  We’ll add a few more once I can find where I’ve saved them on my computer.
3. Intro: We didn’t really say what the form was or make any case as to why a prospect should fill it out.  Now we’ve done that.

Here’s the before and after shot:

So there you have it.  With example #2 it will be interesting to monitor and quantify the impact of this change.  It was maybe 30 to 60 minutes of effort, so not much cost there.  More important was the 2 minutes spent to identify that this page was indeed getting a decent number of views and was converting even in its poor state, and thus proving to ourselves that it was very much worth spending a little time on.

Your thoughts?  Any examples you want to share?