Andy Parkinson’s World

Last month one of our clients, Adam Washington (not his real name), achieved a 24% increase in website visitors signing up for a demo of his software. He did it basically overnight and without spending an extra dollar to drive traffic to his site.

How did he do it? He simplified the request form.

Adam got rid of a bunch of questions that weren’t necessary and asked only for information he really needed: the visitor’s name and email address. (Interestingly, through testing we found that adding a field for the visitor’s country increased response.)

The original form looking like this:

The new form looks like this:

Instead of spending a ton of money to drive more people to his website, Adam focused on the visitors who were already coming there. As a result of the form change, he was able to get many more of his website visitors to take the action he wants – and needs – them to take: download his product demo. This ultimately resulted in more sales opportunities for the sales team at a much lower cost.

Think about that for a minute.

Imagine this is your company. Let’s say 20% of the people who fill out the demo form eventually end up buying your product and an average of 80 people download the demo each month. Let’s also say that each purchase is worth $5000. Your product revenue is currently $1,200,000 annually.

By getting 24% more people to fill out the demo form as Adam did, you would add another 20 people to the pipeline each month and – if everything else remains the same – that adds 4 additional customers (@ $5000 each) every month. At the end of the year, revenue has increased by $240,000 and it cost you nothing!

This is why we advise so many of our clients to focus on optimizing conversion rates and not just on generating more leads. There are an almost unlimited number of ways to get more prospects moving through your pipeline – and all of them are less expensive than generating the prospects in the first place.

In the spirit of full disclosure, let’s go back to Adam’s form for a minute. You may have noticed that the phone number is missing from the new form, and if you try to pass this directly to a sales team for follow-up you’re likely to get some very loud pushback. In fact, one of our next tests with Adam will be to add the phone number back into this form and see what happens to the signup rate. There are also other ways to get the phone number for the sales team, but that’s not the point of this article.

The point of this article is to show how a few minor changes within the marketing process can have a dramatic effect on the number of prospects who make it through this conversion point in your marketing process and ultimately on your revenue.

Is Adam’s success with the demo form experiment a fluke? It could be – time will tell whether or not the modified form maintains its high performance level. But based on our experience with other clients like Adam, it will almost certainly continue to provide Adam’s company with increased prospects week after week after week.

Technorati Tags: conversion, optimization, prospects, leads, website, revenue