Ramping up for the fast approaching MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013, this blog post features a video excerpt from one of last year’s presentations.
Watch Steve Parker, Vice President, Direct Marketing Division, firstSTREET, explain how radically redesigning a landing page led to a 500% increase in sales.
In this excerpt, Steve provided the audience advice on making the decision to conduct a radical redesign on a landing page.
He said to ask yourself a few questions:
- Will I achieve my annual goals by further tweaks?
- Do I have the resources to “go radical?” (Time, budget, outside-the-box thinking, internal support)
- How will I minimize risk?
- What happens if I win, draw or fail? (To my business? To my career?)
He also offered some recommendations:
- “Pre-plan your learning” in the test design
- Manage risk
- Get truly radical
- Apply what you learned, and apply your educated guesses
If you would like to watch the entire presentation, Steve covered the entire process of this case study, beginning with why he chose a very poorly performing landing page for a new product for testing and optimization, all the way through the radical redesign of the page and eventual increase in sales on the new landing page.
The original page had dismal conversion metrics, so Steve felt it was a safe place to begin testing. Over five months, he conducted numerous tests on various aspects of the page producing incremental results, both positive and negative. The end result was a 30% improvement, but the bottom line impact was negligible because the starting point was so low.
Steve described the testing and optimization program on the old page as “like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
He decided to conduct a radical redesign on the landing page, creating a completely new look, feel and thought process for visitors. The redesigned treatment dramatically beat the control, and for the remainder of the year, Steve implemented a testing and optimization program on the radically redesigned landing page.
The end result of this entire process was a large impact – 500% increase in sales – on firstSTREET’s website.
Steve Parker will also be presenting a new case study at this year’s upcoming Optimization Summit 2013 in Boston.
Related Resources:
Landing Page Optimization: Radical redesign leads to 3,566% increase in conversion
Landing Page Optimization: 262% increase in lead rate
A/B Testing: 4 tests from a crowdfunding site with double-digit results
Email Optimization: A single word change results in a 90% lift in sign-ups
That is obviously a great result, sometimes starting again can be the best solution. I think what is key here is that he had nothing really to lose. It does show the value of testing and even if you have a page that is performing ok you may find split testing with a redesign to be of great value – even if business drops on the new page you have learned something.