I recently set up a pilot program for my company (OpenStudy) with MIT OpenCourseware (just voted one of the Top 50 Websites of 2010 by Time Magazine) and i was able to increase my ‘call-to-action’ by 18%.
In this case, my call to action was to get students interested in joining a study group when taking an MIT online lectures to sign up for OpenStudy.
Historically, our ‘sign-up’ button at OpenStudy read, “Sign Up For OpenStudy”. I wanted to see if i could increase the conversion rate of people visiting the web page to learn about the service, so i setup a simple A/B test using a service called Unbounce.com.
Test A has the word ‘Free’ on the sign up button displayed on the web page and Page B did not have the word free on the button. Everything else on the page was the same. 50% of traffic was channeled to Test A and 50% to Page B.
Button A:
Button B:
The difference in results were significant:
- Conversion rate (i.e. call to action = to sign up) 42% vs 34%.
- HAVING THE WORD ‘FREE’ IMPROVES SIGN UP BY 18%
Knowing when to change
Here’s a great example of how a business pursuing one type of business model decided that it was not working and put another in it’s place.
Stack Overflow is a programming and Q&A site that’s free. After the company’s initial success with the ‘Stack’ for programmers, they reasoned that they could duplicate the business model by allowing other people to create their own ‘Stacks’ for different topics and make money by licensing their software to the person creating the new ‘Stack‘. Wrong, the concept bombed.
Looking at their story gives an insight into their self analysis and and the reasoning they used to change things up. Granted, Stack-Overflow, did have the option of not needing to make revenue but this aside it’s interesting how they evaluated the way they were running things, recognized what was and wasn’t working and then made a decision on where they wanted to go. At a core level they didn’t change what they were all about (building Q&A communities) but they did change how they wanted enable their vision.
What i like about this example:
- They recognized what wasn’t working i.e. “Only people with money to burn or a business plan could create sites and those people didn’t necessarily have the ability to bring an audience”.
- They worked out what they needed to do i.e. “a site doesn’t get created until we have some reason to believe that it’s going to get that critical number of people showing up to make it work”.
- They adopted a clear and well documented flow for creating new Q&A: ghost communities are killed and strong communities survive.
VIEW THE CASE STUDY BY CLICKING HERE
The blog ends by saying:
“We’re working as fast as we can! We hope to start the new process of proposing sites within four weeks.”
Well, the four weeks is up and they were true to their word:
I want to give major props to one of our marketing interns at OpenStudy (let’s call him William – mainly because that’s his name). He’s just demonstrated the right way to suggest an idea.
He wanted to suggest that I contact a new ‘big’ company for a partnership. Here’s the email i received from him. Not only had he undertaken this on his own initiative but the suggestion was so well presented. It wasn’t “hey, i think you should contact Company X”; it was here’s company X and here’s how to get hold of them (he’d even mocked up a screen shot of what the product integration should look like).
This is the right way to make to a suggestion (especially a customer or someone up the food chain).
