We recently started a new campaign and we came out of the box with higher traffic and higher conversion rates than expected.
Our partner was thrilled, we were blowing away the aggressive volume goals we set.
Then they came to us and said something along the lines of : “our legal team needs your to make a few changes”…This is usually the kiss of death.
In this case, there was a mixture of legal needed changes and some from people just thinking that this change would be much better. But it was presented as these changes need to be made.
They did not want us to accentuate the free offer quite so prominently.
They thought the page was too busy.
They were afraid the customer would be so engrossed in our content that they would fail to click order now.
Then there were the actual legal changes we needed to be made
Unfortunately our web master read this as “these changes need to be made right away”.
It is important that you measure the results of everything you test and to make gradual changes. As a result of the huge list of requested and required changes our CR plummetted.
Turns out, that everything except a single line in our fine print was not necessary to change, and was just a suggestion.
Rather than add everything back in at once, we made changes one at a time. What we learned by doing this is what was negative and what was positive and what did not matter.
In our case, they actually made a few suggestions that added a few percentage points to the CR. They also had a few horrible ideas that really hurt. The only required change had virtually no impact.
Moral of this story - you are not your target market. Just because you love (or hate) an idea does not mean everyone else will.
The eventual result is that our ultimate conversion rate was even better than before because we were ‘forced’ to make changes we would not have made on our own.
