Mini Case Study: How 1 simple change boosted sales by 50%

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) has become an essential tool for increasing sales and leads in a relatively short time. This mini case study shows how one simple change to an online form boosted sales by 50%.

I’ve been a digital marketing consultant, specialising in search engine optimisation, for over 12 years, much of that time focused on driving more traffic to websites from people with a strong buying intent. And that approach has worked well to help our SME clients compete in numerous industries with much larger companies with much larger digital marketing budgets. So we are rightly proud of our achievements here at Ditto Digital.

However, we have discovered over the past few years that there is another process that we can use to even further increase sales and leads for our clients - Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).  The CRO process is now incorporated in all our digital marketing campaigns. After all what use is lots of web traffic if no one is buying?

So when visitors with a strong buying intent have clicked on a website and then engage with the content and information they find there, it makes sense to ensure they take the next step to become a customer or a sales lead.  For e-commerce sites the main objective is to encourage visitors to buy a product, but for service orientated B2C businesses and for B2B businesses, potential customers often need some additional advice or information first before they are read to make a decision to buy a service.

For instance, let’s look at a self-storage company like Storing.com – very typically they offer a range of storage units in different sizes across multiple locations. Showing basic prices on a website is rarely enough to enable potential customers to make an informed decision about whether to rent a storage unit from a particular company because other factors influence cost and convenience:

• Does the customer want collection of their items (and, if so, their location is important to determine if there is a cost)?
• Does the customer want 24/7 access to their storage unit (and, if so, only certain types of storage unit or certain locations would be appropriate)?
• Does the customer need help calculating the amount of storage space required?

To answer these queries the storage company needs more details.

So, they might reasonably ask for those additional details on a quote form in order to provide an accurate quote. That would appear to make sense but what level of information people are willing to provide in the digital world shows something different.  

The limitations of user data

By analysing user data from the Google Analytics tool, it was obvious that many people interested in obtaining a quote from this particular company’s self-storage service were, perhaps surprisingly, reluctant to provide many personal details. During one 3-month period nearly 1,100 people clicked on the quote form in order to request a storage quote. Yet, the actual number of quote requests was significantly lower than this number.

Conversion Rate Optimisation revealed the problems

Conversion rate optimisation can be a complex and time-consuming process, but in the case of this particular self-storage company a simple solution presented itself more or less immediately after our initial analysis. The analysis clearly showed that many visitors to the website wanted a quote and began completing the online form but far fewer people actually submitted the completed form.

Once we knew this, the reason became obvious. The form had multiple mandatory fields that a potential customer may not necessarily know or be willing to share. Add to that the mandatory field for Phone Number (unlike many competitors in the same industry) and people were simply deterred from submitting the quote for because ot was too long and asked for too much information.

A quick and easy solution

There were good business reasons for gathering as much information as possible to enable an accurate quote to be sent out. However, it was clear that people with a strong buying intent were not completing and submitting the form because they could not or did not want to supply too many details. Another possibility was that they may just have lost interest, or not had time to complete a long form.

The solution, fortunately, was quick and easy – reduce the number of fields on the quote form to the minimum required to supply initial price information. So instead of 15 fields to complete the form was reduced to just three fields:

• Name
• Email address
• Postcode  

This simple change resulted in a 50% increase in the number of quote forms submitted to the business. A great result for one simple change. Even better the quotes forms received resulted in a significant increase in sales. Sometimes all it takes to increase sales is reviewing the online purchase, booking or request process from a customer perspective.