When member acquisition is a high priority, it’s easy to look at simple marketing levers like paid search and paid social as the answer. Drive more traffic to the site, raise awareness of the organisation and in turn generate more sign ups. It really can be that easy.
However, it’s not the most sustainable way to grow your member base, and it’s certainly not the most cost effective. Paid search costs have increased by 10% in the last year, and more shockingly, conversion rates from paid advertising have declined over the last two years.
Many are looking at playing the long game with solid SEO strategies to drive more traffic, but that’s not going to help you hit the membership targets in the short term.
When you get to this point, it makes sense to start improving the numbers that you can control, and one of them is the conversion rate of your website.
Convert the traffic that you’re already receiving
I’ve worked with my fair share of membership organisations over the past five years, and it still surprises me how few are investing in improving their own conversion rates. In fact, a high percentage that I’ve spoken to don’t even track that figure.
They’re generating good amounts of traffic, paid and organic, but with no real indication of how much of that is being converted into new members.
Yet when you run the numbers on a conversion rate percentage increase, it’s quite eye opening. Even a 1% increase in conversion rate can have a significant impact on the number of visitors that turn into members.
If you haven’t already, I urge you to put the right tracking in place to measure your website’s conversion rate. You can then understand whether your site is performing to the industry average (2-5%) and put measures in place to improve it.
Regular UX experimentation is key
If you find that your site isn’t converting as it should, it can be quite tempting to revamp the whole member sign up journey in one go.
It’s a route I’ve seen many memberships take. But after months of work and often hefty development costs, the results don’t always outweigh the investment.
Despite what you might think, optimising your conversion rate doesn’t need to be about large, site-wide changes.
Excellent results can be achieved by running small, iterative changes throughout key user journeys to track their impact.
That could be something as simple as a button colour change, replacing an image or a basic copy change, the results of which are often hugely underestimated.
If you go through your member sign up journey step-by-step, I’m sure you’ll notice multiple tweaks that can be made.
Be sure to track everything
Of course, any change needs to be very accurately tracked and that’s where specialist A/B testing tools come in.
It makes no sense to make changes to a key user journey and not have them perform against what was there before.
If it works, make the change permanent. If it doesn’t, simply keep what’s already in place and move on to your next test.
Either way, if you’re tracking your tests accurately, you know exactly what’s working and have some solid stats to take to the board.
CRO doesn’t need to mean expensive development
A common misconception when starting any CRO activity is the complexity of making changes to your site andrunning tests.
Development pipelines in membership organisations can be long-winded to say the least, with integrations between CRM and CMS to consider.
But conversion rate optimisation doesn’t need to be a part of the typical development cycle. Code changes can be made directly in an A/B testing tool which will then display multiple versions of a page to your visitors.
Depending on the complexity of your test, these can even be executed by marketers, with no development input necessary.
Start with a list of basic experiments, and scale over time
Once you have identified what works, it’s time to scale your CRO efforts. This involves applying the same principles across your entire member acquisition strategy.
Start by prioritising the changes that will have the biggest impact on your member acquisition. Focus on the areas that are most likely to drive growth and revenue and keep a record of what does and doesn’t work.
Remember that CRO is an ongoing process. Keep experimenting and testing to ensure that your member acquisition strategy continues to improve over time.
Use CRO to kickstart a culture of experimentation
Starting a conversion rate optimisation programme can be a big change to your usual way of working.
It’s taking a step away from the usual ‘big bang’ approach to development and choosing to take a data-driven iterative approach instead.
Over time you should reap the rewards. You’ll know exactly what does and doesn’t work, you’ll satisfy your visitors and more importantly; start converting more of that website traffic that you’ve already earned into members.
GRM Digital is an award-winning, full-service web development and digital marketing agency. If you need help converting more website visitors into paying members, contact GRM Digital and we’ll be happy to help.
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