Converting for Fun and Profit

First, a story. After watching the news about the Hurricane barreling down on Houston, Texas, I became obsessed with helping out in one way or another. I regularly give blood, so that seemed like a simple way to help people in need in this time of crisis. I opened up my Red Cross app and started to schedule an appointment. As I was scheduling the appointment, however, I got a phone call. After finishing the phone call, I went back to something else, forgetting that I was in the middle of scheduling an appointment. Luckily, a few minutes later, my phone buzzed. All of a sudden, a reminder popped up, asking me if I still wanted to give blood. 

What’s the point of this story? To talk about the concept of conversion rates. As the Kaushik text argues, this is perhaps the most important web metric that one can measure. After all, “We are investing in our websites, so we should measure what comes of them” (Kaushik 2010). 

So this leads me back to my initial discussion of the Red Cross’s app. What’s the main goal of this app? To have individuals sign up for blood donations. Of course, as my experience dictated, sometimes real life gets in the way. However, the goal of the Red Cross is so important, especially in times of crisis, they needed to figure out a way to make sure that individuals actually finished up what they started. Hence, sending alerts. To finish the story, I did end up signing up to give blood.

To use another example, consider the story of weather.com. Run by the Weather Channel, this website, as it indicates, is a one stop shop for information about weather across the country. However, the site also has a premium service called “Notify!” which alerts individuals to inclement weather in their area. Unfortunately, the channel found that their conversion rate was extremely lacking and they wanted to sign up more customers. 

Ultimately, the marketing team completely redesigned the website so that customers could more easily find the service and sign up. This process involved analyzing existing customers, analyzing the existing website, developing variations for graphics, text, and call-to-action indicators, and running various tests. At the end of the day, weather.com experienced a 225 percent increase in conversion rate. After this process, Brad Bacon, the Weather Channel’s Director of Distribution and Consumer Applications, conceded that this was “a hard product to explain quickly. You almost have to have glanceable content, where you can hit that key benefit point that gets them to register, much less pull out the wallet” (How to Convert 2008). 

Ultimately, however, through the use of web analytics and constant testing, the Weather Channel was able to increase their conversion rate which, at the end of the day, means more money for the company. As Bacon states, they were “customizing the user experience in a way the audience is most likely to respond to” (How to Convert 2008). And that’s just the key to conversion rates and why they’re so important. As marketers, we need to convince individuals to use our services. If our conversion rates are low, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and fix things.