

How We Increased Our Conversion Rate By 311% - stevenklein
http://blog.statuspage.io/how-we-increased-our-conversion-rate-by-311-percent

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recuter
<a very small amount> increased by "311%" is still a <very small amount>, this
is a way to oversell numbers, imho. The rest of the article is not bad, shame
about the title.

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lbarrow
0.5% conversion is pretty good for a SaaS product that only targets
businesses.

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rschmitty
I would have thought businesses are most likely to use a SaaS product.

Is Netflix considered SaaS? Perhaps my mental definition is way off on scope
of SaaS. Honest question, not trying to be sarcastic

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andrewmunsell
Netflix isn't really a SaaS because it's not providing "software" (the first
"S" in SaaS)-- it's providing content.

On the other hand, Google Calendar, Gmail, etc are providing software and
would probably be considered SaaS products. You're providing the content and
Google is providing the means of managing it.

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mikelinington
For what it's worth, we did the free premium trial in June. Over 14 days, we
received 11 emails from the folks at StatusPage--some about getting started,
some (too many) just their regular email blasts, some to say our trial was
ending. Eight of these offered an unsubscribe link, which is appreciated, but
the default should not be to spam the shit out of potential customers.

I know I've seen other threads on HN and elsewhere about finding the "right"
number of emails to inundate your trial users with, so I hope you guys are
experimenting with this and tracking what works and what's turning people off.

Still, seems like a solid product that does what it says, and overall we
didn't convert because we already had a solution in place that we're
comfortable with. Good luck.

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stevenklein
Haha yeah we used to send waaaay to many emails. We're now down to 6 over 20
days. Sorry for being overbearing the first time around. When we personally
reach out, there isn't an unsubscribe link but as far as I know, all of our
automated emails have them.

Email is something we definitely need to experiment with more. It can be an
amazing tool when used for good.

Thanks for the feedback.

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omarchowdhury
If you want to see email done right, check out PerfectAudience's flow.

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brandnewlow
Wow. Thanks. After hours of doing battle with spreadsheets, reading this made
my night. I'm going to pass this along to the team!

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nhebb
I would rename their "Hobby" plan. It's condescending. People don't pay ~$240
/ yr to have a status page for a hobby site.

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patio11
I routinely give out "Call the low plan 'Hobby'" advice. Here's why:

a) Price-sensitive customers with side businesses often either affirmatively
identify of hobbyists (I would have said that about myself for the first 5
years of my business -- at which point $20 a month would have made it
somewhere around the 10th most expensive thing I was buying, by the way) or
are willing to buy it without thinking too much about the name.

b) At larger customers, there are social reasons to avoid putting Hobby on a
purchasing card / requisition form / etc where one does not have any
technical/quota/etc objections against the lowest-tier plan. I've told the
following anecdote two dozen times but it's still good: I was once instructed
by a boss to get CrazyEgg set up. We were in the $9 a month Hobbyist tier. I
put in a requisition for it and he redlined the Hobbyist and price, went to
the pricing page, and picked the Enterprise tier (at $500 at the time, IIRC).
When I pointed out that I was intimately familiar with the numbers and sure we
could make do with Hobbyist, he said (translated loosely from the Japanese)
"Eff if I'm going to pass a request for Hobbyist services to [my boss]."

c) See the anecdote above? I can tell you the anecdote. I can't show you the
data. But trust me, the anecdote has scaled for companies before.

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nhebb
Actually, I thought about your CrazyEgg anecdote as I was writing my comment.
Having worked for a large Japanese company for several years, I did see a
cultural difference between what US and Japanese managers were willing to sign
off on for purchase req's. But aside from that, I do think a $9/month CrazyEgg
plan is within the scope of a true hobby site, whereas $20/month for a status
page service isn't. The proof is in testing, but my gut tells me that
customers could be segmented without using a plan name that is arguably
demeaning.

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coldcode
What a strange world we live in, there is a business that lets other
businesses point out that their business is not doing business sometimes.

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outericky
But it's hosted in a different location. So if said business is offline, you
won't know why. An offsite location, with backup sites will still stand.

Also, it's not really for people to know... it's for people who depend on it,
like API sites. As an app that uses, say Balanced or Stripe, I'd want to know
when, why and for how long they are down. So their status is important to me.

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rlocke
Thanks for sharing! At the risk of sounding pedantic, your increase was
actually 211%:

(0.424 - 0.136)/0.136 = 2.117 (so 212% actually)

(Increasing something by 100% is doubling it, 200% is tripling it, so on and
so forth.)

But to everyone saying he's overselling, if the title had said he tripled his
revenue, would you say the same thing? This is a huge accomplishment no matter
how you slice it!

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benologist
How We Increased Our Traffic Rate By Writing Ads For HN.

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Jackstone
.136% to .424% is a 211% increase.

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stevenklein
Would be happy to elaborate on any of these points if you have any questions.

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tlogan
Do you guys measure/optimize on "traffic to revenue" or just "traffic to
paid"? Does these two measurements have different optimization techniques?

Also, it would be great to learn about how do you generate top of the funnel.
As patio11 said there is an "arms race" on that front and I wonder what do you
that on that front.

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stevenklein
If I understand your question correctly, you're asking if we optimize for
traffic -> any plan vs. traffic -> total revenue? Right now it's pretty
unsophisticated and we're not really measuring/optimizing on getting people to
select a higher plan vs. a lower plan. I'm sure as we nail more of the basics
down this is something we'll focus on in the future though.

Generating top of the funnel is actually really hard and something we struggle
with a lot. Writing blog posts and posting them on Hacker News (like this one
here) result in huge bumps of traffic but it's not really scalable. We added a
small "powered by statuspage.io" at the bottom of every status page and are
going to do more SEO-minded blog posts.

For early stage startups where there isn't already much of a market (there
aren't a lot of companies doing status pages as a service), a lot of traffic
and eventual customers come in via word-of-mouth. We have some plans to really
give our customers an amazing experience with our product and company as a
whole with the hope that it will get people talking about us.

Do a google search for karma based marketing - Colin from Customer.io does an
amazing job getting people talking about his company.

~~~
tlogan
Thanks! One more question: I like your
[https://www.statuspage.io/series-t](https://www.statuspage.io/series-t) page.
Is there a service which does everything for you or do you guys process this?

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stevenklein
We process all of it =/. There are companies that take care of the entire
fulfillment process but the volume we're doing is so low that we just mail
them ourselves.

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adrianhoward
_" For us, there was so much low hanging fruit in watching a bunch of people
check out our marketing site. I suspect there's a good amount of diminishing
returns there, but if you've never done it, the value you get out of it is
tremendous."_

I'd strongly suggest that you keep doing actual tests with customers until you
actually _see_ diminishing returns. I've regularly seen people think they've
fixed all of the big problems - then see another N rounds of "low hanging
fruit" appear ;-)

The insights and improvements you get from doing usability testing are very
different from the ones that you get through optimisation via a/b testing.
Each can inform the other.

Keep doing both until you find you get no value. I suspect that you'll find
that you keep getting significantly useful results if you keep it up.

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SpookSEO
One of the best things that worked for me when increasing conversion rates is
to remove all the distractions that's on the page.

To do this, you first need to define what that specific page's goal is
(whether it's to have the visitors purchase, share, sign-up, etc...). It'll
work remarkably better if you only have 1 goal per page.

From there, you need to look for the things that will distract your visitors
from doing that specific goal. It could be the images, an even better content,
even the social sharing buttons, etc...

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danaw
By having a server error page? Seems a strange strategy.

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khalidmbajwa
The demos of your app on your site are pretty slick. What are those ? Simple
Gifs or is there some other fancy sorcery going on in there ? PS: i would
really like a way to control the playback of these demos. I would mostly
arrive when they had already started and frustrated would move on.

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stevenklein
The thing that shows off the different parts of the actual status pages is
just a big screenshot with explanations controlled with some JS/CSS. The
Creating and Managing Your Page section is actually HTML5 controlled videos.

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efm
I couldn't figure out why pricing was dependent on number of users. Who are
the users? How do I know how many I will have? Do I have any control over who
they are?

But most of all, why is this thing tied to that at all?

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ape4
So statuspage.io displays of a another site is up, down, etc? I don't get it.
If you want something outside your company to do this, get regular webhosting
plan from an ISP.

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robryan
I can see the benefit. It is a totally different architecture to your service.
Meaning no chance that the thing that brings down your service is shared by
you services servers and the server running your status page.

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rglover
Good tips, thanks. Do you have any resources that you learned from? Trying to
improve on this, too.

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stevenklein
Haha oh god so many. Google startup metrics for pirates, check these out
[http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/clients-and-
results/#...](http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/clients-and-
results/#clienttestimonials), sign up for this
[https://segment.io/academy/](https://segment.io/academy/), read these
[http://blog.kissmetrics.com/topics/conversion/](http://blog.kissmetrics.com/topics/conversion/).

Now that you mention it, putting together a huge directory of this content
might be valuable.

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rglover
Thanks, appreciate it.

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cpursley
What javascripty thing are you using for "Just ask xyz" copy?

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stevenklein
This guy [http://cosmos.layervault.com/typer-
js.html](http://cosmos.layervault.com/typer-js.html)

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cpursley
Thanks! I'm gonna' use this.

Also - what are you using for the moving status page below highlighting
features? That's clever.

P.S. - did you also try A/B testing the copy, layout, etc.

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stevenklein
That's just a little custom thing I made myself with JS/CSS.

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rlwolfcastle
But what do I do if I want to increase my conversion rate by 312 %?

