As someone who does conversion rate optimization (CRO) for a living, I can’t express to you how thrilled I am when a simple change has a big impact. And this particular example? It couldn’t be simpler or more effective.
Sure, I’m a self-proclaimed CRO geek, but if you could increase the conversion rate on a website by 560%, you’d definitely be a geek too.
Personalization as an optimization tool
As a member of HubSpot’s web strategy team, I have been optimizing core site pages on HubSpot.com for eight years.
Previously, I spent many years optimizing this very blog.
And over the last year, I’ve been experimenting a lot more with personalization to improve both the user experience and conversion rates on the site. The tactics appear Quite simply, I tailored both calls to action (CTAs) and content to different segments of our website visitors.
But personalization can be difficult. If you create more than one version of a single page, you must do this as well maintain more than one version of the site.
Multiply that by every page on your website and things can get pretty unmanageable. Therefore, it is important to track the performance of all the personalizations you make live on your website and only keep the ones that prove profitable.
Luckily it was worth it.
Personalization for free users
On many core pages on the HubSpot website, we typically show visitors two CTAs by default:
- A CTA encourages visitors to start using the free version of our software.
- And a CTA encourages visitors to get a demo of the premium editions.
As I started experimenting more with personalization on the site, it occurred to me that it would be pretty silly to show free signup CTAs to contacts who are already free users.
And if these contacts continue to visit our websites even after becoming free users, they are likely still evaluating their options and may be interested in trying out the premium editions.
So on one of our highest traffic pages – a product page about our free CRM and other free tools – I created a rule with HubSpot’s intelligent content replacing the free signup CTAs with demo CTAs for every contact who was already a free user of our software.
Since there was no risk to demand for free signups and therefore no reason to do a true A/B test, I ran this as a hindsight test. (That is, I made the change to 100% of visitors and then compared a period before and after the change to assess the impact.)
This is what it looked like in action:
Standard content:
Smart Content:
The results were breathtaking. After I implemented free user personalization, our demo conversion rate increased by 560%. We saw demo requests increase from 38 demos/month to 258 demos/month – on this one site alone. Oh yes.
Additionally, there was no negative impact on demand for free signups.
Even better? This approach can be implemented on every page where we offer free signup CTAs. This means that we are sure to generate even more demand for demos as we implement this on more pages on our website. This is called a win-win situation! Or maybe it’s a win-win-win situation. 🤔
How to set up personalization with HubSpot Smart Content
If you’re a HubSpot user subscribed to the Professional or Enterprise editions of Marketing Hub or Content Hub, you have the ability to personalize your web pages with intelligent content. There are several ways to do this how to segment intelligent content to your visitors, including by device type, country, referral source, language and more.
For this specific use case, I based my smart content on contact list membership and initially created a contact list in our HubSpot Smart CRM that included anyone who is a free user of our software. And because this list is also smart, it automatically updates when a new or existing contact becomes a free user, so my personalization is always up to date.
Next, in the page editor, I set up a smart rule for each module on the page that I wanted to personalize based on membership in the contact list I created.
This allowed me to change certain parts of the page (e.g. text and CTAs) only for free HubSpot users, while leaving the rest of the page content unchanged by default.
The best part: Setup only took a few minutes. Talk about low-hanging fruit!
This is how personalization works You
The segmentation strategy you use to personalize your web pages should be based on your website’s overall conversion strategy and your business goals that only you know.
For example, one of our challenges on the HubSpot website is that we sell products that suit different sizes of companies, from small startups to large, expanding companies. These companies of different sizes have different challenges and needs and therefore respond differently to specific content and conversion streams.
So the core of our current personalization strategy is to segment content based on company size and where a contact is in the buying phase.
For more guidance and inspiration, check out our website personalization article. (Pro tip: If you’re a HubSpot user or thinking about becoming one, you might also be interested in what’s new Breeze intelligence Functionality that enriches your contacts with third-party data, which can make your personalization efforts even more effective.)
However you decide to segment your personalization strategy, start small and keep a close eye on ROI. You may be surprised that sometimes even the simplest change can cause a major disruption 😉