How Top Subscription deals increased sales by 3.3x after having their ad account shut down.
Top Subscription Deals is a company that sells subscription deals for many major publications including the Wall St. Journal, The Economist and Barron’s.
The owner had been doing quite well with sales. Google ads were bringing in the majority of the website’s traffic and the ROI on the ads was good.
However due to a breach of Google’s advertising guidelines Top Subscription Deals had their adwords account closed down with little warning from Google.
Eager to make up for the lost revenue Top Subscription Deals employed EG Web Design to make changes to their website and suggest marketing ideas to increase conversions.
After evaluating their old website I suggested a course of action.
Due to not being able to advertise using Google Adwords anymore other ways had to be found to improve sales.
Stage 1 - review of the site.
The website already had a few things in place to work with to increase sales.
- They had many great reviews about their service.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was good in brought in a decent amount of traffic.
- Some on-site persuasion techniques were being used.
- Apple and Amazon ‘Buy now’ buttons were installed to allow a fast and easy checkout.
However the design of the site was outdated. The mobile version in particular wasn’t great. The site lacked many trust indicators the reduce friction in the purchasing process. The checkout process was a standard WooCommerce form and could have been more user friendly.
Stage 2 - Identify conversion killers.
A big part of the site’s appeal was the same subscription at a much lower price.
‘How much you’ve saved’ amounts were used with prices rather than just the discounted price. Making it easy for people to see just how much they are saving.
Better micro copy was written throughout the site reiterating the benefits of buying through Top Subscription Deals rather than the publisher.
eg. Faster processing time, resolving of problems.
Another issue was trust. How could people know it was a legitimate site if the prices were so low.
The site had many 5 star reviews so the new design made more prominent uses of reviews throughout the site and other trust indicators on checkout.
If a customer has a problem with their subscription Top Subscription Deals will act on behalf of the customer to sort out the problem. So this was made clear with a guarantee on the checkout page below the ‘Place Order’ button.
The checkout was optimised. Unused checkout fields removed and an auto address look up system added. This all makes the billing and shipping forms faster and easier to fill out.
The checkout layout was changed to a two column layout with the Your Order and payment input on the right hand side above the fold so users don’t have to scroll down to see the order details and enter their payment details.
Unnecessary distractions where removed from the checkout form page.
Step 3 - Email and remarketing.
Klaviyo was set up as an email service. Klaviyo allows on boarding emails to be send post purchase to let the customer know what the next steps will be after they buy.
An abandoned cart system was also set up. People who leave their cart without completing the purchase get a reminder email sequence sent to them. Discount coupons are sent to people to encourage them back to buy.
The result?
In June, the month after the Google Adwords account was cancelled the site had 2,981 visitors and a conversion rate of just 1.58%
As of writing this in October 2019 the site had 3,317 visitors and a conversion rate 5.33% of October.
Roughly a 3.3x increase in conversions.
Take aways from this result….
While CPC ads are a great way of increasing sales they shouldn’t be your only tool for making sales.
A breach of Google or Facebook’s terms can lead to your ad accounts being shut down. On top of that, Cost Per Click prices are steadily rising.
Before spending money on advertising make sure your WooCommerce store is designed to convert visitors to paying customers. This in turn will help you get the most from your advertising spend.