How We Increased Our Conversion Rate By 311%
blog.statuspage.io
blog.statuspage.io
Or it's ~0.3% of the population. That's a tiny number!
It really depends on context.
Woah, that's even tinier.
Well...maybe. What are the numbers? If you converted 4 people on 1000, the 95% confidence interval runs from 0.2% to 1%. The difference between 1 conversion in 1000 and 4 in 1000 isn't significant.
But if you converted 40 on 10,000 (vs. 10/10,000), that is significant. So if you've got big numbers to back up your tiny conversion rate, you should just write that into the blog post to silence these sorts of critiques. You don't even need to be specific -- saying that your N is of a certain order of magnitude would be enough to make most reasonable people take you seriously.
BTW, the article gets this right, its the title of the blog post that leaves out the crucial information.
Is Netflix considered SaaS? Perhaps my mental definition is way off on scope of SaaS. Honest question, not trying to be sarcastic
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.
Hard to imagine what 99.5% of the traffic is doing on the website.
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.
Email is something we definitely need to experiment with more. It can be an amazing tool when used for good.
Thanks for the feedback.
I doubt they were purposely trying to insult anyone, but with a thousand roadblocks to growth, knocking down one of them by changing a plan name seems like a quick win.
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.
Thinking I would pay 2/3 the cost of my vps for a status page is a bit crazy.
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.
(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!
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.
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.
Mixpanel was extremely useful just to see where the huge holes in our funnel were. For example, only 30% of the people that see our signup page end up signing up. Now that we know a lot of people are following through with signup, we're focusing attention this week on improving that number.
We just started using Optimizely and so far it's been great but I haven't used it enough to really comment. Optimizely seems to be really great for micro-optimizations and we've been focusing on bigger complete page redesigns thus far.
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.
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...
But most of all, why is this thing tied to that at all?
Now that you mention it, putting together a huge directory of this content might be valuable.
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.