In this story I will tell you how we increased sales and stopped 100% of the complaining emails from customers.
EWM Interactive is a startup I co-founded with my friend Alex. It is a service that provides analyses for the financial markets based on the Elliott Wave Theory.
Our business model is really simple. We have weekly subscriptions which include analyses of 7 different instruments.
Our clients can subscribe for 1,3,6 or 10 weeks. They receive one analysis a week per instrument (7 in total) on late Sunday (before the market opens) and a mid-week update on those analyses on Wednesday.
Problem
There are many subscription services out there that provide analyses and updates every day. We are NOT like that. When we implemented this business model our main problem was how to explain to our users that they will receive the analyses late Sunday and mid-week updates on Wednesday, not everyday like with the other similar services.
We had been receiving constant e-mail inquiries regarding when the analyses will be received even though we had mentioned this a few times in the description.
Imagine that you purchase analyses on Thursday and then you receive nothing for the next few days because we send them on late Sunday. That was irritating for our customers and that lead to refunding quite a few orders. We absolutely had to solve that!
The obvious solution here was just to start providing analyses every day but since we are a small team we do not have the manpower to do so.
So we decided that our main goal was to make absolutely sure that our users know when they will receive their analyses and what they will include.
Insights
We started by analysing our users’ browsing behaviour with google analytics, heatmaps and recordings.
We gathered lots of data regarding our users as well as their feedback during our extensive communication with them.
The main things that we have found out are the following:
- We have found out that less than 30% of the users actually scroll down to check the description below our products.
- The general oppinion is that the description of the products itself was too long and users do not read all of it.
- We identified the few main user flows that end with a sale. That helped us ideantify the most important pages within the funnel and what part they play in convincing the user to purchase.
Hypotheses
Based on our research we came up with few hypotheses:
- We believe that a combination of small features which will be integrated on all the steps throughout the whole user flow, not only the page where the subscriptions packages are, will provide much more information and will be much more understandable for the users.
- We belive that a solution should not require scrolling. Especially on the page with the subscriptions packages.
- We believe that adding an explanatory video to our page underneath the packages will make it much easier for the users to understand what and when they will receive.
- We believe that adding a countdown until the analyses will be live on top of the page with all the packages as well as on the other pages of the main user flows will answer perfectly the question of “When will the analyses be live?”.
- We believe that by showing users when exactly the analyses will be live will certainly increase sales during those days.
Solution
We needed a way to verify our hypotheses. So we prepared a plan how to test them.
Video
First things first – we launched a simple explanatory video which immidiately lowered the complains and apparently made easier for our users to understand what exactly they are purchasing.
Timer
We also A/B tested our timer. During those tests we experimented with few different colors and sizes until we found what works best.
Of course, we positioned it on top of the page with the packages and on the sidebar of the page with every article and category.
The results from the test were that the compains stopped completely and the sales increased.
Since the timer worked really well we replicated it on the other pages as well. Those will be the important pages that we identified within our user flow.
Personalization for Sunday and Monday only
Since the timer helped focus our sales during those days we decided to strengthen its effect and implement few more features on the important pages shown on our user flow.
We used personalization based on the day of the week and added call to actions that prompt users to “subscribe and receive analyses today” when it is Sunday or Monday and “subscribe and receive on Sunday” when it is another day of the week.
What this did is that it strenghtened the effect of the timer and focused our sales mostly toward the weekends.
Results
- What this did is that it increased our sales in general.
- The complains from the users stopped and we receive much more positive feedback.
- Our sales are mostly focused around the weekends.
