We have boosted the number of email subscribers from 2 or 3 a day to 30 in average, gaining more than 1200 double opt-in email subscribers in a little bit more than a month.

We are talking about subscribers to a daily newsletter with financial information. No impact whatsoever in the un-subscribed rate.

Starting with Google Analytics

It all started with the client saying that all their campaigns of increasing the number of newsletter subscribers only got them volumes but low quality which meant a negative ROI at the end of the month (really high delivery costs and very low open rate).

The subscribers that were gained naturally (not a result of a special campaign) were of really good quality: their behavior on the website was way above average.

We started by identifying the profile of visitors who subscribe to the website using a form presented in the sidebar bellow the fold. Not a very difficult task for Google Analytics, right? We created a segment for all the visitors who subscribe to the newsletter and tried to figure out what data stands out for them (we looked for data for the whole 2009).

The conclusion: most of the subscribers were new visitors and almost all of them viewed at least 4 pages before subscribing. The next thing was to create a segment and see how many of the website visitors are new and visit at least 4 pages in one session. The red highlighted area in the below chart is where we believed a little gold mine was waiting.

Before running the real time behavior targeting campaign

Using MailChimp and their great API

By now I guess that everybody in web marketing knows who MailChimp is, right? Just in case you don’t, they are a super cool platform used for newsletter or email marketing delivery. Our client was using a local solution but at much, much higher costs per delivery so it wasn’t difficult to convince them to change to MailChimp when showing them the cost benefits.

Why were we so pushing towards MailChimp? Basically because of their great API as we intended to use in order to increase the number of subscribers.

That’s where the magic comes in place

You probably already guessed by now that the plan was to use some real time behavior targeting. Well, maybe you didn’t guess, but yes… that’s what we did.

Using an in-house software we have been secretly working on (not so secret now, is it) we were asking all the new visitors seeing more than 4 pages on our client website to subscribe to the newsletter. We used an overlay window, presenting a friendly message and the form for subscribing. That’s where the MailChimp API came into place as it allowed to subscribe the users directly into the newsletter list managed by our client.

During the real time behavior targeting campaign.

Nice results, aren’t they? 9-12% conversion rate.

All of the above without doing any modifications to the website. Everything was managed from within our software, including the newsletter subscribing process on the MailChimp platform. Since we have started the campaign we have customized the targeted segment from 4 viewed pages to 5, or from new visitors to returning ones only, but the segment definition that offered us best results was new visitors seeing more than 4 pages.

What segment would you be interested in using? Have you ever give it a thought to such an approach for your website?

Being so excited by this campaign results I just realized that this is the first blogpost from this year and I forgot to say Happy 2010! I wish to everyone daring dreams and a great year from all possible and impossible points of view.

Watching Websites published a couple of days ago “a proof that speeding websites improves conversions” and not only. Their research is very interesting especially cause it shows the impact of optimization of page loading times on different metrics. I found Bounce Rate to be the most interesting, as I’ve seen many times people leaving websites because it took long times for them to fully load.

I totally confirm the findings of the guys from Watching Websites. With the page loading optimization process we’ve worked with, I’ve seen improvements in conversion rates between 0.4% and 1%. Translated in revenue, the best results we’ve got was an increase of up to 10 000 $.

How to tackle it?

For a starter, fast loading pages never hurt anyone. There is no excuse for not having a really well optimized website from the point of view of loading times. UX Booth has a great (technical) tutorial that I recommend you to forward it to your developers and make it a priority. Basically, this is what they suggest to do:

1. Test to see what are your loading times at this moment
2. Improve CSS and JavaScript files so they will weight as little as possible. Also make sure you only serve the end user elements that are used in his experience. (for example don’t load the CSS code for whole website when one page uses just a fraction of it)
3. Make sure there are as little server calls as possible. Put all images in one and use the sprite method in order not to influence in any way the user experience
4. Make sure all graphical elements are optimized for the web.

All of the above details are thoroughly explained by UX Booth. In their case they improved the loading times of their website by 3 times. (decreasing the weight of the page from 1350kB to 450 kB)

Server Loading Times

Then you need to look into server side loading times. If your website gets loads of traffic it can affect pretty much the rate at which is capable of serving content. For this, at our company we use alerts. Whenever the server loading times go higher than a certain acceptable level, we fire an email which lets us know that we have issues.

I don’t know about you, but I just won’t let something as basic as page loading times affect the conversion rate for any website I’ll ever work with.