How we increased our conversion rate by 11% in 10 minutes | Hacker News Reader

How we increased our conversion rate by 11% in 10 minutes

easyproducttours.com

22 pointsmds10115 comments

I think your conversion went up because users were able to easily see a demo of the product.

I personally think that the tour (of your homepage) does is not much useful otherwise - it just goes through all the elements one by one, the graphic design of the tours interferes with the design of the page, and the large amount of text in the tours makes it hard to understand whats different with the information in the tours.

I would love to see you try a couple of things and let us know how the conversion rate changed (it will also help us know the best practices when using your service):

- try the tours with a similar theme as the site (as is currently the case), but do more to separate them - perhaps by adding rounded corners, more shadows, or changing what are the main colors in the tour.

- try reducing the text in the tours.

- try putting in content in the tours that is different from the current site content - perhaps by grouping the features on the site and your tours introduce them as groups, or perhaps by focusing your tours on the benefits (as opposed to the features).

I find it hard to follow the tour, as the popup designs mimic the design of the site (and micro-screenshots) so closely.

It's hard to tell where the barriers are, and what I should be looking at next

Thanks for the feedback. We will be looking into optimizing the tour design in the next few days.

Agreed, you should have done the tour popups in a different colour to the site being toured.

Also when the tour is finished there's no "close" which would be naturally placed where the next button used to be. When I closed the tour and wanted to start again I [apparently] had to reload, a "start tour again" button would have been good; perhaps have a tour hotkey that works site-wide to get a tour of a particular page.

Do you have any idea how well this will for a website that's not selling product tours? Would be eager to know if it works somewhere else.

But I think you could do better than 10% if the site was redesigned with the tour at the core. At the moment there feels like a lot going on.

The 'how' is nicely explained now, but the 'why' isnt so much. Meaning I think for me I'm not coming away with the feeling it's the tour isnt going to simplify anything on my app / site.

As you mentioned, people are lazy, so I want to be inspired to throw it into my app because what I've seen is so nicely done that I want it too.

Thanks for your feedback. We will be redesigning our landing page in a few days, after we have gathered some more feedback.

If you go out of business, do my guided-tours go as well ?

Or perhaps you generate a tour that I can host myself ?

Hopefully we will not go out of business anytime soon ;)

But to answer your question, we host the tours ourselves and provide you with a small script to insert into your page. And in the event of us going out of business, we will provide an 'offline tour player script' which you can host yourself. This is something we are already developing for some of our clients, who require it for sensitive internal apps, so we should be able to open it up for everybody if the need arises.

You say "we will provide" the self-host option but contrast that with "should be able to" in respect of using the solution that enables self-hosting.

I'm not in the market for this so I'll leave my conclusions aside.

That 'Welcome' popup keeps coming back after refresh, it's a bit annoying, for me at least... I closed it and selected to 'never show again', however it comes back. All I want to do is to look around without any tours... Just my 2 cents.

Oops, looks like we messed up and disabled user-tracking for that tour. We'll fix it soon. Sorry about that.

Seems like a super specific product, is there enough of a market for it? I do like it compared with the average website tour, but seems like they should create something more comprehensive somehow.

It is a super specific product. We designed it to be simple and so one thing but to do it extremely well. In our opinion literally every webapp requires a guided tour. If not to explain the features on their landing page, then to guide users through the actual functionality of the app itself. So IMHO, there is a pretty large market for us. Over the next few weeks we will be writing about how our customers are using Easy Product Tours in their applications.

Answer: split test.

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