How to increase a “low month’s” conversion rate by 22%
This post is going to cover:
How to still grow during “slow months”
Why conversion rate has such a huge impact on revenue
What was changed to increase a paid page’s conversion rate by 22%
Slow months
I’ve seen a lot of people report that we’re starting to get into slow months :’) this could be because of the economy, people’s spending habits during summer, or because there’s so much competition.
But what if the slow month is because of you?
In reality, it’s quite difficult to know if you’re experiencing a slow month because of something outside of your control (for example: September spending in America trending downwards) or because of something you’re doing wrong (for example: having an unoptimized page or marketing poorly).
I like to think that the reason for a slow month doesn’t really matter: no matter what, I want to do my best to try new things each month in order to reach 5%-20% month-over-month growth.
The only way to continue seeing growth is to continue trying new things ❤️ and that’s how this month’s experiment came to be.
Let’s focus on conversion rates
Your conversion rate (the number of people who subscribe to your page after viewing your page) is one of the most important metrics you can be tracking over time. This rate has an incredibly high impact on your potential for revenue.
This relationship between conversion rate and revenue is quite clear, especially on paid pages. Even just a seemingly small increase from just 0.5% to 1% — both seemingly tiny tiny percentages, would result in literally doubling your revenue from new paid subscriptions. On a free page, the more people who subscribe, the more people you can market your locked content to.
Since OF doesn’t give you conversion rate data (why?!), I calculate this by taking the number of new subscribers divided by the number of profile visitors. Turn your result into a percentage. For example:
200 new subscribers / 30,000 profile visitors = 0.66% conversion rate
To really understand how conversion rate can have such a huge impact on your revenue, take a look at how revenue from new subscribers on a paid page can change when the conversion rate improves incrementally:
What you really came for: how to increase your conversion rate
Despite conversion rate being so important, there are actually just a small handful of variables that impact the conversion rate: simply, the things that are visible when a non-subscriber sees your page. A potential subscriber will see whatever is immediately visible and factor in each one of those items before subscribing, whether consciously or subconsciously. For me, that looks like:
Your subscription price
Your photos
How many media items you have
Your bio
Because this list of variables is quite small, it’s fairly easy to isolate each one and test out different things that might increase your conversion rate.
Note: For you, your list might be slightly different. For instance, you might allow non-subscribers to see the text of each post or how active you post on your profile.
The cause for my September conversion rate increase:
For today, I’ll just touch on the ONE change that improved September’s conversion rate: the images used in the profile picture/banner.
I know this is what I can attribute the improvement to, because everything else stayed essentially exactly the same: the price, the bio, the bio, though the media items changed by a few (from uploading), but not a noteworthy amount.
For privacy reasons, I won’t show the actual photos that were used in the profile. But here are metrics you can use as a case study:
For reference: Percent change is calculated by calculating (new metric - old metric)/old metric and turning that decimal into a percentage ~
As you can see above, this 4 week test showed a HUGE improvement in the first 2 weeks of September. This is all because new photos were chosen with data guiding that decision. An increase of +22% is incredible for such a simple change! With slightly less visitors in September, there was still more revenue from new subscribers.
Ok, now how do you replicate this experiment for yourself?
How to pick photos that will have high conversion rates:
Part 1: The layout of your photos matter
So many creators simply upload one image as their profile picture and one large image as their banner. Don’t do this! When you do this, you only have two total photos for potential customers to look at.
Instead, upload a collage of 2-3 photos as your banner image. Now, there are 4 total images to compel somebody to subscribe for more. See how this could increase your chances of somebody wanting to subscribe?
Part 2: Be strategic about the photos you select
While I know none of us are just picking totally random photos to use, you can probably be more strategic than you are.
Go through your Instagram posts, look at your analytics, and make a note of which photos performed the best. How you measure this is up to you (comments, likes, saves, etc) but be consistent for each photo you pick.
These are the photos you’ll want to include in your banner. Why? Because we already have some indication that your target audience likes & engages with this particular piece of content.
Once you have a list of your top few photos, select your new profile photo and create a new banner image as a collage with 2-3 other photos from your list. You’ll likely want to consider having a variety of poses or outfits as well.
Part 3: Test your new photos & track data
Once you’ve uploaded your new photos, measure what your new conversion rate is. I would keep measuring until you have about 50k impressions so you don’t have to worry about statistical significance. Once you get there, look at your previous results. Is it better or worse? Do you want to run a new test with a new batch of photos?
Keep in mind that in order to truly measure whether or not your photos are what’s causing the conversion rate change, you shouldn’t introduce any new variables. Don’t rewrite your banner. Don’t change your price or run a sale. Just test one thing at a time. If you change more than one thing at a time, you won’t know what exactly caused your page to perform better or worse :)