You've heard it before, small optimizations can have huge impacts that increase conversion numbers. It's true! What follows is the story of one such optimization that my team at Mozilla recently released that increased our daily newsletter signup rate by 25%.
We Want to Date You
One question always on our minds is how to form lasting relationships with our website visitors. I'm sure many of you have the same question and fear people visiting your website once and moving onto the next sexy thing, never to come back again.
Dumped.
It's a busy inter-webs out there! It happens all the time!
We've recently launched a fantastic email program that allows a deeper connection between Mozilla and our users to be formed. Our web team has worked closely with Winston Bowden (@winstonbowden), our email program lead extraordinaire, to make sure site visitors have a chance to signup for our newly launched monthly newsletter. (sign up here)
Launchin' and Learnin'
When the first iteration of newsletter signup form launched it went like this: user clicks signup option in footer and gets linked to a landing page where they can fully register. Can you spot the inefficiency?
When the first iteration of newsletter signup form launched it went like this: user clicks signup option in footer and gets linked to a landing page where they can fully register. Can you spot the inefficiency?
Above: "Get Monthly News" links to this main Newsletter signup page:
We decided to make this process easier by allowing inline signups. Stripping down the signup form and embedding only the bare-minimum fields within the site footer accomplishes this. It also helps the user experience in two ways: whittles down the signup process, and allows the site visitor to remain on the same page.
Here's what it looks like now:
Above: Email signup field is open by default within the footer of every page. Clicking the small tabbed button reveals the other data fields needed for complete signup, as seen below:
Hot or Not?
This slightly more advanced technical implementation did take some time out of our normal release cycle. But was it worth it? Sure was...
This small change increased the daily signup rate by 25%, or 1,000 incremental new subscribers every day. This will result in an additional 365,000 email subscribers a year!
The Bottom Line
Although next time we launch similar site functionality it should contain the most streamlined user flow from day one, it's never-the-less interesting to see just how big of an effect a small change like this can have.
Do you see other ways we can improve the user experience on Mozilla.com? I'm sure you can. I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments below.
