Last month I re-built and re-launched MTW:ED, a expiring domain name data web-service. In terms of the data that MTW:ED collects, nothing has changed. The aim of the re-make was simple: make it easier for both new and existing subscribers to see what MTW:ED does, access MTW:ED’s data and ultimately subscribe to the service.

Since re-launching, I have seen MTW:ED’s subscription income increase by more than 33%, and it is anticipated that many more existing subscribers will renew their subscription. I wanted to share with you what I have done to increase sales, and give a comparison with the new and old website.

The old version of MTW:ED was a bit confusing. The data was not presented well, and it was difficult to immediately grasp what MTW:ED did. This obviously presented some disadvantages in getting subscribers, as they didn’t exactly know what they were getting for their subscription fee.

The new MTW:ED has been re-designed with this problem in mind. We now have a dedicated homepage which explains exactly what we do. We understand that some users don’t like to read a lot of text, and there are often better ways to communicate. This is why we created a ‘welcome video’-style banner which gives users some key information (stats) and shows some screenshots of the site in use. You can see our video here:

The video isn’t the best in the world, but it does the trick. For your curiosity, the video was created using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and uses stock audio from iStockPhoto: Aspects (Loop A).

Another central consideration was to make it easy for visitors to see our sample data and use our sample search tool. We knew from the old site that the average subscriber visited 23 pages per visit. Our re-design increased this figure up to a surprising 73 pages/visit (compared to 7 for all visitors), with each user spending 30 minutes browsing before subscribing. This demonstrates that users who do subscribe like to know exactly what they are getting — even if it is just $4.99 per month, they like to know it is $4.99 well spent. In fact, one user spent 2 hours browsing before subscribing and another viewed 220 pages. This is how we did it:

Rather than treating subscription as a ‘subsidiary option’, we wanted to make it an integral part of the service. We wanted to devise a way of making users flow towards subscription, without forcing them to subscribe. We achieved this using our 3-step-tour-style navigational structure:

We broke-down what MTW:ED does into 3 fundamental stages. We wanted to first show users the data we collected because it is important that they form their own opinion of our service before they bounce. We engaged users by giving them access to almost an entire years-worth of data. This allowed them to see MTW:ED from a subscriber’s point of view, only with 3-month-old data. Similarly, we invited them to perform searches on a reduced data set.

The final stage was really the most important. If a visitor ended up on this page, it meant they were probably about to subscribe — in fact, 32% of visitors viewing this page ended up subscribing.

Previously, subscription was priced at $9.99 per month for access to data and search tool. We recognised that many users only used the browse-list data (not the search tool), so for the re-make we decided to re-consider the subscription options available. Again utilizing the Rule of 3, we separated our functionality into 3 subscription packages:

Silver is comparable to the old MTW:ED monthly subscription. It costs $4.50 more as many more users will opt for the Bronze subscription option instead. Our subscription price now ranges between $4.99 and $49.99, depending on need. The observed benefits of using multiple subscription options are:

1. We are able to target different ‘types’ of people, and offer each group a more suitable package for their needs.
2. It gives the appearance that, for example, Bronze subscription is being ‘given away’ as it is comparitevly much cheaper than Silver and Gold. This means users are more likely to subscribe because they are (or at least feel as if they are) taking a lesser risk.
3. It presents an opportunity for us to showcase concisely what MTW:ED offers, and provides an implied value to each of our features.

MTW:ED also created an advertising campaign with Google AdWords. Since MTW:ED serves a quite small and specific audience, many of our subscriptions come from users looking for us in search engines. Our natural search engine presence is enough for us to sustain the service, but we wanted to target more subscribers. Google AdWords is perfect because it allows us to ‘link up’ to those very specific users looking for a service like ours.

Our campaign so far has been moderately successful. We are about breaking even in terms of cost against revenue, and will hopefully increase ROI by optimising in the near future.

The average Google-AdWords-referred visitor is viewing 14 pages before subscribing or leaving, with the best performing keywords at around 90. They are also spending an average of 5 minutes browsing; with the best keywords, around 20 minutes.

We will continue to look at these figures and decide which keywords are simply not getting conversions and remove them from our campaign.

Okay: so I’ve done my bit of sharing. Now, it’s your turn: I want to hear what has worked for you, so please start a discussion by leaving a comment below.

Thanks,
Brendon.

Taxomation.com have just released ‘404 widget‘ — a useful tool for helping your site’s lost users. The widget looks at the URL a visitor tried to load, and extracts keywords from it. It then runs over to Yahoo! and finds related pages from your site — all just in time to be displayed to the visitor, who can choose a page or keep searching.

It is similar to Google’s widget, except that more than one page is displayed and text from the page is also included. The Taxomation widget can be customised for your site (changing colours, etc) and is simple to set-up: you just need to copy a little code, and everything works instantly. Why not grab yours now, and see what you think…

Here’s a live example for the page ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.html‘ rather than ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.php‘:

(If you are looking for another example, mis-type a URL on this site; it has the widget installed).

You may also be interested in reading the following about creating more useful 404 pages:

• Creating User Friendly 404 Pages (Coding Horror)
• Creating useful 404 pages (Google)
• A More Useful 404 (A List Apart)
• Make your 404 Page Useful (Blog for Profit)
• Usability: Create a 404 page that’s useful and relevant (azngamerboi 2.0)