Draft Sharks CRO
Time Frame: 3 Years (2017-2020)
260%
Increase in Total Conversions
$160,000
Annual Revenue Increase
Savvy CRO decisions helped get Draft Sharks to the end zone with their new subscribers.
Background
Draft Sharks is a nationally recognized Fantasy Football advice website, providing top-notch advice to football enthusiasts. They offer a host of free tools, including mock drafts, depth charts, and average draft positions for all major players, as well as even more “insider only” tools and tips.
Challenge
Draft Sharks had a goal of selling more subscriptions for their fantasy football insights. Much of their content is gated to non-members, so Draft Sharks knew the publicly available portions of the website, paired with their email marketing campaigns, had to entice individuals into becoming paying subscribers. They enlisted Accelerate Media’s help in optimizing all aspects of the conversion touchpoints, including price, language, design, and more.
Our Solution
Offer Optimization
46% HIGHER CONVERSION RATE
The Draft Sharks team seemed confident that their price of $19.99 was set in stone, but we at a(m) knew to let the tests do the talking. In actuality, testing showed that raising the price to $24 resulted in a 46% higher conversion rate. The Draft Sharks team was floored! This one test helped to realize an extra $160,000 in annual revenue – and cost less than $1,000 to run.
After seeing such impressive success with pricing tests, we decided to try adding a 20% off offer. The hope was this would act as an extra enticer for users who were still trying to make a decision. Testing showed that it only increased conversion rates by 6%, and ultimately made the price point less profitable in the long run. So, we decided against implementing it. While we may have missed the extra point on this one, we still got the touchdown.
Copy & Design Variation Testing
145% HIGHER CONVERSION RATE
The aesthetics of a website are sometimes overlooked as a conversion factor, but not by us. Clean designs with ample white space are becoming quite popular, so we decided to test a minimalist design against a full-color, football-themed look. For this particular audience, bold was big, and the vibrant, Draft Sharks design increased conversion rates by 8%.
Of course, looks aren’t everything – the message is equally important. Analytics showed us that there was a decent flow of traffic to the subscription page, but not everyone who made it there was following through. We decided to do a classic A/B test on the headline of the subscribe page. The original, Subscribe to Draft Sharks Today for Just $24, was alright. The alternative, Get League-Crushing Information Today for Just $24, was indeed league-crushing. The variant won over the original with an increased conversion rate of 137%!
Home & Landing Page Testing
128% INCREASE IN PAID MEMBERSHIPS
Video creation and testing played a huge role in final optimization outcomes. Because potential buyers couldn’t see the benefits offered by becoming a member, a(m) created a series of explainer videos that allowed people to see “behind the curtain.” We tested various scripts and productions for engagement and conversion rates, with the winning videos bringing a 128% increase in paid memberships. Once we found our winning video, we made sure it was perfectly placed, running home page tests comparing it against winning copy. Compared to other content, the video increased the conversion rate by 28%.
We knew we would be able to sufficiently target our key demographic with Google search ad and that the homepage was well optimized, but we were unsure how new users were most comfortable completing the sale. How much information did they need? How much of the site did they click around on before committing? As you can probably guess, we decided the only way to know was to test it. We set up ads that were linked to a contained, navigation-less landing page and then redirected that traffic to the home page 50% of the time. This gave us a sufficient amount of traffic to ensure a statistically significant result. The outcome: a simpler, all-inclusive, distraction-free landing page increased the conversion rate by 41%.
By the end of our optimization testing, we were able to realize a 260% increase in total conversions while also increasing the profitability of each subscriber.
“Every time we think we’ve reached peak performance, Accelerate Media shows us all the ways little changes can have a MAJOR impact on our conversions. They really do test everything.”