False.
In my current role as the Head of Inbound Marketing at Wix Partners, and previously as the Head of Wix Funnel, I spent countless hours with our team optimizing the conversion rate of millions of users. We A/B tested everything, from design to CTAs to improve the click through rate and conversion rate of various funnels.
Most recently, my team of funnel optimization experts have been improving the onboarding funnel of the Wix Marketplace.
The Wix Marketplace is a platform that gives Wix users the option to hire professionals to help them with their website needs. Wix users do this by submitting a project request to get matched with the right agency for the job. The goal of our team is to increase project requests, and we do this by optimizing the funnel as much as possible.
After running countless optimization tests, we found that contrary to popular opinion increasing clicks can increase conversions but only if it brings value to your client. So abandon this false truism and instead apply the best practices we identified through tests we ran on the onboarding funnel of our Marketplace.
1. Ask the right questions—and base them based on intent
A good onboarding funnel will make your end-user feel like they are being heard. In order to create that effect, every step in your flow should have a clear purpose and bring value for both the user and the site.
This is a best practice we identified time and time again, but that was most clearly visible in how we optimized the first step of our onboarding funnel to the Marketplace.
At this stage we ask our users to select the type of service they need help with. Initially, we displayed the options they could select as a laundry-list of services including: web design, online store, site customization, graphic design. However, we found that the drop off rate with this approach was too high at 42.5%.
We decided to try something different and turn the list of options into intent-based statements. “Web design” became “design my website”, “marketing and promoting” became “promote my business” and so on.
The test worked. After implementing these changes we saw an 8% decrease in the drop off rate.
What was behind this dramatic improvement? Clients were more inclined to respond because the new copy made the benefit of hiring a professional obvious. It was clear our marketplace had a solution for the specific intent they had. Before: The initial way we displayed services in the market place had a drop off rate of 42.5%
After: Changing the way we asked the question led to an 8% decrease in the drop off rate
2. Sometimes there’s more than one good answer
It’s not always about the question. Another important way to make a survey funnel a place where you can effectively communicate the benefit of your service to the end client is through the answer options you provide them.
After analysing the stages of the Wix Marketplace funnel we noticed that we could improve the drop off rate when we asked clients to select the service they needed. At the time, we only gave clients the option to select one type of service they needed help with. We decided to test if allowing them to choose multiple services would improve the submission rate.
The results were astounding. After increasing the number of services clients could choose, our submissions increased by over 20%.
By increasing the number of services clients could select, they understood that they could get everything they need from a single agency. So yes, we increased clicks but doing so brought our users’ value and this is ultimately what improved their conversion rate.
3. Show users they’re in the right place by making answers as specific as possible
Building on our understanding that sometimes optimizing the answer options in the funnel is the key to improvement, our team creates answers that are as specific as possible to our client’s intent.
Take our approach with ecommerce users for example. Our team knew that amongst Wix ecommerce users there was an increase in those looking for dropshipping solutions.
We decided to apply this insight to the Marketplace funnel for clients looking for ecommerce support.
Instead of just asking users if they wanted to sell online, we went a step further and added a question about which types of products they sell (physical products, digital goods or dropshipping items).
Again, the results of these changes were huge. We were able to increase the amount of users that chose to hire ecommerce professionals by 30%.