In this eSales Hub video, we walk you through how we increased by conversion by 40% for some of our clients by creating a clear Covid-19 Secure Business statement and identity.
Video Transcription
eSales Hub’s lead generation platform has over 180 clients in the UK, with many seeing a downturn in leads since the lockdown. By creating a simple yet effective Covid-19 Secure Business statement and identity, eSales Hub was able to increase the page conversion and therefore the lead volume of clients who adopted the Covid-19 Secure Business operations policies. In this video eSales Hub shows you the direct impact a clear Covid-19 statement can have on increasing page conversion.
The effect of Covid-19 on lead generation volumes
In this video I’m going to show you something that we’ve developed that’s helped us increase page conversion over the last couple of weeks. Now undoubtedly Covid-19 and the corona virus pandemic has had massive impact on businesses all throughout the UK and in Europe. We’ve certainly seen probably, from the day of the lockdown, we saw probably about 70 percent of our clients pause their lead generation campaign because they weren’t able to trade. Those that stayed live including emergency plumbers, emergency drainage engineers and those type of local services that were classed as critical, they still kept their lead generation campaign going, but I would say the lead volumes were probably down by about 50 percent.
But from what we could see, the traffic didn’t really change. There’s been a bit more traffic maybe, but it just wasn’t converting so we put together a campaign and in this video we are going to detail the results we saw from the improvements that we made to our landing pages and the knock-on effect that we saw not only on page conversion but on lead volume. Whilst you want a high converting page, you also want a good lead volume.
As you can see from the data we pulled from Google Trends, and I’ve just given an example of some keywords that we use for a couple different clients, you can see here other than at the beginning of May when we had the bank holiday that there isn’t really been a drop-off in traffic. So although we had some clients that were down on their lead volume by 50 percent, it wasn’t necessarily a traffic issue, but a page conversion issue. This is what led to the discussion internally that we needed to better position our clients Covid-19 operations policy.
Covid-19 Secure Business Statement and Identity
We noticed that on a number of different websites there is a covid-19 statements and we looked at a couple of different examples. To me it seemed like there were two types of layout that people have used; a brief statement at the top where you click through for further information or a bit more of a complete statement where there’s no click-through to another page. We felt that actually going down the route of having more of a complete statement so you didn’t have to navigate off the landing page would be better for page conversion and better user journey.
We also wanted to create an identity for a covid-19 secure business as its an expression that’s been used by the Government and we felt that although there’s Government guidelines, there’s no real identity or communications packaging so clients know exactly what your operations policy is regarding Covid-19 and operating securely as a business. We therefore set about creating an identity and a very clear statement straight on the landing page, so you could see straight what the policy was. When you’re dealing with a local service business often a lot of local services are delivered in the customers home or place of work. I think getting across a clear statement operations policy your are implementing to protect clients and colleagues also helps to put people’s minds at rest.
The key to delivery was also to make sure our clients were adhering to a Cobid-19 Secure Business Policy. We didn’t want to put the statement and identity up if they weren’t adhering to it. Our clients demonstrated they had a clear operations strategy behind Covid-19 and that they followed government guidelines
Did it work?
On the evening of the 13th May we set about implementing the statement and identify across selected client pages and measured its impact. One of the key messages we wanted to get across to the user was that every precaution was being taken if you wanted to make use of their service.
After the first day we could see the impact, and what’s really interesting is the increase in page conversion just by doing this simple packaging and simple communication to make it easy for the customer to understand. On average we’ve seen about a 40 percent uplift in page conversion across the board and I would say in terms of lead volumes, we are probably about 75% of lead volumes before lock-down started. As you can see in the different categories, page conversion has had a massive effect whether it’s driveways, whether it’s emergency plumbing, kitchens, bathrooms, emergency drainage and the like. As you can see, whether it’s an emergency service or something that’s pre-planned within the home improvements sector, having a clear Covid-19 statement has a dramatic increase in page conversion.
Rather than just being a set of words on top of the page, I think having the badge and a clear statement just adds that credibility that client is operating in in a secure manner and has the proper operational processes in place to protect customers and colleagues alike. For fitted bathroom lead generation, the effect was even more profound, almost doubling page conversion within two weeks which is pretty impressive.
Our recommendations to generating a higher converting landing page
If you’re going to take advantage and improve page conversion, I’d recommend a clear Covid -19 statement. But, you can’t just stick this logo any where you want, you’ve got to have a clear plan in place because you can’t say something that you don’t do. I think one of the key things is having a very clear statement that’s very simple, but to the point that doesn’t need the client to click off your landing page on to another page. In my view you, if you’re get the user to click off your landing page onto another page, unless it is to fill out a form it’s a conversion killer – it just a barrier for them to become a lead. Our average page conversion across all out clients was around 33 to 34% before the lockdown. With this statement and identity we are not far off those levels at the moment. Having the statement and logo on the same page in the header certainly helps.
I think the other benefit in clearly communicating your Covid-19 Secure Business operations plan is to remove the concerns your clients may have in using your service, and this has definitely impacted page conversion as you can see. The day we made the change on the evening of the 13th May, straight away the next day on the 14th May our page conversion kicked up. You could argue other factors may have had an effect like the relaxing of the regulations here in the UK, or other events that have conspired to help the page conversion. But as you can see from the traffic, there hasn’t been a major increase, certainly not anywhere near a 40% increase in traffic, so I do think that removing people’s concerns by having a very clear statement does have a massive impact on page conversion.
I hope you found this eSales Hub video informative and as always please do ask any questions or make any comments below. Thanks very much for you time, my names Mark Taylor and I am the CEO of eSales Hub.
