By pvaughan@hubspot.com (Pamela Vaughan)

As someone who does conversion rate optimization (CRO) for a living, I can’t express to you how excited I get when a simple change makes a big impact. And this particular example? It doesn’t get much simpler or more impactful.

Sure, I’m a self-proclaimed CRO geek, but if you were able to increase the conversion rate on a web page by 560%, I bet you’d be geeking out, too.

Personalization as an Optimization Tool

As a member of HubSpot’s web strategy team, I’ve been optimizing the core website pages on HubSpot.com for the last eight years.

Prior to that, I spent many years optimizing this very blog.

And in the past year, I’ve been experimenting a lot more with personalization to improve both user experience and conversion rates on the website. The tactics

seem simple — I’ve tailored both calls-to-action (CTAs) and content for different segments of our website visitors.

But personalization can be tricky. By creating more than one version of a single page, that means you also need to maintain more than one version of the page.

Multiply that by each page on your website, and things can start to get pretty unmanageable. This makes it critical to track the performance of any personalization you put live on your website, and keep only the ones that are worth the return on investment.

Luckily, this one was worth it.

Personalizing for Free Users

On many of the core pages on HubSpot’s website, we typically show visitors two CTAs by default:

• One CTA encourages visitors to start using the free version of our software.
• And one CTA encourages visitors to get a demo of the premium editions.

When I started experimenting more with personalization on the website, it occurred to me that it was pretty silly to show free sign-up CTAs to contacts who are already free users.

And if these contacts are still visiting our web pages after becoming a free user, they’re probably still evaluating their options and might be interested in trying the premium editions.

So on one of our highest trafficked pages — a product page about our free CRM and other free tools — I created a rule using HubSpot’s smart content to replace the free sign-up CTAs with demo CTAs for any contact who was already a free user of our software.

Since there was no risk to free sign-up demand and therefore no reason to run a true A/B test, I ran this as a lookback test. (Meaning I made the change for 100% of visitors, then compared a period of time before and after the change to assess impact.)

Here’s what that looked like in action:

Default Content:

Smart Content:

<img src="https://www.hubspot.com/hs-fs/hubfs/website-personalization-2-20241108-3853983.webp?width=1178&height=611&name=website-personalization-2-20241108-3853983.webp" width="1178" height="611" alt="Screenshot: CRM Software for Growing Businesses. CTA: …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron