The author describes how they more than tripled their website's conversion rate in three weeks by testing landing page optimizations. They initially followed best practices like adding testimonials and reducing distractions. A major breakthrough came when they emphasized that users get 40+ apps for free with signup. Further testing showed that keeping the message simple by focusing only on the free apps and no credit card requirement was most effective. The key lessons are to not ignore best practices, continuously test pages, identify the most compelling message, and keep the landing page simple.

1. How to More than Triple your Conversion Rate in Three weeks?
We did it so can you.
You might be wondering why don’t I have an article with quick tips for tripling your conversion
rate in 3 days instead of 3 weeks. The truth is that tripling of conversion in 3 days is just not
possible unless you are a really very high traffic website and can get statistically significant
number of visitors to accurately measure you improvements. So if somebody tells you that they
can hep you double or triple your conversion rate quickly, don’t believe them.
Now getting back to the topic at hand, one of the biggest ongoing challenges of any web based
company is to increase the conversion rate of the users coming to their website or landing pages.
We at Apptivo face the same challenge and are always trying to improve our conversion rates so
that our cost per acquisition is low.
So in this blog post I will tell you about our experience around trying to increase the conversion
rate and how we more than tripled our conversion rates. I used a tool called unbounce
(unbounce.com) to achieve this. I have no vested interest in promoting them so you can take my
word when I tell you that their tool is really good for this purpose. I will not be telling you what
our conversion rates actually are now, so don’t ask me about that in the comments.
How we Started
Our earliest landing page was very basic and we did not have much faith in the best practices for
landing pages. We did not realize that having too many links on the landing page just distracts
the users and that we needed to have testimonials to provide social proof etc. We did not think
that such small things could make such a huge difference to the conversion rate. Our first major
jump in the conversion rate was by just following these best practices. To achieve this we added
a testimonial, we decreased the number of links on the site, added a video explaining about the
product, and tried to keep the page simple.
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.

2. Major Breakthrough
Our first major breakthrough was when we realized that the people coming to the landing page
were really impressed when we told them that they get 40+ other business apps on the cloud, for
free, when they sign up with Apptivo. This is when our conversion rate increased to almost 2.5
times of what it was when we started out.
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.

3. K.I.S.S
If you see our current landing page you will see that we have got rid of most of the additional
info which we were displaying earlier. We are highlighting the 40+ apps, the fact that Apptivo is
free and that we do not need your credit card info etc. We are no longer trying desperately to
convince people in the landing page, about why they should use Apptivo. We have a simple
headline and this works great. So if you didn’t get it by now, the next thing we learned is that, it
is important to Keep It Simple, Stupid.
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.

4. Key Takeaways
The key takeaways from our experience are:
1. You cannot ignore the best practices. They are there for a reason. You can leave out the ones
you are uncomfortable with, but definitely don’t leave them out altogether.
2. Testing is important. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you don’t test there is no way you will
know how to measure your progress or reach your full potential.
3. Figure out what really works for your target audience. For us it was the fact that they get 40+
other business apps for free along with the invoices app when they sign up.
4. Keep it as simple as possible. Landing page is like a mini elevator pitch ( elevator pitch is 30
seconds, people usually decide whether to close the page or continue reading in 5-10 seconds),
so make sure that it is short and sweet, and just concentrates on the points that sell and nothing
more.
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.

5. Now with this learning we are trying to re-do our website apptivo.com and have collected
feedback from users over the last few weeks. Let me know if you see something on our website
which needs to be changed by adding them as comments.
------------------
Puneet Yamparala is the Program Director at Apptivo. He is passionate about helping small
businesses and professionals. Look for his work on Apptivo’s Small Business University blog.
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.