Targeting the right people for your product or services is one of the key feature in designing a marketing strategy. While marketing a content you must have to know, for whom the content is designed for. You must have to make it clear, what kind of people will find your content interesting. If you keep this points in mind, it will help you in targeting the right people for your content. This matters a lot in case you are serious in driving the audience towards your website. Ancestry.com realized the importance of targeting there content to the right kind of people and you will be surprised to know that, this resulted in 20% increase in their conversion. Let’s look at their strategy closely.
About Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com is a privately owned company which focuses everyone to discover, preserve and share their family history. President/CEO of Ancestry.com is Tim Sullivan. Ancestry.com is founded in 1983. It is owned by Permira and co-investors, headquarter at Provo, Utah, US. On 2012, there employee count was just 1,000 all over the world. With a revenue of US$399.7 million.
Their products include Family tree software which is counted among its no. 1 selling family history software products. Other products are Fold3.com, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com, Newspapers.com, Rootsweb.com. Ancestry.com is a sweet place where all the family members can stay connected online by sharing videos, photos and stories in one place.
Ancestry.com have very well used the online platform to get their visitors. They had 1.87 million users in the first quarter of 2012. They could reach out to 8.4 million users by the end of 2012. As of 2015 after making use of targeted contents they had over 19.6 million visitors per month and counted among the top Genealogy websites. Can you imagine, what exactly they used in order to reach that high number of visitors per month?
Challenge faced
Ancestry.com realized that their offer pages are the places in their website where maximum conversion of visitors to customers take place. So, they decided to check the potential of their website by analysis the performance of this offer pages. The goal was to increase their conversion rate in their websites. In order to achieve that they optimizing their offer page to get a clear view of the visitors and the subscribers. But soon they realized that their offer pages were not optimize enough to perform well. They didn’t have a consistent optimized offer page so they started working on the consistency of its offer pages.
Strategy used
The team of Ancestry.com made use of a 3 phase strategy in order to increase their conversion by better targeting their contents of offer page.
Phase 1: Optimization
Ancestey.com realized that they cannot force a customer to buy their product and services just by displaying a set of offer an incentive. It was noticed that as soon as someone visits their website to check out, visitors were bombarded by their offer pages making the visitors unable to access the website unless they subscribe. So, they corrected this fault by optimizing their offer pages.
Phase 2: Template creation
In order to improve conversion Ancestry.com started to ensure that their website have a consistent design. So they introduced templates and different contents for different customer segments. For better targeting the people according to their interest. This was one of the main factor which ensured better conversion rate.
Phase 3: Optimization and Customization
Ancestry.com analyzed their website and made an observation on the customer journey when they enter into their website. Based on this customer journey, they started segmented their customers into segments of four groups.
- Self-selector
- Interrupted browsers
- Past fee trailers
- Upgraders
This customization helped them in producing different contents for different segments. The top strategies they used in here are:
- Mapping out the primary user journeys and conversion rates in order to identify top opportunities.
- Creating a flexible template that allows users to easily and efficiently test customized messaging.
- Isolate your testing elements. This will allow you to discover what influences and motivated your customers.
- Pay close attention to placement and treatment of your prices- it can have a large impact on conversion.
- Be aware of the friction that may be caused by presenting too many choices.
Outcomes
Ancestry.com identified their mistakes and this helped them to get a fantastic outcome in terms of number of visitors converted to customers. People used to get confused by a large number of offers listed by Ancestry.com. Reducing choices by optimizing their offer page save customer from the pain of facing a large number of choices taking a glimpse of their website services. This helped in reducing the dropout rates. After optimizing and customizing, they could see a 20% rise in the conversion rate. 40% of the offer page visits of the segment of ‘self-selectors’ increased their conversion rate by 5X times. And 60% of the ‘Interrupted browsers’ segment increased in their conversion rate. This finally resulted in 19.6 million visitors per month in 2015.
Learning
Ancestry.com is a good example of company they cares for their customer satisfaction. They started optimizing their website by taking a look from the customer point of view. This realization about the satisfaction of customers made them concern about better targeting of their contents according to the interest of different segments of the customers.
Image credits: corporate.ancestry.com, mfcreative.com, blogspot.com
