Eliminating Distractions on Your Sign Up Page
Let’s begin this post at the end. The lesson here is: your sign up page should have a single purpose – to get people to sign up.
That may sound obvious, but it took us a few months to figure out the obvious here. When we first started taking sign ups for our original membership site, we put the order form within our regular website template. Perfect, we thought. The look and feel of our order form fits within the framework of our site and so visitors will feel comfortable that they are in the right place.
We took great care in making sure our secure certificate worked the right way so that the little lock showed up in the browser to assure buyers that their transaction was safe. Awesome – all necessary steps.
Sign ups were good – not great – but good. It was a newer site and we knew it would take time to grow our email list and for our marketing efforts to pay off.
Then one day I was going through our email list sign ups, dutifully looking to see which pages visitors were using to subscribe to our daily email. Aweber.com, our auto-responder company, has a nifty tracking tool that lets you see which pages on your website people are using to enter their email address.
“Sign up form” was in the field next to several each day. I didn’t think much of it, until during a test email campaign we ran where we sent half our list directly to the membership sign up page and half to an informational page where they would read details about the product before going to the order form. I was naturally curious to see if people would buy a piece of content after reading about it in an email only and then be sent straight to the order form, OR, if they converted better by being sent to an informational page first with even more detail and then had to click a buy button there to go to the order form.
(Straight to the order form wins – but not all the time for a few reasons – that’s best left to another post)
Anyway, on that day I saw more email subscriptions with the “Sign up form” tag on it. Investigating it more, I came to realize that people were signing up for our newsletter on the sign up form page.
You gotta be kidding me. I had actually gotten the visitor to click on a buy button and become a member, and then offered them all kinds of crap to do and places to go OTHER than fill out the form. How did I miss it? I just wasn’t thinking about it.
From the old order form (below), visitors could search the site, sign up for the newsletter or click on a variety of super cool tabs that would take them all over our site and away from the order form. They could even go to our Twitter page, for crying out loud!
So Emile quickly got to work on a template page that still had the look and feel of our site, but eliminated every other thing they could do except one – BUY. Surprise, surprise, conversions went up and confusion and distraction went down.
The moral to this story is easy to see. Your sign up page should excel at doing one thing and one thing only – get the visitor to sign up and do nothing else. There should not be any other actions, choices or links available to them at that point. You’ve worked hard to get them to that point so don’t blow it!
Old sign up page:
New sign up page:
MemberCon is written by Tim & Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. MemberCon.com is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
