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RingCentral Boosts Conversions By 37%

Your service is selling on line, but you suspect conversions could be higher. Why not try testing one of your highest-impact pages, the product pricing page?

That's what RingCentral Inc. did, ringing up a 37% increase in conversions. A provider of telephony systems for small businesses, RingCentral's original conversion rate was good, but Boris Elpiner, VP of Marketing for RingCentral, thought it could be higher.

"When you can convert every single visitor to your website, then you're doing well," he jokes.

Opportunity/Problem

The team wanted to improve conversions on the site's pricing page. "That particular page was very high in terms of traffic -- at both the entry point and the exit point," he says. "We had theories about how many products to include on this page, so we wanted to test different configurations."

The page originally included four different service plans, listed in columns, increasing in cost (thus targeting larger businesses) from left to right.

Testing Approach

The team had a couple of theories about what might work best on the pricing page:

  • Theory #1:
    The fewer choices you give to a customer, the easier it is for them to make a choice -- but they may not find what they need, or they may think that, as their company grows, they would outgrow RingCentral's services.
  • Theory #2:
    Give customers more choices so they can find the product that best suits his or her needs, including the premium products -- but the abundance of choices or the higher priced products might scare them away.

With those theories in mind, the team devised their test with three different creative treatments: the control, with four pricing plans, another with three plans, and another with two.

Results

The page that showed three plans increased conversions from the control (4 plans) by more than 37%, Elpiner says.

The page that showed two plans decreased conversions.

"We learned that the less overwhelmed the customers feel, the better. That's pretty simple," says Elpiner. "But it's a fine balance between how much information you can present without overwhelming them. The high priced plan, we learned, was scaring away customers."

Instead of including the high priced plan on the pricing page, he is rolling out a special product page geared toward customers who are looking for a higher end solution.

"We had some ideas about what would work and what wouldn't, but by testing, we know the results are based in reality," he says. "It's easy to come up with a logical reasoning behind the results after the test," he adds. Before the test, both theories sounded logical -- after the test, they knew for sure which was true.

Moving forward, Elpiner will continue to test (always hoping for that 100% conversion rate).