How We Increased Sales Pipeline by $330,000/Month at Numara Software with Experience Optimization

Numara Software (now part of BMC Software) is a leading provider of integrated IT management solutions for Desktop Management, PC Lifecycle Management, Security & Compliance, Help Desk, and Service Desk. Designed to optimize IT management, their flagship products, Numara FootPrints, and Numara Track-It! collectively support more than 50,000 customer sites and nearly 20 million IT assets worldwide.

Numara’s website was the company’s engine for driving multiple levels of sales leads into the CRM system and ultimately to the sales people. Through a diverse mix of marketing activities including Pay-Per-Click advertising, Social Media, Email marketing, Public Relations, Seminars, Webinars, and Events, the primary goal was to drive “suspects” to the web site for conversion into “prospects” for the sale team.

The goal of these conversions was to drive enough leads to build a pipeline of opportunities that was 3 to 4 times the size of the sales target in a given month/quarter.  And serving these requirements of a 100 person global sales team, our methodology needed to be cost-effective yet scalable and repeatable.

The Solution

The Numara website was pretty well optimized through best practices in web design and SEO fully implemented across 12 global sites and landing pages.  This had given Numara a competitive edge in SEO and PPC campaigns. But we found that we were not reaching our conversion goals with the traffic we were generating.  We built up our unique visitation volume to 40,000 visitors per month, but we knew we were going to have to make changes to the site to get that traffic converting at a rate that would build the right amount of leads to drive the right amount of pipeline.

We did not want to make wholesale changes to this optimized site, so we turned to a more customer experience optimization to web design.  This adaptive approach called for small incremental changes that get tested and tweaked to measure and optimize their effect.  After 6 months of testing and improvements, it led to a $330,000 monthly increase in the sales opportunity pipeline from just our PPC campaigns alone.

Some of the Techniques Used

1.    Improving Readability for the Visitors

The latest version of the website had been in place for about a year, but the font used for all of the content had remained the same since the website had first launched. The font was Arial 10pt.

Following a common strategy used by bloggers to increase engagement, we tested increasing the font size to 13pt and added a little extra spacing between each line.  Even though the previous smaller font looked better and content flowed better, the results with the larger font showed a different story. That simple change improved the bounce rate by 10%, the site exit rate by 19%, pages per visit by 24%, and an impressive 133% improvement in form conversion rate.

2.    Conversion Action Layout Improvement

The homepage for Numara Track-It! had very little difference from the rest of the pages on the website, and it was one of the most active pages as an entry page as well as a landing page for campaigns. We felt there was a great opportunity to explore a new design to better present the call to action (CTAs) items on the page.

Original Header

Revised Header

Studying the heatmaps for the page, we already knew that the main conversion actions on the page were being ignored by most visitors. So the heading of the page was redesigned to bring focus on the product download and pricing requests.

The result was extremely exciting.  The click-through to the download CTA increased by 334% over the original design.  Additionally, click-through to the pricing CTA request improved by 54%.

3.    Onsite Search Improvement

The Numara website had over 400 web pages and PDFs available to be searched. The search box was one of those standard things that remained the same over the various renditions of the website. The search box itself was an out of the box form field size and visible on the top of every page.  When we added up all the times the search function was being used, it was the third most common form of site navigation and within the top 5 pages on the site, but its usage numbers were still quite distant from the main menu and top three pages.

Original Search Box

Revised Search Box

So we tested changes to the size of the search box to make it taller and wider as well as the font size of the text. This change led to a very positive impact on its use. The visitor engagement of the new design was increased by 20%. So simply improving the visibility of the search box had a great impact on improving the user experience for an unmet need of site visitors.

4.     Google Adwords Landing Page Optimization

The landing pages used by Numara Software were heavily targeted by their Google Adwords (PPC) campaigns. Numara had about a $150K/month spend. The landing pages offered different assets such as whitepapers, new and archived webinars and product downloads. A/B testing of the landing pages was a critical component to driving up conversion rates for the paid campaigns and driving down cost per acquisition.  Many iterative changes were made to the landing pages, including:

• Headline testing
• Body copy length
• Position of forms
• Removal of form fields
• Submit button text

The number of changes made using A/B testing over the months improved the overall conversion rates by 60% for the paid spend.  Over time, this testing enabled Numara to decrease the monthly budget by 50% and still maintain the number of leads generated.  This had a big impact on the acquisition cost per lead and it helped identify areas of improvement that could be made on other areas of the site and forms.

Combining A/B testing with PPC was a critical strategy for success and driving growth. Without the testing, the campaigns were generating typical conversion rates that most companies are used to seeing.  When you combine the two, it will have a big impact on lead generation.

What All This Meant

At the end of the day, for Numara Software, it meant an improvement in both the quality and quantity of incoming leads.  The techniques applied were simple changes to an already heavily optimized website to drive value. We found that through an adaptive web design approach, the practice of continuous updating of the website through visitor testing will always drive value to the company.  In the case of Numara Software, it was nearly $1 million in new business opportunities per quarter.

“John Paul’s adaptive web design approach proved to be extremely effective both from a results perspective and a cost perspective.  The traditional website overhaul every two years is a thing of the past.  The website should be tweaked every day to meet the ever changing behavior of its visitors.” – John Machonis – VP of Marketing, Numara Software

Want to Increase Your Site Conversions?

If you want to find out right away how to increase your site’s conversion rates with leads that will build your pipeline, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our conversion scientists. We’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to make incremental improvements that will grow your business through a cost-effective, adaptive web design approach.