If you’re websites’ success is dependent upon the number of registrations you’re able to generate, then you’re going to want to look the best ways to raise the number of registrations your receive each and every day you go to market. Regardless of whether you’re offering a software as a service type model, an ecommerce platform, or any other type of online solution, generating more registrations will likely lead to increased revenue streams and the achievement of higher conversion optimization across your platform.
To help out, we’ve provided 8 top tips for generating more user registrations across your website, which will help you achieve your goals and hopefully enable a more lucrative online solution for your business.
1. Provide clearly defined points of registration
This point may be obvious, but it’s amazing how difficult it can be to locate where to register on some websites, simply because of poor usability factors. Because converting a visitor to a registered member is a high priority goal for you, ensure you display this option clearly at the top of each page across your site. It’s also strongly recommended that you have a dedicated registration page that you can link to from external sources if you’re registration is a popup-type solution. This way you cover both bases.
2. Offer a FREE trial period
Free trial periods are a great way to generate more registrations across your website. Even if half or more of those visitors don’t choose to continue beyond your trial period, you’ve still managed to capture a bunch of newly registered members which will help you to build your business. If you’re clever with your terms and conditions of registration, you can also use the registered email addresses of those who did not wish to continue as a paying member (if that’s your model) and market to them via EDM’s on a semi-regular basis. This way, you may also be able to determine why they didn’t choose to continue with their membership, so you can attempt to to bring them back to your service at a later time.
3. A/B Test “Sign Up” vs “Registration”
When you visit a website, sometimes you’ll be asked to register, other times to sign up. Depending upon numerous factors including your use of terminology around “logging out” or “signing out”, you may want to run a set of A/B tests that looks at the effectiveness of one term vs. another. One way to do this is to simply change the wording of the link for a couple of weeks and count the numbers, or if you’re more sophisticated, you can implement some heat mapping technology such as Crazy Egg to determine which link is providing the most time spent on or around the registration button. Another more commonly used option is to simply look at your Analytics to determine factors such as link clicks or visitations to your registration page to gauage which option proved more successful.
4. Try a smart popup service
Everyone knows popups can be annoying, but they can also serve to be very valuable if implemented correctly. Services such as Popup Domination allow you to configure custom popups on timers which look at all manor of user behaviour to determine when is the best time to serve a popup. These services do require some testing, and in my experience are best used periodically, but work well if you spend the time carefully watching their progress and testing a few different options for your popup message.
5. Work your subscriber list
When email marketing to your lists, make sure you do so with highly targeted offers. If you can break your subscribers down to succinct groups, you’re going to receive a much better result. For example, on Job Stock, we’ve managed to break down a large numbers of our subscribers into very defined interest groups. As a result, when we send out offers or information, we receive a much higher response rate from these users than if we were to send out a blanket email, because their interests are much more closely aligned with the subject matter. Because many list managers simply dump all their email addresses into one group called “subscribers”, it may be tough to align the old subscribers, but you can definitely start to filter your new subscribers which will help you greatly improve your ROI when email marketing.
6. Offer a FREE account credit
By offering an introductory free account credit or coupon via any of the available coupon sites, you can capture an enormous amount of new registrations. Sites such as Rewardli are also interesting to trial as you can directly target lists of relevant subscriber groups via email blasts, and post a listing on their site for a fee. Recently we trialed TNW Market, which proved to be a handy service for promoting promo codes which you could use upon registering with our service and receive an added account credit for free.
7. Make the most of profile data
During the process of increasing user registration counts, the good news is that you have a fantastic resource already at your disposal: your current member base. Depending on your service, you may have a number of different key factors that indicate why your members registered, and what drove them to convert. If not, you can run a survey to find out why you met their needs. By studying your successes, you can build on highlighting the reasons that resulted in a conversion, and begin to discover where else you may be able to reach more users through continued improvement to your online platform.
8. Survey those who have opted out
Whether you’re reaching out to a member who has registered for a trial period or has been a registered user for some time beyond that, always try to define why they did not proceed with the use of your service. If your model is a fee for service type model, commonly you would be looking at pricing issues, customer service or product performance, however if there was no fee for registration or ongoing payments, you’re going to have to look a little deeper and may want to consider a more open-ended response form which allows the user to provide feedback. Keep in mind that sometimes the data will be useful, other times not so much; but hopefully throughout this process you’ll be able to get an indication of why members may be leaving your website, and if they’re going somewhere else?
Of special note here, because a member is leaving, they may not want to be hassled with a final survey, so be careful about how you serve this up to them. If you want to make it mandatory before they leave the site, then possibly a quick checkbox type response is best to optimize your outcome, but I would definitely avoid any lengthy surveys here to avoid any negative backlash online, and the likelihood of useless data.
Summary
Although not all of the above mentioned items will be applicable to your individual circumstance, there are many different ways in which you can generate more registrations across your website and at least some of these items will be worth testing. No matter what the industry or specialization you’re targeting, it’s important to listen to your audience to determine why they registered or chose to discontinue their use of your service. By using popular diagnostic tools you can gain a great deal of insight into why you’re receiving a certain level of conversion optimization, and what you can do over time to improve upon that. Often, it’s a combination of few small things that can make a large difference to your online business success, so by starting today you’re sure to gain some highly valuable insights into your business operations, and boost your daily registration base steadily over time!
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