Case study: How Basecamp increased leads through changing their home page messaging?

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Most online marketeers don’t consider the fact that users take decisions based on their emotional impulse.

Most marketers consider their primary responsibility to bring users to their online properties. They completely let the marketing people decide whether they would like to sign-up for demo.

If you can increase the conversion rates for visitors when they arrive on the page, it’ll significantly lead to more leads and sales. And, this will translate into more leads and money for the business.

In this regard, the project management platform basecamp creatively beats other players at creating a website experience conductive to turning website visits into free trial signups. Let’s see how they turn casual online browsers into long-term loyal buyers.

Lead with a Good story

The difference between a successful and low-return ad campaign could be a good story.

There’s one thing that makes the visitor convert better than anything else; That’s a Good story.

Stories have the ability to evoke human emotion. If you can evoke emotion, you’ll also have access to the fickle human attention.

A good story is also better suited to communicate how a product will help your potential customer without loosing their attention midway through the interactions.

When it comes to a business, the most valuable advertising space is the home page. It’s significantly seen more times by your target consumer than any other pages on the website.

Your home page either preceded or proceeds all other advertisements seen by your potential customers. This means home page is the most valued advertising space owned by the business.

Instead of inserting stoic keywords, you can tailor a short story about how your business helps your customer. For example, if you have experienced this pain, we will provide this solution.

How Basecamp achieved the right balance in their homepage

If you can nail-down your home page design, it’ll enable you to create better brand experience across all other different platforms. Let’s see how basecamp created a homepage that would have made significant difference for their business growth.

Ideally, your home page should ideally encapsulate the pain point of your visitor and how your product/service solves the corresponding pain point.  Ideally, your visitor should feel the pain that’ll force the visitor to sign-up for the product/service.

Initially, basecamp went overboard at communicating the pain point. This could come across as confrontational and potentially turn-off visitors.

This was the home page of basecamp a year and half ago. It showed different pending tasks simultaneously running on project managers’ head, eventually setting it on fire.

It captured the hectic life of a busy project manager perfectly; may be rather too well. The visual may not have resonated with a few visitors and made them to go to competitor websites.

Around the 2nd quarter of 2019, Basecamp revamped their home page copy. Now, it gives more subtle description of the project management challenges with an explanation how Basecamp makes your life much easier.

At present, their home page still follows the overall thesis for conversion optimisation, but has changed the home page to reflect the prevailing “remote-working” culture.

As basecamp is known to test everything and anything, we can reasonably assume that these changes made massive improvements to their website conversion rates.