Overview
Challenge
Baptist Health/Milestone Wellness Center is a full-service fitness facility with a reputation for excellence.
Milestone teamed up with Seer to tackle this challenge:
Can we increase awareness of and signups for Milestone’s free trial program in order to get users exposure to the value of a Milestone membership?
We started with new Paid Search campaigns, driving users to legacy free trial landing pages. These campaigns were not performing up to par, and we identified that the older, un-optimized landing pages were not providing users with the information they needed to commit to a free trial.
The value of Milestone and a free trial wasn’t clear to users based on the copy and design of the landing pages, so we shifted gears to focus on Conversion Rate Optimization.
Approach
Our CRO team conducted extensive user research via email surveys, Google Analytics, and CrazyEgg to find out what mattered most to prospective, current, and past members.
With this approach we uncovered a few key insights that directly informed our testing strategy for a new landing page outlining Milestone’s core benefits and driving users to a free trial signup:
- ‘Facility and Equipment’ and ‘Exercise Classes’ were consistently among the most important factors in people choosing a fitness club
- 57% of the people who decided not to join Milestone cited ‘Price’ as the most important reason for their decision
- 68% of their members don’t leave to join a competitor
This is where an audience-first approach outsmarts “best practices”:
While best practices say that a brief landing page with a form above the fold is recommended, Milestone already had that kind of page—and it wasn’t converting as well as they’d hoped.
Our user research showed that even though the trial was free, people wanted a lot more information about the experience before committing to coming in. Our research also gave us clear insights on what current and prospective members valued, which informed the content for the page.
Execution
Using the data from the research phase, which told us what mattered most to our audience, our CRO team drafted the basic copy and wireframes.
Our design team then created polished pages using existing brand elements; adding new, immersive design elements; adding in a sub-navigation for ease of use and more—all to communicate the quality that someone experiences when walking through the doors of Milestone.
Results
When we tested the new page against the old, we saw a 70% increase in conversion rate for our PPC campaigns, which resulted in a 125% increase in new gym membership signups.
Based on the successes we saw in PPC campaigns, Milestone completely replaced their old "Free Trial" signup page so all site visitors would interact with the winning page.
- 70% increase in PPC Conversion Rate for Free Trial Signups
- 27% improvement in Page Engagement during CRO tests
- That lift in Free Trial Signups contributed to a 125% increase in full time memberships!