I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed showing my peers where they’re leaving money on the table on their websites that I wanted to continue looking at different websites to see where there are opportunities for conversion.

My friend Claudia knows how to get a bunch of traffic to a website through organic search (that’s SEO) and help publishers make a healthy living through affiliate relationships, so we got together and built reports for a few companies we wanted to work with on a consulting basis.

We delivered these reports, and now we’re sharing our observations with you. I’ll link to Claudia’s piece of the reports once hers go live.

The first one is Grove.

What the website says Grove does

Based on the language of the homepage, Grove offers a hybrid of robo advisor and live advisor who is a Certified Financial Planner. The layout is hip and beautiful, so that indicates they’re going after a young-ish demographic who want the ease of using a robo advisor combined with some expertise to ensure they’re not making huge mistakes.

Conversion opportunities

Re-orient the home page

My guess is the homepage doesn’t convert very well, because the language doesn’t take a user down a path, and if my instincts are right about who Grove is trying to target, they’re going to have to try a lot harder than they are to get a millennial to pick up the phone.

Allow the home page to do more of the heavy lifting in terms of pre-qualifying callers. Look at the list of questions your advisors ask, and answer them before they pick up the phone. Common advice says you might get fewer calls if you “give away” too much information on the home page, but my instinct is that you’ll get more calls, not fewer, and the quality of those calls will go up.

So take the buyer on a journey. Start where they are, then teach them the steps you want them to take before they click the call-to-action.

Test a different call-to-action and sequence of events

The GET STARTED button takes someone to a mostly white page with two options:

• Pick up the phone to talk to an advisor, or
• Pay $50 toward getting started

Instead, test what happens if you put the form (or parts of the form) ahead of the $50 deposit. Why is the deposit refundable? What does it accomplish? Is there something you can do that eliminates that friction?

Can you have people create profiles before they pay? What are the downsides with that strategy?

Make the Free Checkup front and center

I didn’t even see your Free Checkup offer in your menu until I had been on the page for over five minutes. You should be leading with this offer!

I would test out offering the Free Checkup on the home page and leading people through those questions as part of the pre-qualifying process. The questions are great and I love that I can see the results without having to subscribe.

I would suggest using a progress bar during the quiz as it is helpful for people to see how many more question there are left. Also, I hope that the follow-up email sequence teaches people about the different aspects of financial planning that you ask about. If not, that could be a great opportunity to teach your subscribers why working with you is important.

How can I help?

I’d love to work with you to put together a strategy for maximizing conversions. Reach out and we can brainstorm ideas for collaboration. Or, better yet, set up a call: kathleencelmins.com/contact