3.6. Growth Simulator

Sometimes people tend to choose the hardest paths to achieve their goals and create problems at the drop of a hat. Sometimes people tend not to look for easy ways and heroically flounder through a morass to implement their decisions. Sometimes people are ready to spend time, money, efforts, and whatever it takes without actually stopping to look at the situation from a different angle and think whether there’s another way that is not that drastic. Usually the greatest ideas are the simplest, as has been proven by the Ultimate Guitar case. Curious? Keep on reading.

The ‘Before’

Ultimate Guitar is the world’s most popular resource for musicians. Having chords and tabs for more than 1M songs, Ultimate Guitar is by far the largest and fastest growing guitarist community in the world. Speaking in numbers, the Ultimate Guitar website was quite well liked with over 500 000 visitors coming to listen to some songs, download some stuff, or read some music industry news or reports. Nevertheless, the number of purchases was not as high as the number of visitors.
Indeed, when people clicked on the landing page, the number of visitors there was already 50 000 (10 times less!); when it was necessary to choose tariff and payment method, the number of visitors usually decreased by 7 times, leaving only 7 000 people on that particular webpage. Having chosen the tariff, people had to enter their payment data. Accordingly, out of 7 000 only 3 000 customers came until that stage, and, finally, there were only 400 successful purchases made. Ultimate Guitar understood that they had to change something for the situation to change for the better.

Generation of Hypotheses and the ‘After’

The main goal was to increase the number of successful payments through the website. How did the Ultimate Guitar achieve that? The team thought about different ways of how to quickly and in the cheapest way possible increase the conversion. The first crazy thought that the team came up with was not telling the customers about the value of the product. Usually businesspersons try to present their products or services in all colours, but get the opposite result — the more they try to convince people, the less people get convinced. Accordingly, the Ultimate Guitar team changed the tutorial. Earlier the tutorial provided information about the product, how cool and awesome it was, but after they’ve implemented changes, all the attention was on the customers. Customers were asked different questions, starting from what kind of instrument you play to what kind of music you like. After all questions, customers were provided with the pricing. What is interesting, is that the team did not actually use the collected data, it didn’t have any influence on any further choice. So, what was the result? The result was +20% of conversions! By simply asking customers questions and showing some interest, the team managed to convince 20% of people to move towards the payment.
There is a lot of research on how different colours influence people’s behaviour and thoughts. Human brain associates bright warm colours with a range of feelings. Red, for example, attracts the most attention and despite the fact that it’s usually associated with love and passion, it’s also a colour of anger, power and even danger. Therefore, the Ultimate Guitar team decided to test a hypothesis that changing the colour of the button from red to green, because green is associated with calmness, security and trust, will increase conversion by 20%. Moreover, they also changed the text of the button, when “Try Pro For Free” was replaced by “Start Free Trial”. Can you imagine what the result was? The result was +140% of conversion! All in all, they managed to increase their sales by 2.4 times without any difficulties by simply thinking more about their customers.

Final Words

When you’re developing or improving a product, it is necessary to perceive it not as your own creation, but look at it through the eyes of a customer. Indeed, you know your product better than anybody else and you will like it no matter what, thus it actually becomes a problem than an advantage. Accordingly, try putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and you will be able to see all the weak sides of the product that must or can be improved. The subjective assessment of your creation will help you to find inspiration and come up with ideas that will increase your business with ease.