As I’ve written previously, I got two new customers in June via my Capterra PPC campaign. I had a landing page which asked for first name and email in exchange for viewing a demo video. That page was converting at around 20%.

Then, based on some advice from a Capterra representative, I added a phone number field to my form. I expected that this would hurt the conversion rate, but since it would mean I could actually call the people, I was okay with that possibility.

The first week or so of that was pretty impressive. I collected something like 10 phone numbers in about two weeks. I remember one day I got something like four phone numbers in one day. I remember being on vacation with my family and calling all these people from our hotel room. It was one of those moments where you remember where you were and what you were doing because it was such a big deal.

But then, mysteriously, the conversions dried up entirely. I went about two weeks with ZERO conversions. So on July 20th (I believe it was), I changed the form back to requiring just name and email. And presto, I started getting one conversion per day again, like clockwork.

One potentially dumb thing I did was that I changed some of the copy along with adding phone number. So I can’t be sure whether the phone number field is entirely to blame or if the copy had a hand in it. After I run the current landing page for a while without the phone number, I might try it with the phone number again to see what happens. Maybe I’ll set up an A/B test.

I also now have a better idea of what to do with these email leads. My goal will be to get a phone number. Once I get the phone number, I’ll try to get them to do a demo. “Don’t sell the product, sell the appointment.” After the demo, I’ll ask them to do a trial. The next step after that is of course that they become a customer.

I hooked up my WordPress Gravity Forms form to MailChimp this morning. Now everyone who views the demo will get an automated email offering six months of the product for free if they respond within 24 hours.

July was pretty much a bust. I tried something that didn’t work. It will be interesting to see if August will be a repetition of June.