Posted 10 June 2022

If you break down everything you can think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.

— Dave Brailsford, the coach who turned British cycling into a world-beating force.

Let’s imagine a union with some fairly typical online joining stats.

On average, 5,000 visit the “join us” page on the union’s website each month, and of those 1,000 actually join. This gives the online join a “conversion rate” of 20%. Each new member (on average) generates £15/month for the union.

What happens if you can optimise the online join process by just 1% and increase it to 21%?

Well, after one year, the union has 600 extra members and almost £60,000 in additional subs.

After two years, the union has doubled that to 1200 extra members and £225,000 in additional subs.

By the end of the third year, the union has 1800 extra members and £500k more in fees.

All for a 1% improvement in conversion rate.

So, the question is - how do they get there?

Here are some ideas:

First, build a better form. Make it quick and easy to complete by asking only for what’s necessary and doing so in a logical order.

Second, make it work for more people. Is the form accessible? Does it work beautifully on mobile? Does it load fast? Does it work well on devices with less power?

Third, make it easy to refer people. If new members are encouraged to refer their colleagues, you increase the number of workers seeing the form and make it more likely they’ll join.

Fourth, remind people who get distracted, or forget to complete their application (that one’s worth a 1% improvement on its own).

Lastly, make it fast and reliable. Use a cloud service with high availability and plenty of power to scale to any time periods when lots of people are joining.

Or just talk to us, because Join Together does all that, and more out of the box.