Case Study

Musicnotes Optimizes Membership Sign-Ups

40%

subscription lift

Founded
1998

Industry
Sheet Music

Headquarters
Madison, WI

Customers
7 million

Downloads
40 million

About Musicnotes

Musicnotes is an e-commerce digital sheet music retailer with a catalog of over 300,000 high quality arrangements for every instrument, style, skill level, and scoring. In addition to having the widest range of sheet music available online, they offer handcrafted transpositions proofed by musicians on most arrangements. Musicnotes allows musicians to buy the individual arrangements they want on demand, print it instantly and then play, transpose, and mark it up anywhere with their free interactive apps — making it a rich resource for all music enthusiasts, from beginners to pros.

Musicnotes’ marketing team oversees everything from on-site promotions to ad campaigns, as well as testing, personalization, and conversion optimization. The team has used SiteSpect since early 2017, and has since integrated testing and personalization throughout their website. Musicnotes.com sees over 200 million page views from 30 million users per year. While each prospective test has its own unique goals, the overarching goal is to continually improve the customer experience so they can get back to the music faster.

Fine Tuning Membership Options

To deliver more value to their most loyal customers, Musicnotes offers a membership program known as Musicnotes Pro. Prior to the start of this test Musicnotes unveiled a new, premium tier to the program referred to as Musicnotes Pro - Plus. This new tier gives members additional savings above and beyond the Standard tier and includes archival quality PDFs on all of their sheet music purchases.

With the release of the new tier, Musicnotes hypothesized that how they communicated these additional benefits could substantially sway customer interest in the membership program. They ran two variations in an A/B test, one emphasized the additional savings on every order while the other focused on the exclusive PDF delivery. This test ran for just over three weeks during the Fall of 2018 with 50% of their site traffic viewing each variation.

In SiteSpect, the marketing team is able to fully create and implement tests without the need for development resources. For this test, they created a campaign using SiteSpect’s Find and Replace feature. In this mode, they indicate which pages require a change and then specify the area of the page they want to replace and what they want to replace it with. For this test it was the cart page. Once a winner was determined, that variation was published to 100% of traffic through SiteSpect until a developer could code the change into the website.

Results

The variation with copy “PDFs Included with Every Order” won this test. Over the course of the test, this page saw 240k users.

  • 40% increase in annual plan purchases
  • 33% increase in membership sign-up

Conclusion

Musicnotes is now moving forward with further testing to improve the customer experience and ultimately provide more benefits to their community of musicians.

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