For all your marketing initiatives, whether it’s through email, social media, or good ole fashioned word of mouth, hundreds or even thousands of potential customers are landing on your youth sports registration page. But how many of those website visitors turn into paying customers? If only a small fraction of them register for your program, it might mean your registration process is turning away interested buyers. 

Simply put, your youth sports registration process has to be simple to use. Your loyal returning customers may deal with glitches, but new members are almost certainly not going to put up with any problems.To figure out whether you have a difficult youth sports registration process that’s losing interested customers and participants, follow these five steps.

Take Your User Journey

Until you’ve experienced your own registration process, you may not even realize how many potential sign ups you’re losing. One in four online customers that don’t complete a purchase do so because they find that the website is too hard to navigate and 24% will leave because the website is too slow or crashes. Additionally, the number one cause for online shoppers to abandon their purchase is unexpected costs at the end. So if your registration process hides fees until the end, interested event-goers will say “no thank you” instead of checking out.

Determine How Site Visitors Turn into Registrants

Look at how many visitors come to your event website each day, then compare that to how many registrations you sell online—this is how you figure out your conversion rate. An easy way to configure this is through LeagueApps Insights, which gives you access to your Google Analytics, Google Ecommerce, Google Adwords, Facebook Pixel, and more. You can then easily create reports through your dashboard giving you the total number of registrants in each program. Divide those numbers and voila, you have your conversion rate.

If you have significantly more site visitors than paid registrations, you might have a difficult registration process. Here’s a list of the “average conversion rates” by industry.

Test on Mobile

You may already know that mobile is important, but what you may not realize is how it affects your registration sales. Research has shown a 160% lift in purchase completion with mobile optimized purchase processes. In other words, if parents and potential members have to pinch and zoom, trying to tap into tiny registration fields, you’re leaving money on the table. Read more on why your website absolutely must be mobile optimized.

Review Your Marketing Initiatives

Spending money on online marketing and advertising is a sure fire way to drive more brand awareness and visits to your program’s website. Especially on Facebook. But with a difficult registration process, your efforts won’t be as effective at driving conversions. So then what’s the point of all that spending? Instead of spending more money on yet another promotion or ad, consider making it easier to register for your program. In the end, you’ll get better results. 

Update Your Youth Sports Registration Process

Your efforts to improve your registration process will only go so far if you don’t have the right technology to support you. Set up a free call with the LeagueApps team to evaluate if your youth sports registration platform is making you lose customers.