One of the questions we often hear from users who are new to A/B testing is what should they test. This does seem like a simple question but it can be quite baffling to the new-comers. This post is one such attempt to narrow down certain options to test, the changes that worked for others might work for you. The change here that we are talking about is testing having a video on homepage or product page. Previous case studies prove that it usually works wonderfully. One such case study is video increases conversion rate of a landing page by 46% and in another one they tested two call to actions ‘Watch the video’ v/s ‘Get Instant Access’ and found out that the video one increased newsletter signups by 28%.
In this latest case study, one of our clients Buy Real Twitter Followers made a variation with a small video explaining about their service on the homepage. This little change helped them increase their sales by 216%. Buy Real Twitter Followers was formed as a response to the need made by the growing Twitter advertising market. Getting Twitter followers has been a large concern by many network marketers and businesses whose primary aim is to advertise through Twitter.
Visitors usually tend to skip the blocks of text. This case study only goes on to prove that users much rather prefer to see the video for the product validation than reading block of text to get the gist of the product.
Original Page
Variation Page
This is what Rene Harvey had to say about the A/B testing tool they used: Visual Website Optimizer: “VWO was very helpful, it was very easy to use and provides a room for designers such as myself to customize without having to change the original code.”
As always, everything is open to testing and the idea is to find what change benefits the most. Let us know what you think about this case study in the comments below.
If you are a Visual Website Optimizer user, you will be excited to know about the latest feature we have released which we call as frequently used (conversion) goals. With this feature, while you are creating a new A/B, multivariate or split URL test, we recommend you conversion goals that you are most likely to add in this test. We do this recommendation based on analyzing your previously created tests and which goals you had added for those tests. As you create more tests, we get a better idea on which goals you use most frequently and recommend you the same (to save time). Here’s a screenshot of the new feature (note the section which says Frequently used goals):
The name of new feature is bit of misnomer because we don’t actually list frequently used goals but we list the goals you are most likely to add. This is an intelligent recommendation that takes variety of parameters into consideration. We analyze how frequently, how recently and for which A/B tests you had added the goal. The major benefit of this feature is that for any new test that you create, you can easily reuse that goal at a click of a link. No need to type that goal again and no need to add or update any code on your website. This means that you can define standard website goals such as signup, search, revenue, funnel visits, etc. and then simply pick these goals from the list while creating the test.
Note: this feature also works with custom conversion goals which are used if your conversion goal triggers through JavaScript (e.g. if you have a form submitted through AJAX). Obviously, with custom conversion goals, you need to add a code snippet on your site depending on how you triggered the goal. Earlier, you had to update this code for every new test you created. But now, you can simply integrate the custom conversion code once, and then simply reuse it across different tests.
We also released a couple of minor new features:
Hope you like the updates! There are couple of other major features that we are currently baking. Our whole team is very excited to continuously improve Visual Website Optimizer. Please do let us know if you have a particular feature request.
We previously ran an article which showed how long sales pages work. Another previous case study talked about anti-A/B testing on how removing header from our blog increased signups by 60%. Now in this post, I will be talking about how removing content from a landing page and hence shortening it increased sales by 62%. So, what is the real truth? Does more content convert better or less content? The short and sweet answer to this question is that there is no eternal truth. You must A/B test your way to more conversions. Sometimes long copy works, sometimes short copy works.
AssessmentDay is a leading supplier of practice aptitude tests to graduates and job seekers. They help candidates prepare for their assessment centres and psychometric tests by showing them what to expect. Based on recommendation by their affiliate partner WikiJob (who are also our customer; previously we had featured one case study from WikiJob on how they increased sales by 34%), AssessmentDay ran an A/B split test on their co-branded landing page. Traffic on the landing page was entirely referred traffic from an affiliate’s website. The affiliate’s traffic is all organic and they have banners and text links sending visitors to the landing page.
Their original landing page had a screenshot section and a FAQ section. Here’s how it looked:
- Original page -
For variations, they tried out the concept of ‘less is more’. Sometimes people get bored by reading long sales pages and they just navigate away, so we stripped out various parts of the page altogether. Having said that, the original sales page didn’t exactly have lots of text in the first place. For relatively low-ticket price purchases we think people want to quickly see what it is they’re buying and then make a decision; they don’t want to read huge reams of a sales pitch.
The variations we tried were simply removing each of these sections in turn and then removing both sections together, so there were three variations in total. In first variation, they removed the FAQs section. In second variation, they removed the screenshots section.
Without FAQs: 62% increase in sales
Without screenshots: 56% increase in sales
Split-testing is always surprising! That’s half the fun of it. The result was a 62% improvement by simply removing the FAQ section, or a 56% improvement by removing the screenshot section.
What happens if you remove too much content from the landing page? Out of curiosity AssessmentDay then went one step further and deleted both sections of the page but this proved too much and the conversion rate actually dropped by about 3%. Here’s how this variation looked like:
Without FAQs and Screenshot: 3% decrease in sales
Their hypothesis is that people like to have enough information to help them see what the product is, but any more and they start to get confused or distracted.
When we asked if there were any lessons that AssessmentDay learnt from this test, here’s what they said:
They also had great things to say about the split testing tool they used (Visual Website Optimizer):
Visual Website Optimizer has been extremely valuable, not to mention fun to use. The service has paid for itself several times over.
This was an exciting test with unexpected results. A classic case of trying bold changes and finally getting a much deserved increase in conversions. If you have any comments or feedback on this case study, please let us know!
This is a guest post by Jeremy Reeves, who is an email copywriter and split-testing freak. To find out how Jeremy can help dramatically increase your email marketing profits, head on over to http://www.JeremyReeves.com/email-copywriter.html
Due to the nature of my business, I’m exposed to more email campaigns than you could ever imagine.
And I have to admit…
… not ONE of them is fully maximizing their email marketing potential.
Every single email campaign I’ve ever looked at has holes in it which are leaking profits on a daily basis.
It’s a sad, but very true, fact.
So in this post, I’d like to show YOU how to maximize your email marketing by giving you 5 “holes” you can fill, starting today.
It makes sense to make this the first reason, because as a reader of Visual Website Optimizer, you should be a split-testing freak like I am!
Now, I’ll admit that for whatever reason – most email marketing software makes it hard to split-test campaigns.
But does that mean it’s impossible? Not at all.
Here’s what you do.
Before you send out a new campaign/broadcast, split your list into 2-5 portions (depending on the size of your list). Then, start testing things that give you insights into what your market wants and responds to.
For example…
With each test you do, try to test something that will give you insights as to what you can use in the future. Over time you’ll seem to develop a 6th sense – the ability to “predict” what your market will respond to, which leads to higher profits!
Many marketers are afraid of making their list “mad” by emailing them too often.
But think about it.
One of the most essential aspects of creating a profitable business is getting your prospects and customers to TRUST you, is it not? To develop an airtight bond and rapport with them, just like you slowly build up rapport with a new person you meet who eventually becomes your trusted friend.
Keeping that in mind, who would you trust more when they recommend something to you…
A) A friend you talk to once a month?
B) A friend you talk to 3…5… 7 times a week?
I’ve seen amazing things happen when a client starts emailing their list more often. In every single case, the more often they emailed their list – the more sales they made (and yes, over the long term).
But there’s one caveat.
Be SMART about it.
Don’t blast your list offers everyday because they’ll drop off your list faster than you can blink an eye. Treat them like you would a friend, by sending relevant information mixed in with soft pitches to buy your product.
And every once in awhile… create a marketing campaign, which we’ll talk about next.
For some reason, newsworthy marketing campaigns are as rare as a hen’s tooth these days. I’m not sure if marketers are getting lazy, or just forgetting tried-and-true ways to promote their business and generate good buzz at the same time.
Here’s what I mean.
Think about the various ways you can tie a promotion for YOUR business into either something that’s on the minds of your prospects… or even something that happened in your life personally. Here are a few ideas to get your mind juices flowing.
I personally ran a birthday promotion for my own services a few months back – and booked myself solid for about 4 months. (Thanks to the VWO subscribers who took me up on that offer!) It took me about 45 minutes to setup the promotion.
Here’s the cool part.
You can come up with special promotions for almost ANYTHING. One marketer I know created a promotion based around his wife putting him in the “doghouse” for having too much inventory in their garage!
If you spend just 30 minutes brainstorming – I guarantee you can come up with at least 5 ideas, one of which will be good enough to use. Use the one you like best, create an email campaign out of it which sends them to a custom landing page made specifically for that event, and you have yourself one heck of a profitable promotion.
Oh, and one more thing.
DON’T make the mistake and think your prospects are too “sophisticated” for these types of promotions. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make in your business, which is why I’ve included it as…
If you think your audience is too sophisticated for fun promotions like that, here’s a little secret.
YOU. ARE. LOSING. A. BOATLOAD. OF. MONEY.
Clear enough?
The fact is, I don’t care if you’re selling to drunk, zit-faced teenagers or to CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies.
They’re both PEOPLE.
And what do PEOPLE want?
They want to have fun. They want to be entertained. They want to be engaged. They want drama (even though most don’t realize it). In fact, most people are psychologically addicted to drama. Why do you think soap opera’s and reality TV shows are so popular?
Whatever way you slice it, you need to add more personality in your marketing. Can you feel my personality oozing out from my fingers and onto your screen?
I bet you can – and that’s why this blog post is easy to read and understand (at least it should be!). If I got all fancy pants and started talking in technical jibble-jabble and hardcore psychology… you’d have no idea what I was talking about.
The point is this.
People like dealing with people, not companies.
Remember that the next time you click “send”.
One of THE easiest ways to increase your email marketing profits is to segment your list.
So what types of segmentation should you be doing?
I don’t know your business, of course, but here are a few you can start with.
Buyers – Every business in the world should have a separate buyers email list. There is NO excuse for not having a buyers email list. Previous buyers, on average, are roughly 7x more likely to buy in the future as compared to first-time buyers. They also make up your back-end which, when fully developed, can triple or more your profits. If you’re not segmenting your buyers – I’m sorry to say but in my mind – you’re simply insane!
Demographic/Psychographic/Geographic – This can be done in many ways. For example you can separate men from women, by age group, by political association, by religion, by type of dog they own (for dog training sites of course), or even by country. The possibilities are endless, depending on your business.
How Active – Here’s a quick promotion you can do to both clean your email list and make oodles of money in the process. It’s called a “reactivation campaign” and it’s something direct marketers have used in the offline world for ages.
Here’s what you do…
1) Do a search to find prospects who haven’t opened an email in 3 months, 6 months, etc.
2) Send them something for free, while also asking them why they haven’t been active lately and seeing if you can help them in any way.
3) After the promotion is over, do a search for those who didn’t open/click the email and flush them from your list. Yes, actually delete them. They’re the non-responders and are clogging up your list. And for the people that did respond and/or download the gift you sent them – they’re now “reactivated” and should start opening more emails!
That last promotion I said is a little more robust than that if you want to do it right (it would take a blog post to explain it in detail), but something is better than nothing right?
Either way… I hope you’re the kind of person who TAKES ACTION and won’t simply read this post and do nothing. I just gave you enough information to add literally tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars into your business, if you take action and implement.
So start fixing the holes in your email campaign… or hire someone like me to do it for you if you don’t know how or don’t want to put in the effort.
As Nike would say… “Just DO it”.
No more excuses.
You can easily add 20% – 100% more profits to your bottom-line by maximizing your email marketing… so what are you waiting for?
