Depending on how long you’ve been a subscriber to Visual Website Optimizer blog, you may or may not have seen the article I wrote last year about why long-form salesletters STILL work in most industries… even in today’s market.

(You can read “The Anatomy Of Long Salesletters” here)

That article stirred up a tremendous amount of controversy because, well, many people have biases about what does and doesn’t work.

One of those biases is the “professionalism” (or lack thereof) of using long-form salesletters in today’s marketing environment.

As a hardcore split-tester myself, I really only care about what works. Personally design doesn’t matter much to me unless you can prove to me that a “pretty” design converts higher than a more minimal design. Then I’m all for it.

However, it’s becoming more clear that design is being used as a credibility and professionalism booster, so I’m beginning to put my own preferences aside and join the crowd. That’s why in this article I’d like to show you a few examples of how people are mixing the power of long-form salesletters with the professionalism many of today’s consumers are coming to expect.

Plus, as a little bonus, I’ll even do a quick critique on each of these websites to show where I believe they’re making mistakes and have potentials for increased conversions. This article is very content-packed, so get your pen and paper ready

Example #1: SEOMoz

As you can see in the picture below, SEOmoz is testing a tabbed layout. They split-test their website like crazy (one of the reasons they’re so profitable) so this may or may not be their winning version. However it’s a good example of what can be done.

As you can see, they’ve broken up the main selling points into several tabs.

SEO Platform & SEO Tools – This tab is equivalent to talking about the features and benefits of your product/service, and would make up the bulk of any traditional salesletter. However instead of laying it out in a vertical fashion, they simply split it up into two different tabs. The theory for this is that it shortens the perceived page length and makes it easier to digest.

Resources – This is more features & benefits. However one thing I think they’re missing is talking about why it’s better than their competitors. From what I’ve seen, very few companies offer the level of ongoing training that SEOmoz does… yet they aren’t prominently talking about the extra value you get as a customer. They simply show what you get with no further explanation, no comparison charts, etc.

Who Uses PRO – This is equivalent to the social proof you’d normally have in a traditional long-form salesletter. I think they need to load this page to the gills with as much social proof as possible. That includes who uses it (as they have), success stories, testimonials, case studies, news and media mentions, etc.

A Few Ending Thoughts On This Page – I’d like to pull from the hundreds of split-tests I’ve done for both myself and my clients, plus countless hours of research into what works and what doesn’t and say a few comments that might help them (and you) increase conversions.

First… they’re missing two critical elements. A guarantee, and success stories. I saw two or three success stories but they were hard to find and even harder to read. Remember, people buy because the perceived value of your product/service outweighs the risk of purchasing. Without a guarantee, that’s hard to do. And without a plethora of testimonials, case studies & success stories, it’s hard for them to trust you.

Second… I’ve tested this tabbed layout a few different times with clients and it’s never won. However that’s not to say it won’t work for your business. Remember, as a marketer you know nothing until you test it and get a valid result.

Third… I think they’re making a mistake by having the price at the top of this page. My guess is that people would come to this page in the early stages of their buying cycle, and therefore weren’t ready to hear the price yet because they weren’t fully sold. This is a critical piece in the selling process, and I believe they’re making a mistake. But again, only testing will tell

Example #2: Basecamp

Basecamp.com is one of my favorite websites to continually spy on and look for new ideas. Again, they have an amazing testing philosophy and split-test like crazy. I’ve also used their software and love it.

Click to expand

The problem they have is that their product is so good and has so many unique features/benefits that it’s hard to talk about them all. If they were to use a single long-form salesletter, my guess is that it would be nearly 50 pages long.

Because of that, they talk about some of the features/benefits most important to their customer and then list out all the reasons people should use their product. All 24 reasons.

Here are a few things I would test and/or fix on this page.

Pricing At The Top – I believe they’re making the same mistake as SEOmoz. And again, I may be wrong but people “typically” aren’t ready for the price before reading about what the product/service can do for them.

Proof & Risk-Reversal – I’m very, very surprised to see this page doesn’t place much emphasis on proof or risk-reversal. In this age, those two factors are two of the most important factors you have at your disposal to build trust. They have a little social proof on the page, but it’s near the bottom and, in my mind, almost an afterthought. It’s also hard to read. I’d recommend bringing it up as well as making it much more prominent.

The Copy – They seem to only be hitting on very surface level benefits. Things like being more organized, being able to chat freely, and coordinating schedules.

The problem is, surface level benefits don’t do much in terms of selling. What they need to do is talk more about what those surface level benefits DO for the end user. For example, being more organized means you and your employees save time, become more productive and increase the bottom line through increased production.

And then they should add a strategically placed testimonial of a person who’s done just that.

See how much more powerful that would be than simply saying “you’ll be more organized”?

Video – Some products simply “need” a video to show how powerful they are and how valuable they can be to the end user. This is one of those products. They could either have a video on the page showing people how it works, or even hold webinars showing people the ins and outs of how it could help them. My guess is they’d raise conversions by 30%+, easily.

Copy Doodles – Believe it or not, the handwriting you see on this page has its roots in old-school direct response copywriting when marketers would write out a printed letter, mark it up by hand and rescan it to create the final letter. I’m doing that exact same strategy for an offline client right now.

I LOVE doing these and love how they used them. However one thing I would change is the font they’re using. To me it’s so hard to read that I don’t even attempt it. Instead I glaze over the entire section.

Call To Action – The call to action they have can be fixed in several different ways. First, they should talk about the guarantee. I would even consider having a guarantee on the free trial. After all, even though it’s free, it’s still a time commitment so there’s still risk involved.

Second, I would test having that form in a different color and a different shape. I’d go with a more vertical look instead of horizontal, as it seems cluttered.

Third, the line under “Sign up for a 45-day free trial of Basecamp” is nearly impossible to read.

Closing Thoughts On Using A Long-Form Salesletter In Your Business

Please, don’t be afraid of trying something new. You’ve just seen two industry leaders who took the idea and selling power of long-form salesletters and spun it in their own unique way.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is thinking “that doesn’t apply to MY audience”. Do yourself a favor and hide your ego and beliefs about what works and what doesn’t for a few seconds. Be bold and try something new. Trust me, you’ll love what happens.

The vast majority of breakthroughs happen when something is radically changed in a business, not through “safe” tests. If you’re looking for a potential breakthrough in your profits, I highly recommend getting out of your comfort zone and trying something new. It’s the only way it’s going to happen.

The only real way to know what a video will do for your website (or landing page) is to actually conduct an A/B test. And that’s what one of our customers Device Magic did on their homepage. They tested existing version of their homepage (which had a video) against a new version which had a jQuery based image slider instead.

A/B test (video v/s image slider)

Device Magic Mobile Forms allows organizations to quickly and easily build robust data collection systems. Using their API, developers can build rich integrations featuring push technologies e.g. for work orders, proof of delivery, maintenance reports, retail surveys etc. They wanted to see if a video or series of rotating jQuery slides would work best for driving people to signup, so they conducted a simple A/B test using Visual Website Optimizer.

Existing homepage (with a video)

Actually, they weren’t sure that the video was of sufficient quality and they suspected it was too technical. So, they thought maybe slides would present their offering more concisely.

Homepage variation (with an image slider)

Can you guess which version worked better?

Results and Lessons

They measured two goals: % conversion from home page to sign up page and lastly number of signups completed. Initially their control (with video) was beating variation (with image slider) and they couldn’t understand why. But then they let the test run a while longer until they had a lot more data – much to their surprise, the result inverted to variation outperforming control, which is what they had expected. And this result was statistically significant.

The image slider variation increased conversions from homepage to signup page by 35%, and the total increase in subsequent signups was 31%. So, it was indeed true that for Device Magic, image slider worked much better as compared to the video.

A key learning from this test would be to get enough data that one is absolutely sure of the result, and that one shouldn’t be too hasty because some detail may be skewing the result or leading one in the wrong direction. Patience in A/B testing is the key learning here. (We have an A/B test duration calculator online to tell you how long you should run a test before giving up on it).

If you have had similar (or contrasting) experience testing video v/s image sliders, do let us know in the comments below.

We are constantly striving to improve Visitnorway.com, and we have generally used traditional tools for analytics as well as usability tests and surveys to assess needs of our visitors and accordingly customize the content and functionality.

In January, we began using a new A/B testing tool [Visual Website Optimizer] for quickly and effectively measuring the impact of changes in text, design and functionality.

Based on input from users, experts or hypotheses, when we decided to conduct a test, we set up the variations that we wanted to test against the original. Based on the results of tests, this helped us decide whether we want to implement the variation on website permanently or not.

For example, it is very easy to test the title that gives the most clicks in an article. We just need to click on the title and change it, see the screenshot below:

Results from some of the tests we have conducted

1) Click to destination company websites from landing pages

We wanted to find out about simple design change on landing pages to increase the number of clicks to the destination’s websites. At first, we only increased the size of the link text and converted it into bold.

The test was done on VisitOSLO pages of visitnorway.com. We got a positive increase of 70 – 75% in click through rate simply by changing the size and have stronger text, see the screenshot below.

We therefore proceeded with this change on the landing page and increased visits to destination company website.

2) What should be the “Booking” name called in the top menu?

We tested different names for the menu item “Booking” in English, Norwegian and Spanish, hoping to lead even more of those who were interested in booking a holiday into the booking section .

For English, the text “Booking” won with an improvement of 39% against the “Book Online” as it originally stood. “Online booking” had a 14% improvement to the original.

The Norwegian word for “Order” with an improvement of 114% (!) won against the original “Book travel”. See screenshot below for an overview of the other variants.

In the Spanish menu, we wanted to see if it was best to write the “Booking” in Spanish or English. Since the Book Norway does not yet have Spanish version, we were curious about the bounce rate.

With regards to how many people went to booking section, “Booking” had a decrease of 48% in English (Variation 1) in relation to “Reservas” (Control). See screenshot below.

Bounce rate was similar for both of them, so we eventually used the “Reserve” in the Spanish menu.

Based on these results, we changed the text in the menu to the “winners” of these three tests.

3) Moving the “Order” link in the main menu for the Norwegian edition

We wanted to see how much change there was in the number of clicks to the Book Norway when we moved the “Order” from the second position to the second last and last position in the main menu.

We had a decline of 72-73% in the number of clicks, see the screenshot below.

So as the numbers speak, we did not move not the “Order” link.

Conclusion and Lessons

A/B testing is an important method for us to determine whether it is wise to move forward with new concepts or changes, before we spend a lot of time and money on design and development. We will use it actively to get real decision-making data.

Our findings show that one must be careful of what you call “booking” in the various languages ​​- words are tremendously powerful.

Finally, we chose Visual Website Optimizer because it was easy to use and had enough functionality to allow us to carry out the tests that we want.

Happy testing!

This year A/B tests conducted using Visual Website Optimizer won 9 awards. We won awards in multiple categories and won across all levels (gold and silver). In this post, you can read and explore those award winning A/B tests.

ThePartyWorks

Details: Ecommerce Shopping Cart Redesign Test – Which Version Raised Sales?
Category: Ecommerce Cart Tests
Who conducted the test: FutureNow

Palmers

Details: Did Single-Page or Multi-Page Product Lists Increase Ecommerce Sales 35%?
Category: Ecommerce Category Page Tests
Who conducted the test: E-Dialog

Hyundai

Details: Does Adding Social Proof – Such as Test Drives Requested This Month – Increase Leads?
Category: Automotive Tests
Who conducted the test: Traffic4U

ThunderShirt

Details: Ecommerce Store Page Template Radical Redesign Test
Category: Ecommerce Product Page Tests
Who conducted the test: Brooks Bell

Unive

Details: Does Adding a Form Field to Start the Buying Process Directly from a Homepage Raise Sales?
Category: Finance Tests
Who conducted the test: Online Dialogue

Smiley Cookies

Details: Selling cookies online? Next-day shipping offer may increase sales by 41%
Category: Header/Banner Icon Tests
Who conducted the test: Trinity Insights

Awayfind

Details: How four additional sentences increased signups by 91% for AwayFind
Category: Landing Page Tests
Who conducted the test: Marketing Genius

EZTexting

Details: Live Chat widget increases signups by 31%
Category: Lead Generation Tests
Who conducted the test: In-house

ThePartyWorks

Details: Do ‘Add to Cart’ Buttons Improve Sales From Ecommerce Search Results Pages?
Category: Search Results Tests
Who conducted the test: FutureNow

Hope you liked these award winning A/B tests. For more success stories where Visual Website Optimizer was used, please go to our case studies section.

Something similar was done by buyakilt.com which is an online Kilt and Scottish Highland Dress retailer since 2004.  Their website has lot of category pages which further have around 4 sub-category pages and they wanted to test if providing a product filter would help them increase conversions. The product filters are just so common these days on eCommerce websites that you might not even test this change before implementing. It has become a standard UI element on ecommerce websites but the team behind BuyAKilt.com wanted to test before coming to any conclusion and rightly so. Here’s how their product category page looked earlier:

Control (original page)

They implemented a product filter which gave visitors an option to shop by kilt type and kilt pattern etc. Here’s how the variation looked:

Variation (with a product filter on left sidebar and in the middle)

They were quite surprised to find the dramatic rise in revenues and other conversions. Overall there was 76.1% increase in Revenue, a 26% increase in conversions and 19.76% increase in shopping cart visits.

Adding a product filer is an obvious feature that many eCommerce stores may or may not have, but this A/B test demonstrated that it worked wonderfully for BuyAKilt.com

Fergus Macdonald from buyakilt.com mentioned that Visual Website Optimizer was very valuable in running the A/B test and collecting results easily and quickly. He intends to continue more such tests on variety of other pages.

]]> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/product-filter-ecommerce-ab-testing-revenue/feed/ 0 http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/split-testing-increases-signups/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/split-testing-increases-signups/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:40:36 +0000 Paras Chopra http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/?p=2179 I have always stressed that headlines and text copy matter a lot on landing pages. We have published a number of case studies which provide a proof in case: 127% increase in conversions by doing a headline change and single headline change increased conversions by 90%. This case study is also similar in essence: text copy around main headline was A/B tested and large gains in clickthrough and signups are seen.

AwayFind helps users step away from their inboxes while still letting them receive important and urgent emails in a timely manner by notifying them of those emails via SMS, Voice Call or iPhone/Android apps. They wanted to improve conversion rate on their homepage which gets a mix of traffic from organic, direct and PPC (Adwords) sources.

A/B testing text copy

Headline is the first thing a visitor notices on a page. If it is not clear, a visitor would just take a broad look at page and leave after a few seconds. But if your headline catches his attention, he would try to understand more about your offering by looking at the copy. So, getting headline right is crucial but getting copy right is equally important. AwayFind have an interesting headline which says: Checking email every 5 minutes? Stop! In their original page, this headline was extended with another headline (of exactly same size, font and color). It said: Let us find your urgent messages. Here’s how their homepage looked:

Original homepage

The team at AwayFind thought of simplifying the copy around headline and slightly changing the layout as well. They used Visual Website Optimizer for doing this A/B test. Here’s the variation:

Variation (91% increase in signups)

Note how they removed second part of headline and instead replaced it with a sub-headline.

Results of this split test

AwayFind thought the new copy was slightly more compelling and that the new layout draws the eye more naturally to the call to action button. And, by jolly, they were right! They saw a 42% lift in people clicking through from the home page and a 91% lift in people completing the setup process. They admit it themselves: the results were shocking! Small change, big results.

Regarding Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), they mentioned that VWO made it easy to implement the test and even easier to track the results.

What they learned was that a little copy can go a long way. Four new sentences dramatically improved their results. As a follow up, they are planning to test the new copy with the old layout to see which of these variables created the biggest impact–a more direct copy comparison.

EcoFoil, one of the retail division of Clickstop, is a leading supplier of radiant barrier and foil bubble insulation for home, pole barn or commercial buildings. They realize the importance of information that can help buyers make decisions. This is why they have a help section which says “Need help finding the right product?” which links to a virtual map and that helps visitors figure out what product they need depending on which part of their home they are trying to insulate.

A/B test: where to show the help section?

In the original design of their homepage, the position of this help section was below the fold where users had to scroll down to see it. Plus, with another section adjacent to it, often it wasn’t noticeable. Here’s how their homepage looked:

Control (Help section center below the fold)

The team at Clickstop thought it could be better to put the help section above the fold where even new visitors can see it without having to scroll down the page. So, they conducted an A/B test using Visual Website Optimizer and found that the Variation indeed worked better. Much to their surprise, the variation with help section above the fold showed an improvement of 86% in sales over the Control. Here’s how the variation looked:

Variation (Help box moved to left sidebar, above the fold)

Needless to say, Ecofoil are very excited about such an upswing in sales. Kendra Smith of Ecofoil also mentioned that Visual Website Optimizer was crucial to help her confirm her theory to increase conversions by moving the help box above the fold on the webpage.

Yuppiechef is a leading online store selling premium kitchen tools throughout South Africa. They are known for their customer service, quirkiness and passion for getting people excited about eating together and spending time in the kitchen. They used Visual Website Optimizer to A/B test the effect of removing the navigation menu from one of their landing pages.

Removing navigation menu increases signups by 100%

Yuppiechef wanted to increase the rate of Wedding Registry signups (conversion goal) generated from the Wedding Registry landing page on their website. They tested two pages against each other that were identical, save for the main navigation bar at the top of the page. As simple as that. On that landing page, there was a mix of various traffic sources including: Google Adwords (Search & Display Network), Facebook, 3rd Party Advertisers, Directories, Organic Search and Direct traffic. Here’s how the original page looked like:

Original page (with navigation)

As far as designing the variation is concerned, the hypothesis was that the option without the navigation bar would provide fewer distractions, and help the user focus on the primary reason they had landed on this particular page. Here’s how the variation looked like:

Variation page (without navigation) — 100% increase in signups

A/B testing results

They were certainly surprised by the results! The new variation of the page without the navigation bar at the top of the page delivered twice as many conversions as the original page! The conversion rate jumped from 3 to 6% with an effective 100% increase in conversions. Who wouldn’t be happy about such results?

This is what they thought about results: “Simpler is better. Try assist the user in focusing on their primary objective by eliminating distractions.“. With regards to A/B testing tool they used, this is what they had to say: “Visual Website Optimizer provided an easy and efficient way to implement the test in no time at all. The reporting was also detailed enough to give us the insights we needed to declare the test an unequivocal success.”

Hope this case study gives you an inspiration to test navigation menu on your own landing pages. We don’t guarantee that you will also increase your conversions by 100% but this test is certainly an easy one to setup. And, who knows, maybe you do significantly increase your conversion rate. The only way to find out is to actually setup an A/B test.

This case study is about an A/B test run by Springest, which is a platform to help people get the most out of themselves and their career by connecting them to the best ways to learn and develop personally and professionally. Eduhub used to be their brand name in The Netherlands. Their business model involves providing brochures to the visitors who request for them (once they find a suitable course provider). Brochure is free, but users need to fill a lot of information in the form to access it.

A/B testing simple changes in the form

Springest aim was to increase form completions on the brochure information request form. So, they decided to use Visual Website Optimizer to create alternative version of the form and see if it increased the form completion rate. Here’s how their original form looked like:

Original brochure request form

They tested one variation of this form, with some parts changed. They removed the intro text and logo and added social proof to the sidebar: quotes from users and logos from well-known Dutch brands. They also removed the asterisk for required fields and changed it to a ‘optional’ text behind fields that are optional. Here’s how variation looked like:

Variation (generated additional €50,000 for Springest)

A/B test results and surprises

The variation resulted in 5.21% improvement in form completion, with 97% certainty (statistical significance) based on over 2,500 conversions. They were partly surprised, because the form itself hardly changed. Their changes were mostly about taking away possible obstructions or doubts in the user’s mind and it seems the social proof removes doubt for at least some of the visitors. Although 5% doesn’t look like much, it adds directly to their bottom-line; they estimate this change to be worth about €50,000 this year alone. Isn’t that a great ROI for doing such a simple A/B test?

Based on this test, Dennis Paagman (from Springest team) had following learnings:

You should watch out for too much explanation and guiding texts, we think the text above the form was confusing and maybe even increasing user’s doubt. Just let people find things out for themselves and don’t explain everything. Forms are so ubiquitous on the web, everyone knows how to fill them in.

Even though Springest are extremely happy about results of this test, they don’t want to stop improving and they already have extensive plans for follow up tests. For this form, they want to split it in two parts and also test it with less fields. As soon as they launch a complete new layout of their website, they plan on A/B testing every part of it.

Importance of choosing the A/B testing tool

Springest think Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) was very valuable when it came to this particular test. This is what they have to say about the tool:

The great thing about VWO is that it’s possible to run tests without the need of developers. The editing of text, even within form labels, works flawlessly. We did have to change something in the actual Javascript used to make the test (this is in VWO’s advanced options) work, because we have a slightly different form for each product.

The best thing about using VWO is that when we think of new ways to test our site, we have the possibility to implement them right away.

We are very happy for Springest as they increased their conversion rates significantly. This case study definitely shows how even smallest of changes can have such large impact. So, always keep A/B testing and, of course, we recommend Visual Website Optimizer for doing the same

GetResponse is one of the leading email marketing platforms in the world with more than 210,000 customers across 183 countries. They prominently place a “Buy Now” call to action button on their homepage. They also have a “Free Trial” plan but it was not available on the homepage and could only be found on certain pages. Here’s how their homepage looks like (notice the prominent “Buy Now” button”):

Original homepage

What happens when you add “Free Trial” button?

GetResponse wanted to test if adding a “Free Trial” button on the home page will influence the number of purchases of paid accounts and number of registrations of free accounts. There was a perception that providing a “Free Trial” button will decrease the number of signups so it was quite a critical test. They used Visual Website Optimizer to quickly setup an A/B test in which variation had an extra “Free Trial” button next to the “Buy Now” button. Here’s how the variation looked like (notice two prominent buttons):

Variation: 158% increase in trial signups

A/B test results and learnings

The results they found after running the test were astonishing. GetResponse noticed that by adding free trial buttons on homepage, the number of free accounts increased by 158.60%, while there was no negative influence on the number of paid accounts created via homepage. That is a very strong proof in favor of providing a “Free Trial” button on the homepage itself.

On asking what lessons can be derived from this test, this is what Agnieszka Dabrowska, GetResponse Brand Manager had to say:

It’s worth testing different variations of Call to Action (CTA) on the homepage. We expected that by adding a free trial button on the homepage the number of paid accounts would decrease. We were positively surprised by the results. Not only did we manage to keep the sale at the same level, but we also noticed a huge increase in the number of free trial accounts, which will also result in a bigger number of upgrades in the future.

She further added, “Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is a great tool that lets us test different variations of the homepage on a small sample of visitors. Thanks to VWO, we managed to find out the perfect combination of CTAs on GetResponse homepage and increase the overall conversion”.

GetResponse plan to constantly run different tests with Visual Website Optimizer. They will test effectiveness of different tag lines, order form versions, pricing variations, etc. We hope they always keep increasing their sales and conversions.