Your customers’ brains are guarded against “sellers”. Direct response copywriting helps you get past the bouncers in their brains and tap into their emotional triggers.
Today, we’ll be talking about the power of copywriting.
Every sale you make online is driven, at least in part, by direct response copywriting. Either your copy is a trained assassin, sneaking past defenses and cutting to the heart of your customer’s psychological triggers, or it’s a lumbering drunk ready to be rejected at the door.
In this article, we’ll show you what makes bad copy fail and teach you how to write copy that sells.
Would you rather watch a webinar than read an article? Click here to watch the Bouncers In Your Brain Webinar!
But first, a story…
The Power of Compelling Copy
Betabrand started with one product and what most would consider a weak value proposition. They offered a pair of corduroy pants on which the wales were positioned horizontally rather than vertically.
That’s it.
You can see from the picture that the pants are pretty stylish, but is horizontal whales really enough to build a business on?
Instead of just sitting back and hoping customers would say “yes”, Betabrand used copywriting to create a tongue-in-cheek branding campaign to that turned their product into an humorous conversation piece.
Betaband described their “Cordarounds” as follows:
Friction-Free: Unlike vertical courduroy, which produces friction that can heat your crotch to uncomfortable, potentially catastrophic levels, Cordaround’s horizontal vales mesh evenly, lowering the average wearer’s crotch heat index (CHI) reading by up to 22%.
The company even went as far as to create diagrams, demonstrating the “data” behind their crotch heat lowering pants.
And of course, the data on this revolutionary pants technology was presented by the Betabrand Supercomputer, a “sentient machine with aspirations of overthrowing the human race.”
All of this, of course, is complete bullcrap.
BUT
It’s humurous.
It’s interesting.
And it’s just believable enough to make think, “Wait, is this real?”
As Betabrand’s CEO Chris Lindland said, “If you create something with a hook, you can experience dramatic results.”
In this case, unique branding, driven by irreverant, humurous copywriting, propelled the company to 432% growth over 3 years. They have since expanded to numerous products, each designed to be conversation starters, like the “Bike To Work Pants” or the “Pinstripe Executive Hoodie”.
They’ve created something really successful, and I would argue it’s more because of how they’ve used the copy to brand themselves than the fairly unremarkable products themselves.
On that note, let’s look at how you can utilize compelling copy within your own business.
What Is Direct-Response Copywriting?
Direct-response copywriting is writing designed to elicit an immediate, emotional response from the reader. It’s purpose is to compel a “direct response” – what we would refer to as a conversion.
Unlike informative or educational copy, direct-response copy has only one purpose in mind: optimize the reader’s emotional state and then close the sale.
This usually looks like arousing an emotional response to a problem the reader is facing.
For example:
If you are attempting to sell skills assessment software to a business, you might be tempted to focus on how advanced the software is or how many unique features it has versus your competitors. As a business owner, this type of stuff is what you think about the most, and it’s easy to assume your customers will see things the way you see them.
In reality, your customers don’t care about your product. They care about solving their own problems and achieving their own goals. In this example, they care about finding talented people who will accelerate their company’s growth. They are scared of wasting time and money only to make a bad hire and lose more time and money.
When writing the copy, your job is to tap into that frustration, pain, and fear. You want to talk about how much money companies waste on bad hires. You wan’t to discuss how challenging it is to know whether a candidate will perform for you based on past experience. You want to tap into that fear and then offer your product as a solution.
With your assessment software, businesses can ensure they hire the right people. They can assess a candidate’s personality for team compatibility and assess the candidate’s skills for job competence. They can know EXACTLY what they are getting when they make a new hire and skip the nasty surprises that come from unexpected revelations.
Now you aren’t selling a product. You are selling a solution and you’ve painted a picture of life with that solution all of your prospect’s mind.
The Bouncers In Your Brain
So the question has to be asked, why not simply say things to people in a straightforward manner? Why shouldn’t we just lay everything out on the table and trust consumers to make a rational decision based on available data?
Ignoring the fact that your business might not actually be the best choice, let’s assume it is the best choice. Let’s assume that you have the best product on the market.
Why do we need to go out of our way to try to tap into a customer’s psyche?
The answer is that the psyche is already in play, whether you try to tap into it or not! Your customers’ brains already have “bouncers” standing guard at the entrance. If you want to have a chance, you have to first get past these bouncers.
Roy H. Williams, founder of the wizard academy introduced them to me. Let’s meet them.
The first thing we see here is Brocca’s Area. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for taking words, translating them into their meaning via the verbs, and then casting that meaning onto the visual/spacial sketchpad that is in our brain. Brocca’s area allows us to visualize taking some future action, which is a prerequisite for us to actually take that action in reality.
Next we have Wernicke’s Area. This part of the brain has access to our memories, and it’s primary job is take nouns that we hear and connect them to the relevant memories. So for example, if we hear or read the word “car”, Wenicke’s area connects that word to our memories of cars, helping us give meaning to the word.
These two areas are the gatekeepers for our Motor Cortex, the area of the brain that initiates physical action. We don’t want messages we hear to be automatically turned into action, so Brocca’s area and Wernicke’s area serve as bouncers to filter what messages get through to the motor cortex.
Getting Past Brocca’s Area
Brocca’s area evolved to help us prioritize what we process versus what we can ignore. This area keeps a sort of cache of familiar things that no longer need to be processed, like the sound of wind blowing, the computer humming in the background, or the driving route you take from work to home every day. It helps free our brain to focus on things that need to be consciously processed or monitored.
In order to register our message in Brocca’s area, we need to present something that is not familiar – something that is:
- Unexpected
- Unbelievable
- Or just plain wrong
Our goal when it comes to Brocca is to “wake it up” so to speak. When we hit Brocca with something unexpected, it has to focus in and send the message down to Wernicke in order to find out what it means.
As you can see in the example above, the page that breaks away from “business as usual” has as significantly higher conversion rate than the page that looks like what you’d expect to see on every website you’ve ever been to.
In perhaps the most extreme example of this, Ling Valentine sells over £35 million worth of car leases each year through what any good CRO expert would tell you is an absolute disaster of a website.
As you can see in the right-hand image, there is a method to the LingsCars madness. Everything Ling does is designed to grab attention in a market where differentiation is a challenge. Whether it’s the insane website, the outlandish speaking outfit, or the missile launcher with her branding on it, Ling’s marketing is all about waking up Brocca’s area and commanding attention in an industry where you’d rarely look twice.
So how can you apply this to your own business?
One of the best way’s to utilize this strategy is on a page’s headline, since the headline’s sole purpose is to compel people to start reading. Say something unexpected or unbelievable. You can even same something that is objectively wrong – something the reader KNOWS is objectively wrong – and then follow it up with an illustration that turns it into a symbolic point.
The main takeaway here is that we need to present people with something unfamiliar in order to grab their attention.
Infiltrating Wernicke’s Area
So if our goal is to shock Brocca awake, why doesn’t marketing simply consist of doing the most shocking things we can imagine?
The answer is that Brocca is only the brain’s first bouncer. There’s more to the story.
Once we’ve grabbed Brocca’s attention by presenting something unexpected, our message is sent along to Wernicke’s area. Wernicke has an entirely different set of criteria for what’s noteworthy and what is simply novelty.
In order to get past Wernicke, our message needs to incorporate at least one of the following:
- Relevance
- Emotion
- Storytelling
Remember that Wernicke’s area is attached to our memories, so in order get past this bouncer in the brain, our copy needs to connect to the reader’s memories in a meaningful way.
For example:
One business that offered help for addicts and their families started their copy with an appeal to a better future, calling themselves “A Place of New Beginnings.”
But vague references to a better future aren’t nearly as powerful as speaking directly to painful, existing memories. Those memories are real, they are emotional, and they drive behavior. That’s why changing the copy to “Addiction Torments Addicts and Their Loved Ones” increased conversions by 184%.
When people who feel tormented by their addiction (or who have seen the negative effects of their addiction on loved ones) read this copy, it resonates with them. They can relate. It’s relevant to their lives, and it’s tapping into a place of pain and problems that need to be solved.
Your copy should do the same thing.
Let’s learn how.
How To Write Persuasive Copy
Writing persuasive, direct-response copy is more science than art. Here at Conversion Sciences, we follow a step-by-step process:
- Understand Your Audience
- Solve Their Problems
- Show The Damned Offer
- Keep Your Promises
- Get Geographical
Each of these steps enhances our ability to evade the brain’s bouncers and provoke a response.
1. Understand Your Audience
Who are you speaking to?
This is the first and probably the most important step. If we don’t understand who we are speaking to, we can’t talk about what is important to them. We can’t be relevant. Alternatively, if we have a thorough understanding of our audience, we can bumble our way through the rest of the steps, and we’ll probably still manage to get through to a few of them.
A consumer can typically be classified in one of four ways.
You will likely have consumers in all four of these categories visiting your site, however, you might be able to determine that most of the traffic coming from a given marketing channel is in one quadrant and optimize accordingly.
Here at Conversion Sciences, we like to primarily focus on another, simpler classification system: Transactional vs. Relational
Transactional buyers #1 fear in life is spending a dollar more than they have to. These are the coupon hunters and deal finders. They aren’t necessarily looking for the cheapest option, but they are absolutely looking for the best deal. They are going to visit 10 websites and 4 physical stores before making the purchase.
They get a big dopamine rush from saving money on purchases, and they will actually convert at a higher rate if you give them obstacles like coupon codes. They see themselves as the experts and shopping is part of the fun.
You can appeal to these buyers in your copy by focusing on the savings.
Relational buyers #1 fear is choosing the wrong thing. They are not looking for the best price, and they are happy to pay a premium if it ensures they get what they’re looking for. These buyers want an expert to help them make the right decision, and they see shopping as the part of the expense.
You can appeal to these buyers in your copy by focusing more on the quality:
Once you have identified and learned everything you can about your audience, it’s time to solve their problems.
2. Solve Their Problems
In many cases, it’s easy to identify the problems your customers face because your product was designed explicitly to solve them. But what happens when your product isn’t really a solution? What happens when your product is a pair of pants, like in our original Betabrand example?
There are two strategies we can take here:
- Dig deeper and find the need
- Create the need
Continuing with our Betabrand example, when we are talking about $100+ pants, we aren’t talking about an audience with legitimate problems or a product designed to solve legitimate problems.
They’re just pants.
But why do people pick a particularly pair of pants to purchase? When you are able and willing to spend $100 on a pair of pants, what are the deeper needs that influence your decision making?
Once we start digging, there’s a lot we can find:
- Some people will pay a premium on fashion to emulate others and be accepted
- Some people will pay a premium on fashion to differentiate themselves from others
- Some people will pay a premium to get higher quality materials that are more comfortable
- Some people will pay a premium simply because they think something looks cool and they can afford it
Solving the problem is as simple as speaking to this core purpose driving the reader’s behavior.
Alternatively, what some people do (and what Betabrand is doing for their cordarounds) is go out and create a need. In other words, they convince the customer that he or she is experiencing a problem that needs to be solved.
The most humorous examples of this come from the infomercial industry, where the characters are fundamentally incapable of performing the most basic activities:
https://youtu.be/3eMCURWpNAg?t=8s
Does anyone really struggle THAT much with cracking eggs? Probably not, but the visualization of failed crack attempts can resonate with the most extreme memeories a person has and make them feel like, “Meh, it might be worth it to shell out a few bucks for this product.”
Betabrand uses a more subtle example in it’s own marketing:
Do normal corduroys really make a dude’s gonads feel like “the fiery eyes of Satan”? Obviously not. BUT if a guy reading this has noticed feeling hot in his corduroy pants in the past, this “fake” need will jump out at him and potentially influence his decision making.
3. Show The Damned Offer
On the more straightforward end of things, it’s important to actually show your audience your offer. It should be VERY clear what is being sold and every benefit should be clearly demonstrated, via the copy and page images.
Are you selling roofing paint that reflects sunlight and maintains a cool temperature. Show it in action!
Images like these are a thousand times more beneficial than stock images or other generic page elements. Stock photos can actually sabotage your conversion rate in a hurry.
Make sure you are clearly showing your offer to readers.
4. Keep Your Promises
Your sales process isn’t a single moment of decision. It’s a funnel.
Your visitors clicked on something to arrive at your landing page and when they click on your Call to Action (CTA) they will see a followup page of some sort. It’s VERY important that you deliver on your promises and meet customer expectations at each stage of this journey.
Don’t be like Zumba and follow-up an advertisement with a completely unrelated webpage.
Make sure that the landing page for every click meets the expectation of the person who clicked through to it.
5. Get Geographical
Our final step might not apply to every business, but if it’s relevant for your business, you can see major results.
Geographic segmentation and personalization offers a massive opportunity for increased conversions. The business pictured below was able to increase conversions by 27% simply by allowing users to select which region they were in.
This is just one of many, many examples of businesses using geographic segmentation to optimize their conversion rates.
When a reader sees their local area mentioned in the pitch, it scores major relevance points in Wernicke’s area.
How To Get Great Copywriting For Your Website
If you have read this far, it means you probably aren’t a copywriter by profession. You are looking to utilize the power of direct response copywriting, either by writing it yourself or hiring a copywriter.
If you aren’t bringing in a CRO agency to improve your site’s conversions, we typically recommend you do the following:
- Hire a great copywriter
- Measure their work
The reality is that copywriting is a very specific skillset, and while you can certainly improve your site’s copy just by following the principles in this article, you are going to get much better results when you hire a freelance copywriter with a proven portfolio.
That said, you should never simply be paying someone to write something for you and then calling it a day.
Working with a copywriter is a great opportunity for AB testing. Instead of simply throwing up something new and hoping it works… test, test, test!
Create several different variations of your landing pages and run a statistically sound series of split tests to identify actual winners and improve your overall conversion rate.
Webinar And Followup Q&A
After my webinar on this topic, there were some questions asked.
Good questions.
Probing questions.
Important questions.
We just didn’t have time (e.g. Brian went on and on and on).
With the help of our host, SiteTuners, I’ve been able to collect these questions and have provided thoughtful answers to them for you.
If you didn’t get to attend the Webinar — and I assume there was a very good reason you missed it – you can watch it via the form below. It’s absolutely worth an hour of your time!
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Watch the Recorded Webinar >>
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Let’s take a look at those questions!
Is there a place for Profanity in Copy?
Andres asked if there was any “data on the use of profanity in the conversion copy? See last example: heat reflection paint ‘kicks ass’. Is this an attractor or offender?”
Profanity can be a part of your voice. Gary Vaynerchuck famously uses profanity in his videos and presentations. It’s part of his “no BS” approach. I used some profanity in my presentation, including the caption that with “kicks ass,” another with “get laid” and my term “Business Porn.” However, I’m not typically profane in my writing.
When I use it, it can have impact. But I don’t have to be profane to have impact.
Roy H. Williams says,
“If you’re not pissing someone off, then you’re not communicating.”
Good copywriters take chances, but they know if those chances are contributing to the bottom line. Good copywriters are measurable.
In fact, I think I’ll toss in a little profanity right now.
What if my company has a stick up its butt about professionalism?
Lainie asked, “Any recommendations for a nonprofit that demands professionalism and no hint of humor?”
Kyle wanted to know if I had any “suggestions for encouraging an employer to take chances with their copy.”
If “professionalism” means “business speak” then there is little hope for them, at least online. Many a copywriter suffers from PESD (Post Editorial Stress Disorder). They create a body of copy that has Broca-busters, metaphors, similes and double entendre. Then the executives review the copy, editing out all color and controversy.
The result is what I call Styrofoam copy. Lifeless. Tasteless. Brittle.
No wonder it’s so hard to find good copywriters. They’ve all been broken down by PESD.
Data may be your only hope. We didn’t hand the headline “Are you tired of lying?” to our addiction center client. We proposed it as part of a test. Once they saw the upside, they had to make a decision: stay safe or take the extra business.
Offer to test more daring copy. But don’t test anything that won’t be accepted, no matter how many donations it generates.
Copy is more than Words
Jerome ask, “Is there a time/place for elegant banners with no copy?”
On a page that is meant to make an impression these banners are appropriate. This is a branding and image approach. On a site designed to entice action, the elegant banners must extend the value proposition or they are taking up valuable space.
The question to ask is, “Am I designing for me or for my visitors?”
This looks cool, but doesn’t help someone who is on a mission to find a solution.
Sites that use parallax techniques are often designing for themselves. They win awards, but they don’t make it easy to find what I’m looking for.
Do Broca and Wernicke Get Old and Cranky
Lori asked an interesting question about the aging brain. “Does the aging brain perceive copy differently than the younger brain. In other words, does the brain change its perceptions?”
I wish I could answer this with the results of studies. The answer is, “Yes.” Older visitors respond differently than a younger crowd. But each audience is different.
Older visitors come with poorer eyesight. So, your copy design should take this into account.
Balancing SEO-targeted and Human-targeted Copy
Tabatha asked, “How do you balance SEO and these copywriting techniques?”
Landing pages are rarely targets of SEO. Landing pages more frequently serve ads, emails and affiliate links. There are exceptions.
On an ecommerce product page, however, the two intersect. Product pages are often landing pages and need good SEO copywriter.
Good SEO copywriting is also good human copywriting.
If there is a conflict because your SEO copywriter wants to stuff keywords into every headline and subhead, you should probably find a better search optimizer.
How is the Web Different?
Katy asked, “Does the same methodology about engaging copy needing to get past Broca apply to direct mail pieces also?”
Much of what I’ve learned about copy has been taken from direct response mail copywriters. But, the writing for the web is different. Web visitors are seekers and searchers. They have a specific agenda and need to know they are on the right path toward solving a problem.
If you want to learn how to apply direct response tactics to web headlines, I recommend the book Great Leads by Michael Masterson and John Forde.
Images of the Invisible
Cynthia is involved in continuing education and asked, “What kind of images do you use for services that all have the same value proposition but doesn’t just show happy business people?”
I recommend real people in place of stock photography. Your teachers. Your students. The human eye can tell the difference between a stock photo and a real photo.
Jan wondered if we “use client logos with permission.”
We do ask permission to use client logos. It’s in our master services agreement. You might ask your lawyer to add a paragraph to your agreements like this one:
CONVERSION SCIENCES may retain copies of all work products and retains the right to use the work products for CONVERSION SCIENCES’ promotional purposes, including, but not limited to, showing Projects to prospective Clients, using the work products in company “demos.” By entering into this Agreement, Client hereby consents to CONVERSION SCIENCES’ use of the Client logo and testimonials for promotional purposes, unless other arrangements have been outlined in the Statement(s) of Work.
Are You a Tease?
Jeffrey asked if I had any “thoughts about lightly teasing the reader?”
A tease is a bona fide Broca-buster. Tease away.
This is especially effective when you tell a story, but withhold the ending while you build your value proposition. Brains hate to be teased because it makes them pay attention.
Psych! This eBook is just a PDF.
Creating Book Alikes
Deanne asked about the tool I used for creating eBooks renderings in 3D.
The tool that allowed me to create all of these wonderful 3D images from nothing was BoxShot4.
And a question from the Brainiacs
Dawn piqued my interest by asking, “Where does cognitive dissonance play out in this?”
In all truth, I had to look “cognitive dissonance” up.
In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values. – Wikipedia
When I am promised one thing in an ad, and then sent to a home page, I will experience cognitive dissonance.
If the one specification that I believe is important cannot be found on a product page, I will experience cognitive dissonance.
If I don’t like to read, but the only images on a page are business porn, I will experience cognitive dissonance.
Good copywriters know how to create a moment of cognitive dissonance and then unite the expected with the unexpected like the punch line to a joke. This creates cognitive sonance, I guess.
Tim Gets Some Extra Credit
One final note. In the Webinar, I failed to credit Tim Ash as the originator of the term “Big Fat Bouncers in your Brain” during an interview several years ago.
Thanks Tim.
Direct Response Copywriting: Get Past The Bouncers In Your Customers’ Brains
Persuasion ScienceYour customers’ brains are guarded against “sellers”. Direct response copywriting helps you get past the bouncers in their brains and tap into their emotional triggers.
Today, we’ll be talking about the power of copywriting.
Every sale you make online is driven, at least in part, by direct response copywriting. Either your copy is a trained assassin, sneaking past defenses and cutting to the heart of your customer’s psychological triggers, or it’s a lumbering drunk ready to be rejected at the door.
In this article, we’ll show you what makes bad copy fail and teach you how to write copy that sells.
Would you rather watch a webinar than read an article? Click here to watch the Bouncers In Your Brain Webinar!
But first, a story…
The Power of Compelling Copy
Betabrand started with one product and what most would consider a weak value proposition. They offered a pair of corduroy pants on which the wales were positioned horizontally rather than vertically.
That’s it.
You can see from the picture that the pants are pretty stylish, but is horizontal whales really enough to build a business on?
Instead of just sitting back and hoping customers would say “yes”, Betabrand used copywriting to create a tongue-in-cheek branding campaign to that turned their product into an humorous conversation piece.
Betaband described their “Cordarounds” as follows:
The company even went as far as to create diagrams, demonstrating the “data” behind their crotch heat lowering pants.
And of course, the data on this revolutionary pants technology was presented by the Betabrand Supercomputer, a “sentient machine with aspirations of overthrowing the human race.”
All of this, of course, is complete bullcrap.
BUT
It’s humurous.
It’s interesting.
And it’s just believable enough to make think, “Wait, is this real?”
As Betabrand’s CEO Chris Lindland said, “If you create something with a hook, you can experience dramatic results.”
In this case, unique branding, driven by irreverant, humurous copywriting, propelled the company to 432% growth over 3 years. They have since expanded to numerous products, each designed to be conversation starters, like the “Bike To Work Pants” or the “Pinstripe Executive Hoodie”.
They’ve created something really successful, and I would argue it’s more because of how they’ve used the copy to brand themselves than the fairly unremarkable products themselves.
On that note, let’s look at how you can utilize compelling copy within your own business.
What Is Direct-Response Copywriting?
Direct-response copywriting is writing designed to elicit an immediate, emotional response from the reader. It’s purpose is to compel a “direct response” – what we would refer to as a conversion.
Unlike informative or educational copy, direct-response copy has only one purpose in mind: optimize the reader’s emotional state and then close the sale.
This usually looks like arousing an emotional response to a problem the reader is facing.
For example:
If you are attempting to sell skills assessment software to a business, you might be tempted to focus on how advanced the software is or how many unique features it has versus your competitors. As a business owner, this type of stuff is what you think about the most, and it’s easy to assume your customers will see things the way you see them.
In reality, your customers don’t care about your product. They care about solving their own problems and achieving their own goals. In this example, they care about finding talented people who will accelerate their company’s growth. They are scared of wasting time and money only to make a bad hire and lose more time and money.
When writing the copy, your job is to tap into that frustration, pain, and fear. You want to talk about how much money companies waste on bad hires. You wan’t to discuss how challenging it is to know whether a candidate will perform for you based on past experience. You want to tap into that fear and then offer your product as a solution.
With your assessment software, businesses can ensure they hire the right people. They can assess a candidate’s personality for team compatibility and assess the candidate’s skills for job competence. They can know EXACTLY what they are getting when they make a new hire and skip the nasty surprises that come from unexpected revelations.
Now you aren’t selling a product. You are selling a solution and you’ve painted a picture of life with that solution all of your prospect’s mind.
The Bouncers In Your Brain
So the question has to be asked, why not simply say things to people in a straightforward manner? Why shouldn’t we just lay everything out on the table and trust consumers to make a rational decision based on available data?
Ignoring the fact that your business might not actually be the best choice, let’s assume it is the best choice. Let’s assume that you have the best product on the market.
Why do we need to go out of our way to try to tap into a customer’s psyche?
The answer is that the psyche is already in play, whether you try to tap into it or not! Your customers’ brains already have “bouncers” standing guard at the entrance. If you want to have a chance, you have to first get past these bouncers.
Roy H. Williams, founder of the wizard academy introduced them to me. Let’s meet them.
The first thing we see here is Brocca’s Area. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for taking words, translating them into their meaning via the verbs, and then casting that meaning onto the visual/spacial sketchpad that is in our brain. Brocca’s area allows us to visualize taking some future action, which is a prerequisite for us to actually take that action in reality.
Next we have Wernicke’s Area. This part of the brain has access to our memories, and it’s primary job is take nouns that we hear and connect them to the relevant memories. So for example, if we hear or read the word “car”, Wenicke’s area connects that word to our memories of cars, helping us give meaning to the word.
These two areas are the gatekeepers for our Motor Cortex, the area of the brain that initiates physical action. We don’t want messages we hear to be automatically turned into action, so Brocca’s area and Wernicke’s area serve as bouncers to filter what messages get through to the motor cortex.
Getting Past Brocca’s Area
Brocca’s area evolved to help us prioritize what we process versus what we can ignore. This area keeps a sort of cache of familiar things that no longer need to be processed, like the sound of wind blowing, the computer humming in the background, or the driving route you take from work to home every day. It helps free our brain to focus on things that need to be consciously processed or monitored.
In order to register our message in Brocca’s area, we need to present something that is not familiar – something that is:
Our goal when it comes to Brocca is to “wake it up” so to speak. When we hit Brocca with something unexpected, it has to focus in and send the message down to Wernicke in order to find out what it means.
As you can see in the example above, the page that breaks away from “business as usual” has as significantly higher conversion rate than the page that looks like what you’d expect to see on every website you’ve ever been to.
In perhaps the most extreme example of this, Ling Valentine sells over £35 million worth of car leases each year through what any good CRO expert would tell you is an absolute disaster of a website.
As you can see in the right-hand image, there is a method to the LingsCars madness. Everything Ling does is designed to grab attention in a market where differentiation is a challenge. Whether it’s the insane website, the outlandish speaking outfit, or the missile launcher with her branding on it, Ling’s marketing is all about waking up Brocca’s area and commanding attention in an industry where you’d rarely look twice.
So how can you apply this to your own business?
One of the best way’s to utilize this strategy is on a page’s headline, since the headline’s sole purpose is to compel people to start reading. Say something unexpected or unbelievable. You can even same something that is objectively wrong – something the reader KNOWS is objectively wrong – and then follow it up with an illustration that turns it into a symbolic point.
The main takeaway here is that we need to present people with something unfamiliar in order to grab their attention.
Infiltrating Wernicke’s Area
So if our goal is to shock Brocca awake, why doesn’t marketing simply consist of doing the most shocking things we can imagine?
The answer is that Brocca is only the brain’s first bouncer. There’s more to the story.
Once we’ve grabbed Brocca’s attention by presenting something unexpected, our message is sent along to Wernicke’s area. Wernicke has an entirely different set of criteria for what’s noteworthy and what is simply novelty.
In order to get past Wernicke, our message needs to incorporate at least one of the following:
Remember that Wernicke’s area is attached to our memories, so in order get past this bouncer in the brain, our copy needs to connect to the reader’s memories in a meaningful way.
For example:
One business that offered help for addicts and their families started their copy with an appeal to a better future, calling themselves “A Place of New Beginnings.”
But vague references to a better future aren’t nearly as powerful as speaking directly to painful, existing memories. Those memories are real, they are emotional, and they drive behavior. That’s why changing the copy to “Addiction Torments Addicts and Their Loved Ones” increased conversions by 184%.
When people who feel tormented by their addiction (or who have seen the negative effects of their addiction on loved ones) read this copy, it resonates with them. They can relate. It’s relevant to their lives, and it’s tapping into a place of pain and problems that need to be solved.
Your copy should do the same thing.
Let’s learn how.
How To Write Persuasive Copy
Writing persuasive, direct-response copy is more science than art. Here at Conversion Sciences, we follow a step-by-step process:
Each of these steps enhances our ability to evade the brain’s bouncers and provoke a response.
1. Understand Your Audience
Who are you speaking to?
This is the first and probably the most important step. If we don’t understand who we are speaking to, we can’t talk about what is important to them. We can’t be relevant. Alternatively, if we have a thorough understanding of our audience, we can bumble our way through the rest of the steps, and we’ll probably still manage to get through to a few of them.
A consumer can typically be classified in one of four ways.
You will likely have consumers in all four of these categories visiting your site, however, you might be able to determine that most of the traffic coming from a given marketing channel is in one quadrant and optimize accordingly.
Here at Conversion Sciences, we like to primarily focus on another, simpler classification system: Transactional vs. Relational
Transactional buyers #1 fear in life is spending a dollar more than they have to. These are the coupon hunters and deal finders. They aren’t necessarily looking for the cheapest option, but they are absolutely looking for the best deal. They are going to visit 10 websites and 4 physical stores before making the purchase.
They get a big dopamine rush from saving money on purchases, and they will actually convert at a higher rate if you give them obstacles like coupon codes. They see themselves as the experts and shopping is part of the fun.
You can appeal to these buyers in your copy by focusing on the savings.
Relational buyers #1 fear is choosing the wrong thing. They are not looking for the best price, and they are happy to pay a premium if it ensures they get what they’re looking for. These buyers want an expert to help them make the right decision, and they see shopping as the part of the expense.
You can appeal to these buyers in your copy by focusing more on the quality:
Once you have identified and learned everything you can about your audience, it’s time to solve their problems.
2. Solve Their Problems
In many cases, it’s easy to identify the problems your customers face because your product was designed explicitly to solve them. But what happens when your product isn’t really a solution? What happens when your product is a pair of pants, like in our original Betabrand example?
There are two strategies we can take here:
Continuing with our Betabrand example, when we are talking about $100+ pants, we aren’t talking about an audience with legitimate problems or a product designed to solve legitimate problems.
They’re just pants.
But why do people pick a particularly pair of pants to purchase? When you are able and willing to spend $100 on a pair of pants, what are the deeper needs that influence your decision making?
Once we start digging, there’s a lot we can find:
Solving the problem is as simple as speaking to this core purpose driving the reader’s behavior.
Alternatively, what some people do (and what Betabrand is doing for their cordarounds) is go out and create a need. In other words, they convince the customer that he or she is experiencing a problem that needs to be solved.
The most humorous examples of this come from the infomercial industry, where the characters are fundamentally incapable of performing the most basic activities:
https://youtu.be/3eMCURWpNAg?t=8s
Does anyone really struggle THAT much with cracking eggs? Probably not, but the visualization of failed crack attempts can resonate with the most extreme memeories a person has and make them feel like, “Meh, it might be worth it to shell out a few bucks for this product.”
Betabrand uses a more subtle example in it’s own marketing:
Do normal corduroys really make a dude’s gonads feel like “the fiery eyes of Satan”? Obviously not. BUT if a guy reading this has noticed feeling hot in his corduroy pants in the past, this “fake” need will jump out at him and potentially influence his decision making.
3. Show The Damned Offer
On the more straightforward end of things, it’s important to actually show your audience your offer. It should be VERY clear what is being sold and every benefit should be clearly demonstrated, via the copy and page images.
Are you selling roofing paint that reflects sunlight and maintains a cool temperature. Show it in action!
Images like these are a thousand times more beneficial than stock images or other generic page elements. Stock photos can actually sabotage your conversion rate in a hurry.
Make sure you are clearly showing your offer to readers.
4. Keep Your Promises
Your sales process isn’t a single moment of decision. It’s a funnel.
Your visitors clicked on something to arrive at your landing page and when they click on your Call to Action (CTA) they will see a followup page of some sort. It’s VERY important that you deliver on your promises and meet customer expectations at each stage of this journey.
Don’t be like Zumba and follow-up an advertisement with a completely unrelated webpage.
Make sure that the landing page for every click meets the expectation of the person who clicked through to it.
5. Get Geographical
Our final step might not apply to every business, but if it’s relevant for your business, you can see major results.
Geographic segmentation and personalization offers a massive opportunity for increased conversions. The business pictured below was able to increase conversions by 27% simply by allowing users to select which region they were in.
This is just one of many, many examples of businesses using geographic segmentation to optimize their conversion rates.
When a reader sees their local area mentioned in the pitch, it scores major relevance points in Wernicke’s area.
How To Get Great Copywriting For Your Website
If you have read this far, it means you probably aren’t a copywriter by profession. You are looking to utilize the power of direct response copywriting, either by writing it yourself or hiring a copywriter.
If you aren’t bringing in a CRO agency to improve your site’s conversions, we typically recommend you do the following:
The reality is that copywriting is a very specific skillset, and while you can certainly improve your site’s copy just by following the principles in this article, you are going to get much better results when you hire a freelance copywriter with a proven portfolio.
That said, you should never simply be paying someone to write something for you and then calling it a day.
Working with a copywriter is a great opportunity for AB testing. Instead of simply throwing up something new and hoping it works… test, test, test!
Create several different variations of your landing pages and run a statistically sound series of split tests to identify actual winners and improve your overall conversion rate.
Webinar And Followup Q&A
After my webinar on this topic, there were some questions asked.
Good questions.
Probing questions.
Important questions.
We just didn’t have time (e.g. Brian went on and on and on).
With the help of our host, SiteTuners, I’ve been able to collect these questions and have provided thoughtful answers to them for you.
If you didn’t get to attend the Webinar — and I assume there was a very good reason you missed it – you can watch it via the form below. It’s absolutely worth an hour of your time!
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Watch the Recorded Webinar >>
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Let’s take a look at those questions!
Is there a place for Profanity in Copy?
Andres asked if there was any “data on the use of profanity in the conversion copy? See last example: heat reflection paint ‘kicks ass’. Is this an attractor or offender?”
Profanity can be a part of your voice. Gary Vaynerchuck famously uses profanity in his videos and presentations. It’s part of his “no BS” approach. I used some profanity in my presentation, including the caption that with “kicks ass,” another with “get laid” and my term “Business Porn.” However, I’m not typically profane in my writing.
When I use it, it can have impact. But I don’t have to be profane to have impact.
Roy H. Williams says,
Good copywriters take chances, but they know if those chances are contributing to the bottom line. Good copywriters are measurable.
In fact, I think I’ll toss in a little profanity right now.
What if my company has a stick up its butt about professionalism?
Lainie asked, “Any recommendations for a nonprofit that demands professionalism and no hint of humor?”
Kyle wanted to know if I had any “suggestions for encouraging an employer to take chances with their copy.”
If “professionalism” means “business speak” then there is little hope for them, at least online. Many a copywriter suffers from PESD (Post Editorial Stress Disorder). They create a body of copy that has Broca-busters, metaphors, similes and double entendre. Then the executives review the copy, editing out all color and controversy.
The result is what I call Styrofoam copy. Lifeless. Tasteless. Brittle.
No wonder it’s so hard to find good copywriters. They’ve all been broken down by PESD.
Data may be your only hope. We didn’t hand the headline “Are you tired of lying?” to our addiction center client. We proposed it as part of a test. Once they saw the upside, they had to make a decision: stay safe or take the extra business.
Offer to test more daring copy. But don’t test anything that won’t be accepted, no matter how many donations it generates.
Copy is more than Words
Jerome ask, “Is there a time/place for elegant banners with no copy?”
On a page that is meant to make an impression these banners are appropriate. This is a branding and image approach. On a site designed to entice action, the elegant banners must extend the value proposition or they are taking up valuable space.
The question to ask is, “Am I designing for me or for my visitors?”
This looks cool, but doesn’t help someone who is on a mission to find a solution.
Sites that use parallax techniques are often designing for themselves. They win awards, but they don’t make it easy to find what I’m looking for.
Do Broca and Wernicke Get Old and Cranky
Lori asked an interesting question about the aging brain. “Does the aging brain perceive copy differently than the younger brain. In other words, does the brain change its perceptions?”
I wish I could answer this with the results of studies. The answer is, “Yes.” Older visitors respond differently than a younger crowd. But each audience is different.
Older visitors come with poorer eyesight. So, your copy design should take this into account.
Balancing SEO-targeted and Human-targeted Copy
Tabatha asked, “How do you balance SEO and these copywriting techniques?”
Landing pages are rarely targets of SEO. Landing pages more frequently serve ads, emails and affiliate links. There are exceptions.
On an ecommerce product page, however, the two intersect. Product pages are often landing pages and need good SEO copywriter.
If there is a conflict because your SEO copywriter wants to stuff keywords into every headline and subhead, you should probably find a better search optimizer.
How is the Web Different?
Katy asked, “Does the same methodology about engaging copy needing to get past Broca apply to direct mail pieces also?”
Much of what I’ve learned about copy has been taken from direct response mail copywriters. But, the writing for the web is different. Web visitors are seekers and searchers. They have a specific agenda and need to know they are on the right path toward solving a problem.
If you want to learn how to apply direct response tactics to web headlines, I recommend the book Great Leads by Michael Masterson and John Forde.
Images of the Invisible
Cynthia is involved in continuing education and asked, “What kind of images do you use for services that all have the same value proposition but doesn’t just show happy business people?”
I recommend real people in place of stock photography. Your teachers. Your students. The human eye can tell the difference between a stock photo and a real photo.
Jan wondered if we “use client logos with permission.”
We do ask permission to use client logos. It’s in our master services agreement. You might ask your lawyer to add a paragraph to your agreements like this one:
Are You a Tease?
Jeffrey asked if I had any “thoughts about lightly teasing the reader?”
A tease is a bona fide Broca-buster. Tease away.
This is especially effective when you tell a story, but withhold the ending while you build your value proposition. Brains hate to be teased because it makes them pay attention.
Psych! This eBook is just a PDF.
Creating Book Alikes
Deanne asked about the tool I used for creating eBooks renderings in 3D.
The tool that allowed me to create all of these wonderful 3D images from nothing was BoxShot4.
And a question from the Brainiacs
Dawn piqued my interest by asking, “Where does cognitive dissonance play out in this?”
In all truth, I had to look “cognitive dissonance” up.
When I am promised one thing in an ad, and then sent to a home page, I will experience cognitive dissonance.
If the one specification that I believe is important cannot be found on a product page, I will experience cognitive dissonance.
If I don’t like to read, but the only images on a page are business porn, I will experience cognitive dissonance.
Good copywriters know how to create a moment of cognitive dissonance and then unite the expected with the unexpected like the punch line to a joke. This creates cognitive sonance, I guess.
Tim Gets Some Extra Credit
One final note. In the Webinar, I failed to credit Tim Ash as the originator of the term “Big Fat Bouncers in your Brain” during an interview several years ago.
Thanks Tim.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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How Will You Optimize In 2017?
Conversion Optimization2017 is just around the corner, and that means a new year with a fresh batch of goals and milestones.
If you increased your website’s conversion rate by 10%, how would that affect your business’ overall growth this year? How would that accelerate your career or revolutionize your bottom line?
Now’s the time to get optimization efforts in motion, and we’re excited to hear about what you have planned for 2017. Leave us a comment and let us know what you’re up to!
In the meantime, here’s a quick recap of Conversion Sciences’ 10 most popular articles from 2016.
And of course, if you’d like to have a group of proven experts handle your CRO efforts in 2017, the Conversion Sciences team is here to help. Our calendar fills up fast this time of year, so don’t put it off.
Contact us right now to schedule a free consultation.
Christmas Conversion Principles: How To Choose A Christmas Card For Your Boss
Conversion OptimizationWe’ve examined a number of holiday cards to determine the one most likely to win you some conversion optimization (CRO) budget for the coming year. Watch this critique and give your manager the card that will deliver.
Primary Conversion Principle Metrics
Christmas cards are a lot like landing page on the web. They have to appeal to visitors quickly and deliver something meaningful.
Christmas Metrics
We’ll be examining the Christmas Card Graph for each card.
Christmas Card Graph
Christmas Conversion Principles: Lessons Learned
When Choosing a Card for your Boss, Don’t be too Safe.
Playing it safe often means being boring. Open rates will suffer.
Do not play it safe or open rates will suffer.
Don’t let your designer make the decisions.
One man’s beautiful design is another’s reading nightmare. Don’t let design get in the way of communicating. Do not lose your message, you are after a brand new CRO budget, after all.
Over Designed Card
Don’t deliver less than you promise.
Making promises is the best way to get people to open your cards — and read your landing page. However, if you over-promise, you can do more damage than good. Conversion rates improve when there are good reasons to open the card.
Flattery works, but underpromise and overdeliver.
Use copy that engages the reader.
Our brains need to be challenged to be engaged. Rhymes, humor and alliteration will work to engage the reader and get them to take action.
Use engaging copy to convert.
Be interactive.
Sometimes you just have to get them involved to get them interested and your CRO budget secured. Consider asking them to do something on your page.
Budget Secured Card.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that all of these lessons can be applied to your website and landing pages. This is what we do at Conversion Sciences.
Happy holidays!
How Mobile Ecommerce Will Profit This Holiday Season [Infographic]
Conversion Marketing StrategyMobile ecommerce is transforming online shopping, especially during the holidays. Here are some eye-opening statistics in an infographic.
Most businesses are giving away their mobile visitors. Either they don’t provide a mobile-friendly experience or they have a responsive site that doesn’t give mobile visitors anything different.
This is an opportunity for you. Mobile visitors will be one of your fastest-growing segments. However, the mobile experience is unique and mobile visitors want something designed for their on-the-go, thumb-driven searching and buying. Those businesses that deliver a special mobile experience for their visitors will steal many holiday shoppers this year, and more next year.
If you are on the fence about adopting a mobile app as part of your marketing strategy, take a look at what mobile commerce will mean to businesses this holiday season.
1
92% of Consumers Shop with Smart Phones
With 9 out of 10 Americans owning a smartphone, it’s understandable that 92% of consumers will search for holiday gifts using their phones. Mobile ecommerce is here, and it’s here to stay.
People nowadays have to cope with busy, crazy lives and they search for ways to save time. How often do you hear people stressed about Christmas shopping? Mobile apps give consumers opportunities to simplify their lives, and the number of active mobile shoppers taking advantage of that simplicity continues to grow.
2
Time on Mobile Increases During the Holidays
November and December are the best months for retailers to increase their mobile revenue streams. These two months see more sales than other months, and 47% of customers prefer using a mobile app for shopping during this time of year. In fact, for the first time in history, smartphones and tablets have higher online penetration than desktop computers.
3
Mobile Generates Revenue
This year, Black Friday ecommerce sales hit $3.34 Billion, with mobile sales topping the billion dollar mark for the first time in history. Consumers spent an incredible $1.2 Billion via their mobile devices, a 33% increase from 2015.
Surprisingly, despite this continued growth in mobile commerce, 98% of companies still lack a mobile app designed for expedited customer shopping.
4
Mobile Apps Can Influence Every Part of the Sales Funnel
Small retailers often underestimate the importance of mobile apps—especially during the holidays. They certainly make shopping much simpler, but the benefits that they offer regarding affordable marketing and customer engagement cannot be overlooked either.
To put it simply, 71% of online shoppers prefer searching for products in retail stores using their app. Creating a pleasant shopping experience is important for businesses of all sizes. Think about your shopping habits. You are not the only consumer who searches for products online before later purchasing them. Everyone wants to save money, and mobile apps are a great way to make sure you are getting the best deal out there this holiday season.
Conclusion
If there is any time of year where businesses can’t afford to ignore mobile commerce, it’s the holiday season. As the trends continue to shift toward mobile, you cannot afford to overlook its potential.
If your mobile sales are under-performing, contact Conversion Sciences for a free consultation, or if you don’t have a mobile app, come check us out at Bizness Apps. Check this out if you need last minute holiday marketing ideas for ecommerce.
8 Ecommerce Testing Examples You Should Have Tried Already
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingPreston Pilgrim presents 8 successful ecommerce testing examples, highlighting some fairly easy-to-implement wins. This is the type of stuff that you should probably have tested already on your site. If you havent’ tried these, there’s no time like the present.
Ecommerce and conversion CRO are the ultimate match: Lots of moving parts. High traffic volume. When it comes to ROI, the sky’s the limit.
The following examples provide a great overview of what success can look like when you are executing on a proven AB testing framework.
1. Intuit Increases Conversions With Proactive Live Chat
Intuit Enterprise introduced proactive chat in various spots on their website. A small pop-up window with a call to action stating, “Chat now with a QuickBooks Sales Consultant” allowed potential buyers to instantly gain answers to their questions, clearing away roadblocks on the path to a sale.
Adding chat to the checkout process resulted in a 20% increase in conversions and a 43% increase in average order value.
Intuit proactively offers live chat.
Most impressively, when Intuit added proactive chat to the product comparison page, sales increased by 211%.
Proactively offering live chat increased sales for Intuit by 211%
THE LESSON: When you’re thinking about adding chat, think about the areas where your customers are the most likely to have questions. This may be when comparing products, or could be regarding payment options. Put some thought into the correct placement and watch the conversions skyrocket.
On a cautionary note, sometimes, displaying a “live chat” that isn’t actually live can alienate visitors. While it might work for certain audiences, for others, it can come across as misleading. If you are going to display a “live chat” without actually offering live chat services, just make sure to first verify that they aren’t alienating your visitors.
2. SmileyCookie Increases Sales With Optimized Header
SmileyCookie is a niche ecommerce store that sells cookies and gourmet gift baskets. While the site was getting a fairly solid conversion rate, they decided to spend some time optimizing the header bar that was normally used for seasonal promotions.
This is a great place to test your value propositions.
SmileyCookie.com spent time optimizing the bar above their header and below the navigation.
They tested a number of different value propositions, including the following:
Tests included focusing on sales, pricing and value.
It turns out that immediacy was an important value to the largest segment of their visitors. The winning variation “Order Today -> Ships Next Business Day” delivered an impressive 12.61% conversion rate at 95% confidence. Even more importantly, the success of this test brought in an additional $1.01 per visitor for SmileyCookie.
THE LESSON: The winning variation gives us some insight into what many ecommerce shoppers are looking for: fast shipping & handling. Any time you can lower uncertainty and solidify expectations, conversions tend to improve.
But an even more important takeaway is SmileyCookie’s investment in testing 5 different options for a large impact area like the site promotional header. No matter how good your predictions are, you will almost always get better results when you are able to test multiple options as opposed to just two.
3. Express Watches Boosts Conversions With Trust Building
Express is a UK company that sells Seiko watches. It’s an industry where buyers have legitimate concerns about purchasing online. What if the watch I buy is a fake?
In answer to this, ExpressWatches A/B tested placing a “price guarantee” stamp or an “authorized dealer” stamp on the product page.
If you’re buying a high-end watch, is price really the most important issue? ExpressWatches questioned “Never Beaten on Price”
Replacing “Never Beaten on Price” with a Seiko authorized dealer badge “borrows” brand trust from Seiko.
This stamp of “authenticity” garnered a sizable 107% jump in sales.
THE LESSON: If you’re operating in an industry with fraud risk, proving your authenticity can go a long way. In this case, ExpressWatches “borrowed” trust by tapping into Seiko’s brand authority. What associations logos, media logos and consumer review logos do you qualify to display?
While this split test worked, it’s not a guarantee it will work in all industries. You will need to run your own split tests, try different variations of how you display authenticity and see how it affects your conversions.
This most likely wouldn’t have a significant effect on conversions when dealing with lower priced “commodity” items, but with larger purchases, this type of split test can go a long way!
4. SAP BusinessObjects Increases Conversions With Prominent CTA Button
SAP BusinessObjects replaced its original small blue text “add to cart” link with a large, orange button.
Original:
Where would you click to get a Crystal Reports trial?
Alternate version:
BusinessObjects made the call to action the most visually prominent element on the page.
And conversions increased by 32%!
THE LESSON: Make your call to action count by making it visually prominent. Don’t make customers hunt for your “buy” button. Make it front and center and easy to click through and the sales will naturally increase.
I also want to conclude here that just because you make something bigger and stand out more, it doesn’t mean it will convert higher. In some cases, decreasing the size of the button or CTA has had positive impacts on conversions. The main takeaway you need to grab from this case study is to always split test your main CTA’s and buttons. Good designers know how to make something visually prominent.
5. Horloges Increases Average Order Value With Guarantee
Horloges.nl is a watch dealer in the Netherlands. Their banner originally had information about overnight shipping (“Morgen al in huis”), free shipping (“Gratis verzending”) and their status as an “official” G-Shock dealer.
Horloges.nl changed their banner to make it smaller, and include a 2-year guarantee on watches.
This change caused the average order value to increase by 6%, and total conversions improved by 41%.
THE LESSON: Adding a guarantee is an excellent way to increase new customers’ comfort level in purchasing from a new vendor. Consider changing banner ads to make them simpler and easier to read in order to increase their efficacy.
This test changed several variables: the offers, the layout, and the font styling. When you test, start with guarantees and once you find one that works, test out how to present that guarantee on your page. Where can you place it? Where does it stand out? Should you only put it on products pages? These are all things you might want to split test.
6. MALL.CZ Increases Conversions With Larger Images
MALL.CZ is the second largest ecommerce retailer in the Czech Republic. Much like Amazon, they sell a wide variety of products, including kitchen supplies and electronics. Product images are an important component in their purchase process, and the company was curious how increasing image size might influence sales.
MALL.CZ’s original product descriptions emphasized lengthy copy and had a smaller product photo.
The category page for Mall.cz may be difficult to scan with competing images, buttons and badges.
MALL.CZ then tried altering the descriptions to emphasize a large product image above the text:
Increasing image size made the category page visually easier to scan.
This variation resulted in a 9.46% increase in sales.
THE LESSON: It can pay off to play around with image sizes and layout. There is some evidence to show that in other circumstances, larger images can actually deter sales, so clearly the issue is product/industry dependent. But if you’re looking for a factor to experiment with, image size has the potential for big rewards.
Aside from image size, playing around with different images in general is another great idea for running split tests.
Option 1: Split test image size, find out what converts at a higher rate.
Option 2: Split test different product images and angles and see what converts higher.
Option 3: Test a 3-D, click-to-rotate type image display, where viewers can get a 360 degree look at the product.
7. Express Watches Further Improves Conversions With Social Proof
Few things can impart safe buying like reading a positive review from a fellow customer. Knowing that other people have purchased the product and had a good experience with the product and retailer is a large factor in influencing customers to click “add to cart”.
Express Watches conducted a customer survey and discovered that their customers wanted to know information about price comparison, if the company was trustworthy, and whether the watch would be genuine and not “fake”.
Is a five-start rating enough without the actual reviews on this product page?
ExpressWatch tested this more aggressive presentation of reviews on their product page.
Express decided to answer those questions by adding a Customer Reviews widget on their product pages. Adding the reviews widget, ExpressWatch saw a 58.39% increase in sales.
THE LESSON: Social proof is a proven way to overcome visitor objections and push the sale closer to checkout will increase sales. Clear roadblocks by decreasing customers’ worries and adding symbols of trustworthiness.
When you think about the logic of the buyer, it makes sense. When you are injured or sick and you need to see a doctor or therapist, you are most likely going to ask your close relatives or friends if they have any recommendations on a doctor they have used in the past that they have had success with. If they give you a recommendation with positive feedback, it’s most likely you are going to choose that doctor over any other ones in the area. The takeaway, positive feedback can increase conversions tremendously.
Just realize that if you’re showing your reviews to the public, too many negative reviews can lower your conversion rate. At the same time, having a 100% positive review rate will also lower conversions, as this tends to be viewed as being manipulated in some way. Negative reviews are an important part of visitor research.
The best review profile looks like what you’d expect to see if a bunch of people tried out a great product. Most would love it. Some would be unimpressed. And one or two would trash it out of spite.
8. Corkscrew Wines Increases Sales With Prominent Discounts
What good is a sale if you’re not advertising it enough? The whole point of launching a sale is to move product, and in order to do that, customers need to be aware that there’s a deal out there that can’t be missed.
Corkscrew Wines experimented with adding sale information in a red circle, front and center over the product image.
The price is discounted on this product page, but the visitor has to do the math.
If you’re offering a discount, don’t hide it.
The result? A whopping 148.3% increase in sales. Both product description pages showed the same price- but the second simply highlighted the savings.
THE LESSON: Let people know when they’re saving money. They’ll want to buy more!
Again, there are many different ways to split test this. In this particular case they are displaying the discount on the bottle and title. Play around with this, try displaying it in different locations, try larger images, try different colors that stand out.
Conclusion
Hopefully, today’s ecommerce testing examples have provided you with some pointers for you next batch of split tests.
Preston Pilgrim is a marketer at Acro Media, a digital agency focused on optimizing Drupal point of sale product pages, contact pages, homepages, and more. Learn more from Preston’s expertise via the Acro Media blog.
Remember that your customers ultimately hold the key to increased sales, and any worthwhile AB testing framework starts with getting a thorough understanding of how they are engaging with your site and what they are feeling in the process.
For further reading, check out Conversion Sciences’ rundown of The 7 Core AB Testing Strategies Fundamental to CRO Success.
10 CRO Experts Explain How To Profitably Analyze AB Test Results
Conversion OptimizationThe AB test results had come in, and the result was inconclusive. The Conversion Sciences team was disappointed. They thought the change would increase revenue. What they didn’t know what that the top-level results were lying.
While we can learn something from inconclusive tests, it’s the winners that we love. Winners increase revenue, and that feels good.
The team looked closer at our results. When a test concludes, we analyze the results in analytics to see if there is any more we can learn. We call this post-test analysis.
Isolating the segment of traffic that saw test variation A, it was clear that one browser had under-performed the others: Internet Explorer.
Performance of Variation A. Internet Explorer visitors significantly under-performed the other three popular browsers.
The visitors coming on Internet Explorer were converting at less than half the average of the other browsers and generating one-third the revenue per session. This was not true of the Control. Something was wrong with this test variation. Despite a vigorous QA effort that included all popular browsers, an error had been introduced into the test code.
Analysis showed that correcting this would deliver a 13% increase in conversion rate and 19% increase in per session value. And we would have a winning test after all.
Conversion Sciences has a rigorous QA process to ensure that errors like this are very rare, but they happen. And they may be happening to you.
Post-test analysis keeps us from making bad decisions when the unexpected rears its ugly head. Here’s a primer on how conversion experts ensure they are making the right decisions by doing post-test analysis.
Did Any Of Our Test Variations Win?
The first question that will be on our lips is, “Did any of our variations win?”
There are two possible outcomes when we examine the results of an AB test.
Joel Harvey of Conversion Sciences describes his process below:
“Post-test analysis” is sort of a misnomer. A lot of analytics happens in the initial setup and throughout full ab testing process. The “post-test” insights derived from one batch of tests is the “pre-test” analytics for the next batch, and the best way to have good goals for that next batch of tests is to set the right goals during your previous split tests.
That said, when you look at the results of an AB testing round, the first thing you need to look at is whether the test was a loser, a winner, or inconclusive.
Verify that the winners were indeed winners. Look at all the core criteria: statistical significance, p-value, test length, delta size, etc. If it checks out, then the next step is to show it to 100% of traffic and look for that real-world conversion lift.
In a perfect world you could just roll it out for 2 weeks and wait, but usually, you are jumping right into creating new hypotheses and running new tests, so you have to find a balance.
Once we’ve identified the winners, it’s important to dive into segments.
This is fairly easy to do with enterprise tools, but might require some more effort with less robust testing tools. It’s important to have a deep understanding of how tested pages performed with each segment. What’s the bounce rate? What’s the exit rate? Did we fundamentally change the way this segment is flowing through the funnel?
We want to look at this data in full, but it’s also good to remove outliers falling outside two standard deviations of the mean and re-evaluate the data.
It’s also important to pay attention to lead quality. The longer the lead cycle, the more difficult this is. In a perfect world, you can integrate the CRM, but in reality, this often doesn’t work very seamlessly.
Chris McCormick, Head of Optimisation at PRWD, describes his process:
When a test concludes, we always use the testing tool as a guide but we would never hang our hat on that data. We always analyse results further within Google Analytics, as this is the purest form of data.
For any test, we always set out at the start what our ‘primary success metrics’ are. These are what we look to identify first via GA and what we communicate as a priority to the client. Once we have a high level understanding of how the test has performed, we start to dig below the surface to understand if there are any patterns or trends occurring. Examples of this would be: the day of the week, different product sets, new vs returning users, desktop vs mobile etc.
We always look to report on a rough ROI figure for any test we deliver, too. In most cases, I would look to do this based on taking data from the previous 12 months and applying whatever the lift was to that. This is always communicated to the client as a ballpark figure i.e.: circa £50k ROI. The reason for this is that there are so many additional/external influences on a test that we can never be 100% accurate; testing is not an exact science and shouldn’t be treated as such.
Are We Making Type I or Type II errors?
In our post on AB testing statistics, we discussed type I and type II errors. We work to avoid these errors at all cost.
To avoid errors in judgement, we verify the results of our testing tool against our analytics. It is very important that our testing tool send data to our analytics package telling us which variations are seen by which segments of visitors.
Our testing tools only deliver top-level results, and we’ve seen that technical errors happen. So we can reproduce the results of our AB test using analytics data.
Did each variation get the same number of conversions? Was revenue reported accurately?
Errors are best avoided by ensuring the sample size is large enough and utilizing a proper AB testing framework. Peep Laja describes his process below:
First of all I check whether there’s enough sample size and that we can trust the outcome of the test. I check if the numbers reported by the testing tool line up with the analytics tool, both for CR (conversion rate) and RPV (revenue per visit).
In the analytics tool I try to understand how the variations changed user behavior – by looking at microconversions (cart adds, certain page visits etc) and other stats like cart value, average qty per purchase etc.
If the sample size is large enough, I want to see the results of the test across key segments (provided that the results in the segments are valid, have enough volume etc), and see if the treatments performed better/worse inside the segments. Maybe there’s a case for personalization there. The segments I look at are device split (if the test was ran across multiple device categories), new/returning, traffic source, first time buyer / repeat buyer.
How Did Key Segments Perform?
In the case of an inconclusive test, we want to look at individual segments of traffic.
For example, we have had an inconclusive test on smartphone traffic in which the Android visitors loved our variation, but iOS visitors hated it. They cancelled each other out. Yet we would have missed an important piece of information had we not looked more closely.
Visitors react differently depending on their device, browser and operating system.
Other segments that may perform differently may include:
These segments will be different for each business, but provide insights that spawn new hypotheses, or even provide ways to personalize the experience.
Understanding how different segments are behaving is fundamental to good testing analysis, but it’s also important to keep the main thing the main thing, as Rich Page explains:
Avoid analysis paralysis. Don’t slice the results into too many segments or different analytics tools. You may often run into conflicting findings. Revenue should always be considered the best metric to pay attention to other than conversion rate, after all, what good is a result with a conversion lift if it doesn’t also increase revenue?
The key thing is not to throw out A/B tests that have inconclusive results, as this will happen quite often. This is a great opportunity to learn and create a better follow up A/B test. In particular you should gain visitor feedback regarding the page being A/B tested, and show them your variations – this helps reveal great insights into what they like and don’t like. Reviewing related visitor recordings and click maps also gives good insights.
Nick So of WiderFunnel talks about segments as well within his own process for AB test analysis:
“Besides the standard click-through rate, funnel drop-off, and conversion rate reports for post-test analysis, most of the additional reports and segments I pull are very dependent on the business context of a website’s visitors and customers.
For an ecommerce site that does a lot of email marketing and has high return buyers, I look at the difference in source traffic as well as new versus returning visitors. Discrepancies in behavior between segments can provide insights for future strategies, where you may want to focus on the behaviors of a particular segment in order to get that additional lift.
Sometimes, just for my own personal geeky curiosity, I look into seemingly random metrics to see if there are any unexpected patterns. But be warned: it’s easy to get too deep into that rabbit hole of splicing and dicing the data every which way to find some sort of pattern.
For lead-gen and B2B companies, you definitely want to look at the full buyer cycle and LTV of your visitors in order to determine the true winner of any experiment. Time and time again, I have seen tests that successfully increase lead submissions, only to discover that the quality of the leads coming through is drastically lower; which could cost a business MORE money in funnelling sales resources to unqualified leads.
In terms of post-test results analysis and validation — besides whatever statistical method your testing tool uses — I always run results through WiderFunnel’s internal results calculator which utilizes bayesian statistics to provide the risk and reward potential of each test. This allows you to make a more informed business decision, rather than simply a win/loss, significant/not significant recommendation.”
In addition to understanding how tested changes impacted each segment, it’s also useful to understand where in the customer journey those changes had the greatest impact, as Benjamin Cozon describes:
We need to consider that the end of the running phase of a test is actually the beginning of insight analysis.
Why is each variation delivering a particular conversion rate? In which cases are my variations making a difference, whether positive or negative? In order to better understand the answers to these questions, we always try to identify which user segments are the most elastic to the changes that were made.
One way we do it is by ventilating the data with session-based or user-based dimensions. Here is some of the dimension we use for almost every test:
This type of ventilation helps us understand the impact of specific changes for users relative to their specific place in the customer journey. Having these additional insights also helps us build a strong knowledge base and communicate effectively throughout the organization.
Finally, while it is a great idea to have a rigorous quality assurance (QA) process for your tests, some may slip through the cracks. When you examine segments of your traffic, you may find one segment that performed very poorly. This may be a sign that the experience they saw was broken.
It is not unusual to see visitors using Internet Explorer crash and burn since developers abhor making customizations for that non-compliant browser.
How Did Changes Affect Lead Quality?
Post test analysis allows us to be sure that the quality of our conversions is high. It’s easy to increase conversions. But are these new conversions buying as much as the ones who saw the control?
Several of Conversion Sciences’ clients prizes phone calls and the company optimizes for them. Each week, the calls are examined to ensure the callers are qualified to buy and truly interested in a solution.
In post-test analysis, we can examine the average order value for each variation to see if buyers were buying as much as before.
We can look at the profit margins generated for the products purchased. If revenue per visit rose, did profit follow suit?
Marshall Downey of Build.com has some more ideas for us in the following instagraph infographic.
Revenue is often looked to as the pre-eminent judge of lead quality, but doing so comes with it’s own pitfalls, as Ben Jesson describes in his approach to AB test analysis.
If a test doesn’t reach significance, we quickly move on to the next big idea. There are limited gains to be had from adding complexity by promoting narrow segments.
It can be priceless to run on-page surveys on the winning page, to identify opportunities for improving it further. Qualaroo and Hotjar are great for this.
Lead quality is important, and we like to tackle it from two sides. First, qualitatively: Does the challenger page do anything that is likely to reduce or increase the lead value? Second, quantitatively: How can we track leads through to the bank, so we can ensure that we’ve grown the bottom line?
You might expect that it’s better to measure revenue than to measure the number of orders. However, statistically speaking, this is often not true. A handful of random large orders can greatly skew the revenue figures. Some people recommend manually removing the outliers, but that only acknowledges the method’s intrinsic problem. How do you define outlier, and why aren’t we interested in them? If your challenger hasn’t done anything that is likely to affect the order size, then you can save time by using the number of conversions as the goal.
After every winning experiment, record the results in a database that’s segmented by industry sector, type of website, geographic location, and conversion goal. We have been doing this for a decade, and the value it brings to projects is priceless.
Analyze AB Test Results by Time and Geography
Conversion quality is important, and Theresa Baiocco takes this one step further.
For lead gen companies with a primary conversion goal of a phone call, it’s not enough to optimize for quantity of calls; you have to track and improve call quality. And if you’re running paid ads to get those phone calls, you need to incorporate your cost to acquire a high-quality phone call, segmented by:
When testing for phone calls, you have to compare the data from your call tracking software with the data from your advertising. For example, if you want to know which day of the week your cost for a 5-star call is lowest, you first pull a report from your call tracking software on 5-star calls by day of week:
Then, check data from your advertising source, like Google AdWords. Pull a report of your cost by day of week for the same time period:
Then, you simply divide the amount you spent by the number of 5-star calls you got, to find out how much it costs to generate a 5-star call each day of the week.
Repeat the process on other segments, such as hour of day, ad position, week of the month, geographic location, etc. By doing this extra analysis, you can shift your advertising budget to the days, times, and locations when you generate the highest quality of phone calls – for less.
Look for Unexpected Effects
Results aren’t derived in a vacuum. Any change will create ripple effects throughout a website, and some of these effects are easy to miss.
Craig Andrews gives us insight into this phenomenon via a recent discovery he made with a new client:
I stumbled across something last week – and I almost missed it because it was secondary effects of a campaign I was running. One weakness of CRO, in my honest opinion, is the transactional focus of the practice. CRO doesn’t have a good way of measuring follow-on effects.
For example, I absolutely believe pop-ups increase conversions, but at what cost? How does it impact future engagement with the brand? If you are selling commodities, then it probably isn’t a big concern. But most people want to build brand trust & brand loyalty.
We discovered a shocking level of re-engagement with content based on the quality of a visitor’s first engagement. I probably wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it personally and double-checked the analytics. In the process of doing some general reporting, we discovered that we radically increased the conversion rates of the 2 leading landing pages as secondary effects of the initial effort.
We launched a piece of content that we helped the client develop. It was a new client and the development of this content was a little painful with many iterations as everyone wanted to weigh in on it. One of our biggest challenges was getting the client to agree to change the voice & tone of the piece – to use shorter words & shorter sentences. They were used to writing in a particular way and were afraid that their prospects wouldn’t trust & respect them if they didn’t write in a highbrow academic way.
We completed the piece, created a landing page and promoted the piece primarily via email to their existing list. We didn’t promote any other piece of content all month. They had several pieces (with landing pages) that had been up all year.
It was a big success. It was the most downloaded piece of content for the entire year. It had more downloads in one month than any other piece had in total for the entire year. Actually, 28% more downloads than #2 which had been up since January.
But then, I discovered something else…
The next 2 most downloaded pieces of content spiked in October. In fact, 50% of the total year’s downloads for those pieces happened in October. I thought it may be a product of more traffic & more eyeballs. Yes that helped, but it was more than that. The conversion rates for those 2 landing pages increased 160% & 280% respectively!
We did nothing to those landing pages. We didn’t promote that content. We changed nothing except the quality of the first piece of content that we sent out in our email campaign.
Better writing increased the brand equity for this client and increased the demand for all other content.
Testing results can also be compared against an archive of past results, as Shanelle Mullin discusses here:
Shanelle Mullin, ConversionXL
The clearer you can communicate the ROI of your testing program to stakeholders and clients, the better. It means more buy-in and bigger budgets.
You can archive your test results in a few different ways. Tools like Projects and Effective Experiments can help, but some people use plain ol’ Excel to archive their tests. There’s no single best way to do it.
What’s really important is the information you record. You should include: the experiment date, the audience / URL, screenshots, the hypothesis, the results, any validity factors to consider (e.g. a PR campaign was running, it was mid-December), a link to the experiment, a link to a CSV of the results, and insights gained.
Why Did We Get The Result We Got?
Ultimately, we want to answer the question, “Why?” Why did one variation win and what does it tell us about our visitors?
This is a collaborative process and speculative in nature. Asking why has two primary effects:
Our goal is to learn as we test, and asking “Why?” is the best way to cement our learnings.
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The 7 Core A/B Testing Strategies That Are Fundamentally Essential To CRO Success
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingOne of these A/B testing strategies is right for your website, and will lead to bigger wins faster.
We have used analysis and testing to find significant increases in revenue and leads for hundreds of companies. For each one, we fashion unique AB testing strategies for each defining where to start and what to test.
However, we will virtually always build out that unique testing strategy off one of seven core strategies that I consider fundamenal to CRO success.
If you are beginning your own split testing or conversion optimization process, this is your guide to AB testing strategies. For each these seven strategies, I’m going to show you:
If you have more questions about your testing strategy, contact us and we’ll be more than happy to answer any questions I don’t cover here.
Let’s get started.
1. Gum Trampoline
We employ the gum trampoline approach when bounce rates are high, especially from new visitors. The bounce rate is the number of visitors who visit a site and leave after only a few seconds. Bouncers only see one page typically.
As the name implies, we want to use these AB testing strategies to slow the bouncing behavior, like putting gum on a trampoline.
We want more visitors to stick to our site and not bounce.
When to Use It
You have a high bounce rate on your entry pages. This approach is especially important if your paid traffic (PPC or display ads) is not buying.
You have run out of paid traffic for a given set of keywords.
Where to Test
Most of your attention will be focused on landing pages. For lead generation, these may be dedicated landing pages. For ecommerce sites, these may be category pages or product pages.
What to Test
The key components of any landing page include:
Be Careful
Reducing bounce rate can increase leads and revenue. However, it can also increase the number of unqualified visitors entering the site or becoming prospects.
Example
In the following example, there is a disconnect between the expectation set by the advertisement (left side) and the landing page visitors see when they click on the ad (right side).
Paid ads are often a fantastic tool for bringing in qualified traffic, but if the landing page isn’t matched to the ad, visitors are likely to immediately bounce from the page rather than attempting to hunt for the treasure promised in the ad.
In order to apply gum to this trampoline, Zumba would need to take ad click-throughs to a page a featuring “The New Wonderland Collection”, preferably with the same model used in the ads. The landing needs to be designed specifically for the type of user who would be intrigued by the ad.
2. Completion Optimization
The Completion strategy begins testing at the call to action. For a lead-generation site, the Completion strategy will begin with the action page or signup process. For an ecommerce site, we start with the checkout process.
When to Use It
The Completion strategy is used for sites that have a high number of transactions and want to decrease the abandonment rate. The abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors who start a checkout or registration process, but don’t complete it. They abandon the process before they’re done.
Where to Test
This process starts at the end of the process, in the shopping cart or registration process.
What to Test
There are lots of things that could be impacting your abandonment rate.
Once you have reduced the abandonment rates, you can begin testing further upstream, to get more visitors into your optimized purchase or signup process.
Be Careful
Testing in the cart can be very expensive. Any test treatments that underperform the control are costing you real leads and sales. Also, cart abandonment often has its roots further upstream. Pages on your site that make false promises or leave out key information may be causing your abandonment rates to rise.
For example, if you don’t talk about shipping fees before checkout, you may have lots of people starting the purchase process just to find out what your shipping fees are.
Example
As we’ve talked about before, best practices are essentially guesses in CRO. We know, as a general rule, that lowering checkout friction tends to improve conversion rates and lower abandonment. But sometimes, it’s actually perceived friction that impacts the checkout experience above and beyond the real level of friction.
For example, one of our clients upgraded their website and checkout experience in accordance with best practices.
The new checkout process should have performed better, yet it ended up having a significantly higher bounce rate than the previous checkout process.
Why?
After looking at previous checkout experience, we realized that despite it actually requiring more steps (and clicks) on the part of the user, the process was broken up in a such a way that the user perceived less friction along the way. Information was hidden behind each step, so that they user never ultimately felt the friction.
Step #1:
Paypal payment method step 1
Step #2:
Paypal billing information
This is just one of many reasons running AB tests is mandatory, and it’s also a good example of how beneficial it can be for certain business to start with the checkout process, as dictated by the long-term strategy.
3. Flow Optimization
The Flow approach is essentially the opposite of the Completion strategy. With this strategy, you’re trying to get more visitors into the purchase process before you start optimizing the checkout or registration process.
When to Use It
This strategy is typically best for sites with fewer transactions. The goal is to increase visits to the cart or registration process so we start Completion testing at the bottom of the funnel.
Where to Test
Testing starts on entry pages, the pages on which visitors enter the site. This will typically include the home page and landing pages for lead-generating sites. For ecommerce sites category pages and product pages get intense scrutiny to increase Add to Cart actions.
What to Test
With this strategy, we are most often trying to understand what is missing from the product or service presentation.
We will test headlines, copy, images and calls to action when we begin the GT strategy.
Be Careful
Even though we aren’t optimizing the checkout or registration process, avoid testing clicks or engagement metrics. Always use purchases or leads generated as the primary metric in your tests. It’s too easy to get unqualified visitors to add something to cart only to see abandonment rates skyrocket.
Example
Businesses that benefit from the GT strategy typically need to relook at their central value proposition on poorly converting landing pages.
For example, when Groove decided it’s 2.3% homepage conversion rate wasn’t going to cut it anymore, it began the optmization process by revamping its value proposition. The existing page was very bland, with a stock photo and a weak headline that didn’t do anything to address the benefits of the service.
Groove SaaS and eCommerce Customer Support Value Proposition
The new page included a benefits-driven headline and a well-produced video of a real customer describing his positive experience with Groove. As a result, the page revamp more than doubled homepage conversions.
Groove created a ‘copy first’ landing page based on feedback from customers
The point here is that fixing your checkout process isn’t going to do you a ton of good if you aren’t getting a whole lot of people there in the first place. If initial conversions are low, it’s better to start with optimizing your core value proposition than go fishing for problems on the backend of your funnel.
4. Minesweeper
Minesweeper optimization strategies use clues from several tests to determine where additional revenue might be hiding.
Some sites are like the Minesweeper game that has shipped with Windows operating systems for decades. In the game you hunt for open squares and avoid mines. The location of minds is hinted at by numbered squares.
In this game, you don’t know where to look until you start playing. But it’s not random. This is like an exploratory testing strategy.
When to Use It
This testing strategy is for sites that seem to be working against the visitor at every turn. We see this when visit lengths are low or people leave products in the cart at high rates. Use it when things are broken all over the site, then dive into one of the other strategies.
As testing progresses, we get clues about what is really keeping visitors from completing a transaction. The picture slowly resolves as we collect data from around the site.
Where to Test
This strategy starts on the pages where the data says the problems lie.
What to Test
By its nature, it is hard to generalize about this testing strategy. As an example, we may believe that people are having trouble finding the solution or product they are looking for. Issues related to findability, or “discoverability” may include navigation tests, site search fixes, and changes to categories or category names.
Be Careful
This is our least-often used strategy. It is too scattershot to be used frequently. We prefer the data to lead us down tunnels where we mine veins of gold.
However, this is the most common of optimization strategies used by inexperienced marketers. It is one of the reasons that conversion projects get abandoned. The random nature of this approach means that there will be many tests that don’t help much and fewer big wins.
Example
You wouldn’t expect a company pulling in $2.1 Billion in annual revenue to have major breaks in it’s website, yet that’s exactly what I discovered a few years back while attempting to make a purchase from Fry’s Electronics. Whenever I selected the “In-store Pickup” option, I was taken to the following error screen.
This is one of the most important buttons on the site, doubly so near Christmas when shipping gifts becomes an iffy proposition. Even worse, errors like this often aren’t isolated.
While finding a major error like this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to begin the Minesweeper optimization strategy, it’s always important to fix broken pieces of a site before you even begin to look at optimization strategies.
5. Big Rocks
Adding new features — “big rocks” — to a site can fundamentally change its effectiveness.
Almost every site has a primary issue. After analysis, you will see that there are questions about authority and credibility that go unanswered. You might find that issues with the layout are keeping many visitors from taking action.
The Big Rocks testing strategy adds fundamental components to the site in an effort to give visitors what they are looking for.
When to Use It
This strategy is used for sites that have a long history of optimization and ample evidence that an important component is missing.
Where to Test
These tests are usually site-wide. They involve adding fundamental features to the site.
What to Test
Some examples of big rocks include:
Be Careful
These tools are difficult to test. Once implemented, they cannot be easily removed from the site. Be sure you have evidence from your visitors that they want the rock. Don’t believe the claims of higher conversions made by the Big Rock company salespeople. Your audience is different.
Example
A good example of the Big Rocks strategy in action comes from Adore Me, a millennial-targeted lingerie retailer that catipulted it’s sales by installing Yotpo’s social-based review system. The company was relying primarily on email and phone for customer feedback and identified ratings and user reviews as its “big rock” to target.
The revamped customer engagement system helped spawn tens of thousands of new reviews and also facilitated a flood of user-generated content on sites like Instagram without Adore Me even having to purchase Instagram ads. Type in #AdoreMe and you’ll find thousands of unsponsored user-generated posts like these:
This is a great example of a how certain AB testing strategies can help facilitate different business models. The key is identify the big opportunities and then focusing on creating real, engaging solutions in those areas.
6. Big Swings
Taking big swings can lead to home runs, but can also obscure the reasons for wins.
A “Big Swing” is any test that changes more than one variable and often changes several. It’s called a big swing because it’s when we swing for the fences with a redesigned page.
When to Use It
Like the Big Rock strategy, this strategy is most often used on a site that has a mature conversion optimization program. When we begin to find the local maxima for a site, it gets harder to find winning hypotheses. If evidence suggests that a fundamental change is needed, we’ll take a big swing and completely redesign a page or set of pages based on what we’ve learned.
Sometimes we start with a Big Swing if we feel that the value proposition for a site is fundamentally broken.
Where to Test
We often take big swings on key entry pages such as the home page or landing pages. For ecommerce sites, you may want to try redesigning the product page template for your site.
What to Test
Big Swings are often related to layout and messaging. All at once, several things may change on a page:
Be Careful
Big swings don’t tell you much about your audience. When you change more than one thing, the changes can offset each other. Perhaps making the headline bigger increased the conversion rate on a page, but the new image decreased the conversion rate. When you change both, you may not see the change.
Example
Neil Patel is one of those marketers who likes to use the Big Swings strategy on a regular basis. For example, he has tried complete homepage redesigns for Crazy Egg on several occasions.
The first big redesign changed things from a short-form landing page to a very long-form page and resulted in a 30% increase in conversions.
The next big redesign scrapped the long page for another short page, but this time with concise, targeted copy and a video-driven value proposition. This new page improved conversions by another 13%.
And of course, Neil didn’t stop there. Crazy Egg’s homepage has changed yet again, with the current iteration simply inviting users to enter their website’s URL and see a Crazy Egg’s user testing tools in action on their own site. How well is it converting? No clue, but if I know Neil, I can promise you the current page is Crazy Egg’s highest performer to date.
Sometimes the only way to improve conversions is to swing for the fences and try something new.
7. Nuclear Option
I’ll mention the nuclear option here, which is a full site redesign. There are only two good reasons to do an entire site redesign:
All other redesign efforts should be done with conversion optimization tests, like Wasp Barcode.
We even recommend creating a separate mobile site rather than using responsive web design.
You should speak to a Conversion Scientist before you embark on a redesign project.
Which A/B Testing Strategy Is Right For You?
Every website is different. The approach you take when testing a site should ultimately be determined by the data you have. Once you settle on a direction it can help you find bigger wins sooner.
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The Proven AB Testing Framework Used By CRO Professionals
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingThere is no shortage of AB testing tips, tricks, and references to statistical significance. Here is a proven AB testing framework that guides you to consistent, repeatable results.
How do conversion optimization professionals get consistent performance from their AB testing programs?
If you are looking for a proven framework you can use to approach any website and methodically derive revenue-boosting insights, then you will love today’s infographic.
This is the AB testing framework industry professionals use to increase revenue for multi-million dollar clients:
The Purpose of an AB Testing Framework
It’s easy to make mistakes when AB testing. Testing requires discipline, and discipline requires guiding processes that enforce some level of rigor.
This framework ensures that you, the marketer-experimenter, keep some key principles in mind as you explore your website for increased revenue, leads, and subscriptions.
This is the framework CRO professionals use to stay on their best game.
1. Evaluate Existing Data
Here are the first two questions you need to ask when approaching a new site.
In some cases, you will have a lot to work with in evaluating a new site. Your efforts will be primarily focused on going through existing data and pulling out actionable insights for your test hypotheses.
In other cases, you might not have much to work with or the existing may be inaccurate, so you’ll need to spend some time setting up new tools for targeted data collection.
Data Audit
The data audit identifies data that is available to the data scientist. It typically includes:
All of these data sources are helpful in developing a rich list of hypotheses for testing.
Analytics Audit
Since our analytics database is the all-important central clearinghouse for our website, we want to be sure that it is recording everything we need and accurately.
Often, we forget to track some very important things.
These issues must be addressed in our audit.
Integrations
It is important that as much data as possible is collected in our analytics database. We never know what questions we will have.
For post-test analysis (see below), we want to be sure our AB testing tool is writing information to the analytics database so we can recreate the test results there. This allows us to drill into the data and learn more about test subjects’ behaviors. This data is typically not available in our testing tools.
Data Correlations
Finally, we want to be sure that the data we’re collecting is accurate. For example, if our site is an ecommerce site, we want to be sure the revenue reported by our testing tool and analytics database is right. We will do a correlation calculation of the revenue reported by analytics with the actual sales of our company.
The same kind of correlation can be done for lead generation and phone calls.
We can also use multiple sources of data to validate our digital laboratory. Does the data in analytics match that reported by our testing tool? Is the number of ad clicks reported by our advertising company the same as the number seen in analytics?
Once we have confidence in our setup, we can start collecting more data.
2. Collect Additional Quantitative & Qualitative Data
Once we understand the data already available to us, we’ll need to set up and calibrate tools that can acquire any additional data needed to run effective split tests. For our testing tool, we may choose to run an AA test.
Two important types of data give us insight into optimizing a site.
Quantitative data is generated from large sample sizes. Quantitative data tells us how large numbers of visitors and potential visitors behave. It’s generated from analytics databases (like Google Analytics), trials, and AB tests.
The primary goal of evaluating quantitative data is to find where the weak points are in our funnel. The data gives us objective specifics to research further.
There are a few different types of quantitative data we’ll want to collect and review:
Qualitative data is generated from individuals or small groups. It is collected through heuristic analysis, surveys, focus groups, phone or chat transcripts, and user reviews.
Qualitative data can uncover the feelings your users experience as they view a landing page and the motivations behind how they interact with your website.
Qualitative data is often self-reported data and is thus suspect. Humans are good at rationalizing how they behave in a situation. However, it is a great source of test hypotheses that can’t be discerned from quantitative behavioral data.
While quantitative data tells us what is happening in our funnel, qualitative data can tell us why visitors are behaving a certain way, giving us a better understanding of what we should test.
There are a number of tools we can use to obtain this information:
3. Review All Website Baselines
The goal of our data collection and review process is to acquire key intelligence on each of our website “baselines”.
Sitewide Performance is your overall website user experience. It includes general navigation and performance across devices and browsers.
Funnel Performance deals specifically with the chain of conversion events that turns visitors into leads and then customers. It will include landing pages, optin forms, autoresponders, cart checkouts, etc.
Technical Errors are the broken parts on your website or elsewhere in the user experience. These don’t need to be optimized. They need to be fixed.
Customer Segments deals with how different key customer segments are experiencing your site. It’s important to understand the differences in how long-time users, new visitors, small-ticket buyers, and big-ticket purchasers are engaging with your site.
Channel Performance deals with how various traffic acquisition channels are converting on your site. It’s important to understand the differences between how a Facebook-driven view costing you $0.05 and an Adwords-driven view costing $3.48 is converting when they reach your site.
4. Turn Data Into Optimization Hypotheses
Once you have a thorough, data-backed understanding of the target website, the next step is to design improvements that you hypothesize will outperform the current setup.
As you evaluate these changes for potential testing, run them through the following flowchart:
You’ll quickly build a list of potential changes to test, and then you’ll need to prioritize them based on your overall testing strategy.
5. Develop A Testing Strategy
AB testing is a time-consuming process that consumes limited resources. You can’t test everything, so where do you focus?
That will depend on your testing strategy.
Ultimately, you will need to develop a tailored strategy for the specific website you are working with and that website/business’ unique goals, but here are a few options to choose from.
Flow vs. Completions
One of the first questions you’ll have to ask is where to start. There are two broad strategies here:
If you find people falling out of the top of your funnel, you may want to optimize there to get more visitors flowing into your cart or registration page. This is a flow strategy.
For a catalog ecommerce site, flow testing may occur on category or product pages. Then, tests in the shopping cart and checkout process will move faster due to the higher traffic.
Gum Trampoline Strategy
Employ the gum trampoline approach when bounce rates are high, especially from new visitors. The bounce rate is the number of visitors who visit a site and leave after only a few seconds. Bouncers only see one page typically.
With this strategy, you focus testing on landing pages for specific channels.
Minesweeper Strategy
This strategy is for sites that seem to be working against the visitor at every turn. We see this when visit lengths are low or people leave products in the cart at high rates.
For example, we might try to drive more visitors to the pricing page for an online product to see if that gets more of them to complete their purchase.
Big Rocks Strategy
This strategy is used for sites that have a long history of optimization and ample evidence that an important component is missing. Add fundamental components to the site in an effort to give visitors what they are looking for.
Examples of “big rocks” include ratings and reviews modules, faceted search features, recommendation engines, and live demos.
Nuclear Strategy
This strategy includes a full site redesign and might be viable if the business is either changing its backend platform or completely redoing branding for the entire company or the company’s core product.
The nuclear strategy is as destructive as it sounds and should be a last resort.
For additional strategies and a more in-depth look at this topic, check out 7 Conversion Optimization Strategies You Should Consider, by Brian Massey.
6. Design Your AB Tests
Once our hypotheses are created and our goals are clearly defined, it’s time to actually run the AB tests.
Having the right tools will make this process infinitely easier. If you aren’t quite sure what the “right tool” is for your business, check out this article: The Most Recommended AB Testing Tools By Leading CRO Experts
But even with the right tools, designing an AB test requires a decent amount of work on the user’s end. Tests need to be designed correctly if you want to derive any meaningful insights from the results.
One piece of this that most people are familiar with is statistical significance. Unfortunately, very few people actually understand statistical significance at the level needed to set up split tests. If you suspect that might be you, check out AB Testing Statistics: An Intuitive Guide For Non-Mathematicians.
But there’s a lot more to designing a test than just statistical significance. A well-designed AB test will include the following elements:
Tests should be set up to run for a predetermined length of time that incorporates the full cycle of visitor behavior. A runtime of one calendar month is a good rule of thumb.
Test goals, targeting, a display percentages should all be accounted for.
Once the test is designed properly, it’s finally time to actually run it.
7. Run & Monitor Your AB Tests
Running an AB test isn’t as simple as clicking “Run” on your split testing software. Two critical things need to happen once the test begins displaying page variations to new visitors.
Once the test begins, it’s important to monitor conversion data throughout the funnel, watch for anomalies, and make sure nothing is set up incorrectly. You are running your tests on live traffic, after all, and any mistake that isn’t quickly caught could result in massive revenue loss for the website being tested.
As the tests run, we want to monitor a number of things. For instance:
Statistical significance is the first thing we have to look at. A statistically insignificant lift is not a lift. It’s nothing.
But even if our results are significant, we still have to look at the progression of data throughout the testing process. Did the variant’s conversion rate stay consistently higher than the control? Or did it oscillate above and below the control?
If the data is still oscillating at the end of the test period, we might need to continue testing, even if our software is telling us the results are statistically significant.
It’s also important to understand that any lift experienced in testing will almost always be overstated. On average, if a change creates a 30% lift in testing, the actual lift is closer to 10%.
Finally, it’s helpful to run quality assurance throughout the test period, ensuring that split tests are displaying properly across various devices and browsers. Try to break the site again, like you did during the initial site audit, and make sure everything is working.
Once the tests have run through the predetermined ending point, it’s time to review the results.
8. Assess Test Results
Remember that an AB test is just a data collection activity. Now that we’ve collected some data, let’s put that information to work for us.
The first question that will be on our lips is, “Did any of our variations win?” We all love to win.
There are two possible outcomes when we examine the results of an AB test.
In the case of an inconclusive test, we want to look at individual segments of traffic. How are specific segments of users engaging with the control versus the variant? Some of the most profitable insights can come from failed tests.
Segments to compare and contrast include:
These segments will be different for each business, but they’ll provide insights that spawn new hypotheses or even provide ways to personalize the experience.
In the case of a statistical increase in conversion rate, it’s very important to analyze the quality of new conversions. It’s easy to increase conversions, but are these new conversions buying as much as the ones who saw the control?
Ultimately, we want to answer the question, “Why?” Why did one variation win, and what does it tell us about our visitors?
This is a collaborative process and speculative in nature. Asking why has two primary effects:
Our goal is to learn as we test, and asking “Why?” is the best way to cement our learnings.
9. Implement Results: Harvesting
This is the step in which we harvest our winning increases in conversion, and we want to get these changes rolled out onto the site as quickly as possible. The strategy for this is typically as follows:
It is not unusual for us to create a new routing test so that we can archive the results of the AB test for future reference.
As another consideration, beware of having too many routing tests running on your site. We’ve found that some smaller businesses rely on the routing tests to modify their test and have dozens of routing tests running. This can cause a myriad of problems.
In one case, a client made a change to the site header and forgot to include the code that enabled the AB testing tool. All routing tests were immediately turned off because the testing tool wasn’t integrated.
Conversion rates plummeted until the code was added to the site. In one sense, this is a validation of the testing process. We’ve dubbed it a “Light Switch” test.
Conclusion
This is the framework CRO professionals use to consistently generate conversion lifts for their clients using AB testing.
6 Highly Productive Ways To AB Test Content Marketing
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingHere are six different ways to AB test content elements and the things you should be measuring.
There is a critical part of your sales funnel that probably isn’t optimized.
When you think about CRO, you think about optimizing your online funnel – your emails, landing pages, checkout process, etc. – in order to acquire more customers.
What you don’t often think about is AB testing your content.
In fact, when it comes to content driven marketing, we rarely see the same commitment to testing, tracking, and optimizing that occurs elsewhere in marketing. Considering that content is found at the top of your sales funnel, the wrong content could be hurting your conversion rates.
Content can be tested in the same way anything else can be tested, and some elements definitely deserve a more CRO-esque approach.
Goals for AB Testing Content
One of the reasons that content is less-frequently tested, is that the goals are often unclear.
Content is great for SEO.
Content is great for educating clients.
Content is great for establishing your brand’s thought leadership.
Content is great for sharing on social media.
Content is also great for getting prospects into the sales funnel. This is typically done by collecting an email address to begin the conversation.
Here are the 6 different elements you should definitely consider testing. You can run any of these tests using these recommended AB testing tools, but I’ve also included some simple WordPress plugins as a viable alternative if you want to try this on a small budget.
1. Split Test Your Headlines
Your headline is arguably the most important piece of your content. It’s the thing that determines whether people click through from your email or social media post.
On average, 80% of your readers never make it past the headline.
Yup, only 2 in every 10 of your readers actually read past the headline. Even fewer make it all the way through the article.
Funny enough, it’s also one of the simplest things to test. It’s so easy.
You already know how to run an AB test. Applying that practice to your headlines is a simple 4-step process.
1. Brainstorm headlines to test.
Stephanie Flaxman of CopyBlogger says you should ask yourself three questions to make your headline the best it can be:
Use your answer to those three questions to craft a headline that will demand viewer attention and channel readers to your content.
But don’t get too excited – The first headline you come up with will probably suck. Or maybe it will just be mediocre.
The whole point of AB testing is that you don’t have to come up with THE perfect headline. You simply need to come up with a variety of solid options, and then you can see what performs best.
This is why I recommend creating a list of 5-10 possible headlines.
Next, pick your two favorites and move on to step #2.
2. Send both versions to a live audience.
Now it’s time to test the headlines. You want to show one headline to 50% of your traffic and the other headline to the other 50%.
How you accomplish this will depend on how you acquire traffic.
For example, if you primarily drive traffic to your new blog posts via an email list, create your email and then send half of your subscribers the email using one headline and the other half the same email but using the alternate headline.
If your promote via social media, try posting at different times or across different channels using the alternate headlines and see what happens.
If you promote via paid channels, simply create two ads, using a different headline for each, and set up a normal AB test using proper statistical analysis.
Once you’ve run your tests, it’s time to review the data.
3. Analyze the results.
Which headline performed the best?
If your traffic is too low to get statistically significant results, it’s still worth running the tests. Your initial readers typically come from your email list or your most active social followers – aka the people most likely to share your content. Getting a feel for what they respond to is always worthwhile, and you might notice certain trends over time.
4. Implement the one with the most clicks.
Once you have your winner, simply set it as your permanent headline. That’s all there is to it.
But your headline isn’t the only thing that gets people to click.
2. Split Test Your Featured images
Content Marketing Institute, the industry leader in content marketing, found that “ad engagement increased by 65% when a new image was tested versus simply testing new copy.”
Brian Massey summarizes it well here, “Spend as much time on your images as your copy.”
Whether you’re using paid ads in your content marketing strategy or not, the image matters almost as much as the headline (maybe more).
So, how does one select the right featured image?
There is some science behind choosing a featured image. If you think about it, picking one image is harder than picking several. So, pick a couple and let your test results decide for you.
Here are three keys that will help guide your selection.
1. Pick something compelling
Your image should relate to whatever your article is about. That said, being relevant is pretty ambiguous.
This article from Inc is not directly relevant to the content, but our brains are designed to make connections.
As long as you can relate it in some way, you’re probably OK, but you want your image to be compelling. Not any relevant image will do. Roy H. Williams, director of the business school The Wizard Academy, outlines a number of techniques that make images compelling.
Pro tip: If you use a human face, have them looking at your headline for best resuts.
The above image may not be highly relevant, but it’s use of a silhouette is compelling.
2. Make sure it is relevant to the post
Your headline and featured image should work together to be both relevant and compelling.
Let’s look at some other examples from Inc.
Do you see how they combine relevant images with compelling headlines? It makes it hard not to click on the article.
Finally, the third important factor to consider when choosing an image is…
3. Always use high-quality images
I know you already know this, but I wanted to remind you. Nothing grinds my gears more than a blog post with a terrible, grainy image.
Once you’ve chosen your images, go ahead and start splitting your traffic.
Now you know how to optimize individual posts for conversions, but what about a more general approach to your overall content marketing strategy?
The next element you should be testing is content length.
3. Find Your Ideal Content Length
Now we’re getting into the overall content creation process. Testing your ideal content length will give you an idea to help you create a content template for all your articles going forward.
According to a study done by Medium, the current ideal content length is about 1,600 words; or, around a 7-minute read.
However, this may not be the case for you.
Yes, the average posts that get the most shares are long, in-depth posts. But that doesn’t mean shorter posts don’t get shares as well. And more importantly, that doesn’t mean shorter posts won’t do a better job of driving qualified leads to your business.
The only way to know the optimum length of posts for your audience is to test it. In order to test the ideal length, you can take two different approaches.
The first and simplest option is to try a variety of content lengths over time and look for trends. You could publish a 1,500 word post one week, a 400 post the next week, a 4,000 word guide the following week, and an infographic the 4th week. Rinse and repeat. You should be testing out different content types anyway, and incorporating varying lengths of content within that schedule won’t require much more effort on your part.
The data you want to measure — time on page — is found easily in Google Analytics. This is a free analytics tool that any content marketer should become familiar with.
The second option is to split test a single post by sending segments of users to different length versions of the same post.
In similar fashion, test video length for views and watch times to see how long your videos should be.
4. Take Your Opt-in Forms Seriously
Opt-in or signup forms are a critical part of content marketing and sales funnels. It’s important that they are converting at the highest rate possible.
So what parts of your opt-in form can you test?
First, test the form length.
I’ve seen forms that ask for the whole shebang; everything from your full name to your phone number and more.
Believe it or not, this can work. Just take HubSpot for example. They have a ridiculous amount of free downloads, from templates to eBooks, and every one of them comes with a form like this:
HubSpot Form.
I put three pages into one image because it was too big to fit in one screenshot!
Here’s the kicker: They see tremendous success with this behemoth of a form. I’ve personally filled out at least a half dozen of their forms like this for free downloads.
So, what’s the ideal form length?
Well, take a look at this chart by eloqua.
It seems the optimal number of fields is 7 because you’re getting the most information with the least drop off in conversions.
That said, you can potentially get close to a 60% conversion rate when asking for only a single piece of information.
Oddly enough, the data above suggest that having 7 form fields is better than having only 2. While this is just one study, it could mean that you’ve been asking for too little information and might want to revisit your opt-in forms.
Again, it’s all about testing.
Once you’ve determined the optimal number of form fields, it’s time to test location. Test placement on the page.
Typically, forms are located:
Where you place your offers is as important as the length of your forms.
Try multiple locations. Personally, I like to include one in the sidebar, one on exit intent, and one either in the middle of or at the end of my content.
Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many choices. If you have four different opt-ins, some call-to-actions, related posts, and other things to click on, they may just leave your page altogether.
5. Split Test Your CTAs
Whenever you create a piece of content on your website, be it a blog post, a landing page, or even an about page, you should always ask yourself this question:
In other words, “Where are we sending them next?”
A lot of people have no idea how to answer that question. I mean, it’s not obvious – especially when you have a lot of content you could send them to.
You might have any one (or more) of these CTAs in your content:
How do you know where to send them?
The answer: Send them to the next stage in your funnel
Depending on your marketing strategy, this might mean immediately collecting a lead, or it could be something else.
Let me give you an example. ChannelApe provides integrations between the systems ecommerce websites use to run their business. ChannelApe offers a free trial for their automatic supplier integration as the next step for anyone reading their list of dropshippers.
This makes sense because anyone interested in a list of dropshippers is probably also interested in integrating those dropshipper’s products with their store.
Notice how ChannelApe uses a bright orange background to help their CTA stand out from the rest of their content. Color is only one of the variables you should test on your CTAs.
In addition to CTA colors, you can also test:
OK, let’s say you want to test the position of your related posts.
I know what you’re thinking.
Maybe. But what if your readers aren’t getting to the end? You don’t want them to leave, do you?
For that matter… what’s “related”? Are you tagging your posts and pages properly?
And what about the posts getting the most interaction? Don’t you think your readers would like to see those?
Or do you want to drive traffic to certain pages over others, like a “start here” page or a new blog series?
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The process of CRO, be it in your content marketing campaigns, your landing pages, or anywhere else, involves asking yourself questions about your readers in order to better understand how to help them.
Simply repeat this process of asking questions for every variable you may want to include, then put your answers to the test.
Conclusion: AB Test Your Content
Let’s recap:
If there’s one thing you should take away from this post, it’s this:
The performance of your content is no less important than any other stage in your funnel. Always test the elements of your content by asking yourself relevant questions about your readers.
Have you ever tried to split test elements of your content before? I’d love to hear. Leave a comment below and let me know!
10 Value Proposition Upgrades That Increased Conversions By At Least 100%
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB Testing10 successful value proposition examples proven by AB testing.
Conversion Sciences has completed thousands of tests on websites of all kinds for businesses of all sizes. At times, we’ve been under pressure to show results quickly. When we want to place a bet on what to test, where do we turn?
Copy and images. These are the primary components of a website’s value proposition.
It’s the #1 factor determining your conversion rate. If you deliver a poor value proposition, there is little we can do to optimize. If you nail it, we can optimize a site to new heights.
So, I have to ask: have you ever taken the time to split test your value proposition?
This article shows you how to identify a poor value proposition, hypothesize a series of better alternatives, and split test them to identify the wining combination of copy, video and images.
Essential Qualities Of A Worthwhile Value Proposition
Your value proposition is the promise you make to prospective customers about the unique value your business will deliver to them.
Your value proposition is a statement, which can be made up of the following elements:
Words carry tremendous power, but they aren’t the only element you can employ in promising defined value to potential customers. A value proposition can be made up of any of the above elements, as well as others I’ve no doubt failed to mention.
To be effective, your value proposition should include the following characteristics:
Hopefully, these criteria are making you aware of what your value proposition is not. It is not a slogan, creative phrase, or teaser.
The best way to demonstrate this is to show you some real examples of businesses that improved their conversion rates by upgrading their value propositions.
Let’s get started.
Example #1: Groove Increases Conversions By 104%
Groove is simple help desk software. It’s a streamlined product designed to help smaller teams provide personalized customer support without learning and configuring something more complicated like Zendesk.
Groove’s original homepage was converting at only 2.3%.
Groove SaaS and eCommerce Customer Support Value Proposition
After reaching out to several experts for help, they received the following advice:
With this in mind, the Groove team spent some time talking to various customers over the phone in order to get a feel for how those customers were talking about Groove and the actual words they were using.
They also changed their opening autoresponder email to the following, which ended up generating an astounding 41% response rate and becoming a prime, continuous source of qualitative data for the business:
Groove welcome email established their value proposition.
As a result of this feedback, they created a new “copy first” landing page, with a completely revamped value proposition.
Groove created a ‘copy first’ landing page based on feedback from customers
After testing the new page against the original, Groove found that it converted at 4.3% for an 87% improvement. After running additional tests with more minor tweaks over the next two weeks, the conversion rate ultimately settled at 4.7%, bringing the total improvement to 104%.
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from Groove’s big win?
Example #2: Comnio Increases Signups By 408%
Comnio is a reputation management company that helps both consumers and businesses resolve customer service issues.
After transitioning away from a moderately NSFW branding strategy, the company needed a new way to communicate it’s value and attract users. After the page below failed to convert, they contacted Conversion Sciences’ Brian Massey for a CRO strategy consultation.
Comnio’s landing page failed to convert well
Brian helped the team come up with a new version:
Comnio’s new landing page performed at a high rate
This new page was a definite improvement over the previous version, and over the next 30 days, it converted a respectable 3.6% of site visits.
That said, there were still some clear problems, the most obvious being that the opening headline and subheadline were failing to make a clear promise. In order to optimize this page, Comnio implemented the following changes:
The new page looked like this:
Comnio further refined the landing page with a significantly higher conversion rate
Thanks in large part to a strong headline, this new page converted at an incredible 18.3% over its 30-day test, a 408% increase over the previous version.
It’s also worth noting that 49% of new signups used one the social signup options available on the new page.
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from Comnio’s huge conversion spike? Whenever this many changes are implemented in one test, it hurts our ability to make specific conclusions, but here’s what I’m seeing:
Example #3: Udemy Increases Clicks By 246%
Udemy is a massive marketplace for online courses on everything you can imagine.
And while the company’s meteoric growth is certainly a testament to their product-market fit and understanding of their own value proposition, until somewhat recently, the individual course pages were very poorly optimized.
Until this last year, Udemy course pages looked like this:
Udemy landing page that needed higher conversion rates
If I’m trying to sell my course via this page, there are a number of major problems diminishing my conversion rate.
While Vanessa’s course does have a value proposition, it certainly isn’t laid out in a way that makes it defined or obvious.
Eventually, Udemy caught-on to this a tested a special layout:
Udemny redesigned landing page employing user testing
Unlike the old page, this version has a very clear value proposition, with the headline, subheadline, video and CTA all clearly displayed without distraction.
Brian Massey talks a bit about what makes this page work:
Most importantly, this new landing page receives 246% more click-throughs than the old course landing page.
Udemy also altered their normal course landing pages to incorporate some of these elements, putting the headline, subheadline and promo video front and center, with a much more obvious CTA button and all additional information below the fold.
Udemy used the same techniques to update their course page.
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from Udemy’s landing page improvements?
Example #4: 160 Driving Academy Increases Leads By 161%
160 Driving Academy is an Illinois based firm that offers truck-driving classes and guarantees a job upon graduation.
In order to improve the conversion rate on their truck-driving classes page, the company reached out to Spectrum, a lead-generation marketing company. Spectrum’s team quickly noted that the page’s stock photo was sub-optimal.
160 Driving Academy original landing page with stock photo.
The team had a real image of an actual student available to test, but almost didn’t test it out.
Ultimately, they decided to go ahead and test the real student photo anyway and simply photoshopped the logo off the sweatshirt:
Revised landing page with picture of actual student.
The primary goal of this test was to increase the number of visitors who converted into leads via the contact form to the right of the page, and this simple change resulted in an incredible 161% conversion lift with 98% confidence.
The change also resulted in a 38.4% increase (also 98% confidence) in actual class registrations via this page!
Not bad for a simple photo change.
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from this case study? Yes, stock photos tend to be poor performers, but why?
The answer lies in how our brains respond to images. Essentially, our brains are far more likely to notice and remember images versus words, but these advantages tend not to apply to stock photos, as our brains have learned to automatically ignore them.
For a more in-depth breakdown of this subject, check out this writeup from VWO.
We’ve covered 28 different takeaways in this article, and for you convenience, I’ve gone ahead and put them into an easy cheat sheet you can download via the form below.
18-28 Value Proposition Takeaways
Example #5: The HOTH Increases Leads By 844%
The HOTH is a white label SEO service company, providing link building services to agencies and SEO resellers.
Despite having what most would consider a solid homepage, their conversion rate was sitting at a very poor 1.34%. It started with the following value proposition and then followed a fairly standard landing page flow:
The Hoth homepage had a low conversion rate.
While their landing page wasn’t bad as a whole, you may be noticing that their value proposition was a bit vague and hinged primarily on the assumption that incoming users would click and watch the video.
The HOTH team decided to make a big changeup, and completely scrapped the entire landing page, replacing it with a new headline, subheadline and…. that’s it.
The Hoth made a big change to their landing page.
Behold, the brilliant new landing page!
And while you might be tempted to laugh, this new variation converted at 13.13%, an incredible 844% increase from the original!
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from this?
Example #6: Conversioner Client Increases Revenue By 65%
So yes, I know that 65% is not quite the 100% I promised you in the headline, but let’s be honest, you aren’t scoffing at a 65% increase in actual revenue.
This case study comes from Conversioner and features an unnamed client whose product enables customers to design & personalize their own invitations, greeting cards, slideshows, etc.
The client’s original homepage looked like this:
The original homepage an invitation service
At first glance, this value proposition really isn’t that bad.
Sure, they are focused primarily with themselves in the headline, but they sort of make up for it in the subheadline by discussing the direct customer benefits, right?
“Delight guests with a unique invite they won’t forget.”
There’s just one really big problem here. These customer benefits have nothing to do with the customer or the benefits.
Stop and think about it.
“Delight your guests”… who talks like that? Nobody. Nobody talks like that. When you are thinking about sending out invites, you aren’t thinking, “Hmmm how can I delight my guests?”
But we aren’t done: “… a unique invite they won’t forget.”
This copy is completely disconnected from the target consumer. Why do people send invites? Is it so their guests will never forget the invites?
No. The best possible invite is one that gets people to your event. That’s it. Your goal is a great party. Your goal is a bunch of fun people at your great party. That’s the primary metric, and it isn’t even addressed in this value proposition.
Which is why the Conversioner team made a change:
The revised homepage of the invitations service
Notice that this new variation doesn’t completely abandon the “what we do” portion of the value proposition. It is still communicating exactly what is being offered from the get-go.
“Create Free Invitations”
But then it speaks to the benefits. It’s free AND it is the start of a great party.
The proof is in the pudding, and this change resulted in a 65% increase in total revenue.
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from Conversioner’s successful experiment?
Example #7: The Sims 3 Increases Game Registrations By 128%
I’m guessing you’ve heard of The Sims franchise, but in case you haven’t, it’s one of the best selling computer game franchises in history.
While the third installment was sold as a standalone game, the business model relied heavily on in-game micro-transactions. But in order to begin making these in-game purchases, users needed to first register the game.
The Sims’ marketing team found that once players had registered, they were significantly easier to convert into repeat buyers. Registrations were primarily solicited via the game’s launch screen, but the conversion rate was unsatisfactory.
The launch screen of the Sims 3 game.
As you can see, it’s fairly obvious why nobody was registering.
Why would they? How could they?
“Join the fun!” … what does that mean? If I’m a gamer pulling up the launch screen, I already know how to join the fun. I just click the giant Play button on the left side of the screen. And there is nothing on this screen that would cause me to pause that line of action and consider registering.
Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what WiderFunnel thought when they were hired to improve this page. They quickly realized the need to incentivize users to register and make it very clear what was being requested of them.
The team came up with 6 different variations to test. Here’s their direct commentary:
#4 converted best, bringing in 128% more registrations than the original.
This version of the Sims 3 launch page performed best.
While this isn’t surprising, it serves to illustrate how simple conversion optimization can be. It’s really just a matter of giving people what they want. Sometimes, identifying what that is will be challenging. And sometimes, it will take a bit of digging.
Key Takeaways
So what should we learn from this?
Example #8: Alpha Increases Trial Downloads By 98%
Alpha Software is a software company with a number of product offerings, the most recent of which deals with mobile app development.
The company wanted to improve results for one of it’s product landing pages, pictured below:
The Alpha landing page for mobile app development.
They tested it against the following simplified page:
An alternate design for the Alpha landing page.
This new streamlined version resulted in 98% more trial signups than the original. That’s a pretty drastic improvement considering the changes can be summed up in two bullet points:
And this isn’t the only case study where the removal of navigation resulted in an uptick in conversions. It’s actually pretty common.
In a similar test by Infusionsoft, a page with secondary navigation between the headline and the rest of the value proposition…
This InfusionSoft landing page has menus under the headline.
… was tested against the same page, minus the nav bar, with different CTA text:
This version of the Infusionsoft page has no menu below the headline
The simplified page with no extra navigation bar had 40.6% more conversions at a 99.3% confidence level.
While I think the CTA change definitely played a role in these results, it’s very important for marketers to streamline the navigation of their landing pages (and their websites as a whole).
Key Takeaways
So why did I include this in our list?
Example #9: HubSpot Client Improves Conversions By 106%
For our next to last example, I want to look at a client case study released by HubSpot awhile back. This unnamed client had a homepage converting poorly at less than 2% and had decided it was time to take optimization seriously.
The client looked through several landing page best practices and decided to make some critical adjustments to their page.
The 1st change was to replace the original vague headline with a clear new headline and benefit-driven subheadline:
Two versions of a landing page with different headline designs.
The 2nd change was to add a single, obvious CTA instead of offering a buffet of product options for visitors to select from.
Two versions of a landing page with the call to action higher on the page.
The 3rd change was to move individual product selections down below the hero shot. The new page started with a single value proposition and then allowed users to navigate to specific products.
The result of these three changes was a 106% lift in page conversions.
The results of this landing page AB test.
The main issue I want to address this with study is the question of “Should we try to convert first or segment first?”
In my professional experience, combined with the many studies I’ve reviewed, it’s usually better for every page to have a clear, singular direction to begin with and then go into multiple navigation or segmentation options.
Another test that speaks to this comes from Behave.com (formerly WhichTestWon). The marketing team from fashion retailer Express had an exciting idea to test a new homepage that immediately segmented users based on whether they were looking for women’s clothing or men’s clothing.
This Express homepage tries to segment men and women right away.
They tested this against their original page that pitched the current discount in circulation and offered a singular value proposition:
This Express homepage converted better than the segmented one.
The segmented test page converted poorly compared to the original, with the following results at a 98% confidence level:
Key Takeaways
So what can we learn from these two case studies?
Example #10: TruckersReport Increases Leads By 79.3%
TruckersReport is a network of professional truck drivers, connected by a trucking industry forum that brings in over 1 million visitors per month.
One of the services they provide is assistance in helping truck drivers find better jobs. The conversion funnel for this service began with a simple online form that was followed by a 4-step resume submission process.
The initial landing page was converting at 12.1%:
Truckers report landing page.
ConversionXL was brought in to optimize this funnel, and after analyzing site data and running several qualitative tests with a few of the most recommended AB testing tools, they came up with the following insights:
Using these insights, they created and tested 6 different variations, ultimately landing on the following page:
Three views of the redesigned Truckers Report homepage.
This new page saw a conversion lift of 79.3% (yes, I know I fudged on the 100% think again… sorry not sorry). Instead of trying to explain why, I’ll simply quote Peep Laja:
The team also optimized the entire funnel, but since our focus is on value propositions today, I’ll simply direct you to Peep’s writeup for the full story.
Key Takeaways
So what are our value proposition takeaways?
10 Value Proposition Examples With 28 Takeaways
Optimizing your value proposition is a low hanging fruit that can have a tremendous impact on your website. It’s also a core consideration in a good AB testing framework.
Hopefully these 10+ value proposition examples will help you along your journey to funnel optimization.
We’ve covered 28 different takeaways in this article, and for you convenience, I’ve gone ahead and put them into an easy cheat sheet you can download via the form below.
18-28 Value Proposition Takeaways