Archive for the "Conversion Testing" Category
Opt-in Email Newsletter Popup Best Practices for 2012
If you’re like the other gazillion websites trying to get people to sign up for an email newsletter, then you probably have an opt-in popup form. You know, it’s that annoying lay-over popup box that asks new visitors to opt-in with their name and emails.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were landing page optimization best practices for designing these? Then your opt-in popups could grab many more subscribers right out of the gate. At the very least, it would be good to know which elements are worth focusing on in testing.
Since we thought it would help a LOT of people to get some straight answers on popup opt-in forms, we got Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker on the phone (Conversion Voodoo is very lucky to work with the best of the best in online marketing). We had an idea for him:
“Whaddya think about us running some tests on the opt-in popup for your newsletter?” Jeremy’s reply was about as easy as they come, “Have at it!” So we did.
Not only that, but Jeremy requested that we post the results for his audience. All we could say was “absolutely!” We rarely get to publish results because 99% of our clients want to remain anonymous — so this was sweet!
Our goal was to test the “default” settings on the popup to see if there were the better ways to convert visitors into subscribers. We hoped to find some best practices to share with you for your website that may not have a horde of visitors every month like the Shoemoney blog. Although we counted more than 30 different elements in opt-in popups, we whittled that number down to the most relevant (i.e. the ones you should care about), which you’ll see in the tests below.
Read the rest of this entry »
Boost your Christmas conversions by 10.2% with a simple JavaScript trick (code included)
Hot off the conversion press and just-in-time for Christmas.
Last year we posted about our Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays test we ran for one of our clients. This year we decided to some landing page optimization tests with variations of the Christmas theme.
If you’ve followed our blog before, you know that creating a sense of urgency for your users to act usually increases conversions. Since we practice what we preach, we decided to run a headline on one of our client’s websites doing just that. We tested a headline that reminds them how near Christmas is. We came up with 2 variations of this headline: one that just states the days, and another that states the days, hours, minutes, and seconds and counts down in real time.
The test:
Here’s the day countdown:
10 days til Christmas.
Here’s the realtime seconds countdown, +10.2% in conversion rate:
9 days, 13:22:03 til Christmas.
Expedia deletes one field from their registration process, increases profit $12m
The following test from Expedia shows how understanding how your users interact with your forms leads to conversion rate gains.
Here is (our mockup) of Expedia’s experiment – see the field deletion in Variant B?
At a glance, they simply dropped the “Company name:” field and that increased their site PROFIT by $12 million a year according to Silicon.com.
Why was changing this field so critical? Read the rest of this entry »
Sexy CRO: Segment your visitors by gender to increase conversion rate . . .
In person, salespeople sell differently to men and women – here’s why that works and how to duplicate it online.
Last week I overheard a conversation about how “stylists” are trained to sell hair coloring, premium hair products, and massages to men and women differently. Read the rest of this entry »
Using an ancient JavaScript technique to drive conversion rate . . .
Despite running dozens of new tests for our clients every day, it was just two weeks ago that we finally rolled out a new landing page for ourselves.
Here’s the fun part – our landing page looks completely different depending on what day of the week or hour of the day you look at it thanks to an old-school JavaScript technique – here are a few examples:
“Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays” showdown – nearly double the conversion rate!
The Wall Street journal suggests that “Merry Christmas” still reigns in popularity as a season’s greeting over “Happy Holidays”
So how does emailing customers with one or the other impact conversion rates?
We selected a 100,000 customer list for a client who tested these subject lines:
A few additional notes on the test:
- The client is a large retailer, their customers mirror a general sample of the USA.
- The email mirrored the subject line’s message; all other elements were the same.
- We sent the email on the 21st of December.
The results show a HUGE difference . . .
As you can see the “Merry Christmas” subject line drove nearly double the click through rate of the other subject lines.
While we haven’t included the “buy rate” in the chart above due to client confidentiality, the results were similarly impressive.
Nearly doubling the number of transactions by changing an email subject line fairly well illustrates why if you’re not rigorously testing every facet of your online business (or letting us do it for you!), you’re throwing money away.
More fun with email testing:
- Personalizing your subject line can drop conversion rates . . .
- Optimize your email conversion rate with three quick tips . . .
- Unsubscribe links at the top of your emails will improve conversion rates . . .
P.S. – Contact us today to increase your conversion rate . . .
We work on a performance basis and charge nothing up front.
If you want to drastically improve your conversion rate contact us today.
Personalizing your email subject lines can drop your conversion rate . . .
Building on our last post about optimizing your email conversion rate, the 10th eMail Marketing Metrics Report came out and contains many points that you can use to help increase your conversion rate and optimize your email campaigns.
But beware, there are some traps in their data that can lead your conversion rate astray – let’s start by looking at a few of their key points:
Personalization can work against your conversion rate . . . Read the rest of this entry »
One simple secret from an 1890 economist nearly doubles website profits . . .
Back in the early days of web marketing (2002 to be exact) we managed website conversion testing for a site called Wholesaler’s Handbook.
The product was aimed at EBAY sellers to provide access to wholesale product sources, and was priced at $49.95.
Around this time we’d begun experimenting with “Price Elasticity Testing”, which was originated by an economist in 1890.
By applying this methodology, we nearly doubled the site’s profit margin in about 2 weeks . . . Read the rest of this entry »
How to track conversions without a “conversion page” in Google Optimizer
When you set up an AB Experiment through Google Website Optimizer, it expects you to have a few separate pages:
- The Control Page
- The Variant Pages
- The Conversion Page
For most websites this isn’t a problem, but what if you’re unique? What if you don’t have a typical conversion page to thank the user?
Don’t fret – we’ll show you how to trigger that conversion script if your end goal is a download, redirect, or something else non-standard. You can even use these techniques to confirm your visitors are actually reading your copy.
Increase conversion rate by making your site ugly. . .
Over the years many have contemplated the counter-intuitive ability of “ugly” sites to win huge market share – think eBay.com, Amazon.com, DrudgeReport.com, PlentyofFish.com, CraigsList.org, MySpace.com, or usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s Useit.com.
In our adventures in website optimization we’ve developed our own grand unified theory of why ugly web design works: Read the rest of this entry »