Today on our web clinic – Technology Blind Spots: How human insight revealed a hidden (and almost missed) 31% gain – we will be releasing never before published research from our laboratory. And you know what we like to do with our audience when we have fresh research that they have never seen before…
That’s right; we like to turn them into guinea pigs.
We like to see if our blog readers, knowing the basic circumstance surrounding a recent test, can predict the outcome. How good is their online marketing radar? Can they spot a good webpage when they see one? How is marketing intuition performing these days?
But honestly, what really matters is the cheese they will be racing for today – one good-ole slice of free online certification course cheese with a little Twitter-love wine to wash it down.
Leave a comment below to enter and let the games begin.
The Experiment
The Research Partner we were working with provides online consumer brokerage services through a subscription-based model. This page, in particular, was aimed at visitors interested in signing up for the foreign exchange trading (FOREX) solutions.
The Control (click to zoom)
After analyzing the current landing page, we concluded that there were some significant factors contributing to confusion on this page. For one, there were many competing graphical elements and objectives. In almost all cases, this type of layout negatively impacts conversion. We also believed that the value of this offer could be communicated with a little bit more oomph.
So we tested three designs against the control to address some of these issues.
Treatment 1 (click to zoom)
The first treatment is probably the closest to the control. However, there are some strategic changes.
First, we added a headline that better communicated the value of the offer. The copy also has been reorganized in a clearer, easier to read fashion.
And finally, we added a call-to-action button in the main section of copy.
Treatment 2 (click to zoom)
The next treatment used a more long copy approach than the control. It also incorporated a stronger headline and clearer copy layout similar to that of the first treatment.
It is important to note that some of the visual elements from the control have been removed from the bottom of the page. However, the left-hand column remained the same as the previous two designs.
Treatment 3 (click to zoom)
This version of the page is almost identical to treatment 2’s long copy layout.
The one big change for this version was that the elements in the left-hand column were changed into a simple navigation.
(Update) The Results
If you are reading this post now, the contest mentioned above is over. Congrats to @terryrydzynski, a marketer who’s intuition got him a free seat in one of our online certification courses. If I were you, I’d follow this brilliant guy’s twitter account.
Which one was the winner you ask? All of the treatments outperformed the control, but Treatment 3 had the highest conversion rate with a validated 31% increase over the control. Now the results were not too surprising if you read some of the reasoning behind our designs above. Treatment 3 significantly reduced the amount of friction over the control by removing the competing graphical elements and focusing the visitor on one objective.
So what can we learn from this experiment?
If there’s one thing that we can all take away from this case study, it is that many times we are trying to accomplish way too much with our pages, and if we could just simplify our message and make options clear for our visitors, we would potentially see an increase in response.
But this is just scratching the surface, if you would like more information about this case study and some of it’s implications, you can find a more detailed explanation in the replay of yesterday’s web clinic, which will be available next week. To be notified when the replay is available, feel free to sign up for free research updates from MarketingExperiments.