Small changes can make a big difference in the user experience.
In today’s MarketingExperiments Blog post, I want to dive right into one of those small changes shared by James Coulter, Marketing Optimization Specialist, Sophos, during his presentation at Optimization Summit 2013.
After receiving some brutal user feedback, James realized that optimizing the user experience was vital to the organization’s success.
James’ strategy to improve the experience was simple: Start with small changes and test your way into a big impact.
Let’s take a look at some of the research notes and get a little background information on the test.
Background: Sophos, a provider of IT security solutions for businesses.
Objective: To increase leads from quote requests.
Primary Research Question: Which CTA copy will result in the most leads?
Approach: A/B split test
Control
In the control, James’ team identified the “Request a quote” call-to-action copy as a point of potential friction in their lead generation process.
Treatment
The team hypothesized that changing the copy in the call-to-action to “Request pricing” would increase conversion based on user feedback.
Results
What you need to remember – prospects are people
By being direct and using the same terminology as prospects, Sophos increased form submissions because it spoke to users as people and not at users as prospects.
To learn more about some of the other small changes James implemented to truly revitalize the customer experience, watch the free on-demand replay of “How a Long-term Optimization Strategy Led to a 6,031% Increase in Leads” to aid your own conversion rate optimization efforts.
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Hi John
This is interesting.
What was the size of the traffic split in the A/B test?
Keep well
Reinhardt
Hi Reinhardt,
Great question, but sadly we’re not able to disclose Sophos’s raw traffic numbers in order to protect their competitive advantage.
I can tell you that their testing and optimization program has resulted in a 6,031% increase in leads. (Not just from this test, but from a strategic continued effort.)
Also, here’s a great post by Daniel Burstein on traffic size that includes some fantastic resources to aid your testing efforts.
https://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/analytics-testing/proper-sample-size-testing.html.
I hope this helps.
-best,
John Tackett
@Reinhardt
This was a global test across all our product pages, each variation received around 3,000 unique visitors before i stopped the experiment. More than necessary but i wanted the % gain to be solid.
Hi James,
Thanks for adding some insight! 🙂
-best,
John Tackett
As an insurance copywriter, I find this very interesting. “Rate” and “quote” are usually the only terms that pass compliance, but I would love to change that up to something else and see if there’s a boost in response. Now if I can convince my clients …