When you are spending advertising budget, you’ll always need to keep an eye on conversion rates.
In fact, it doesn’t matter how much you spend on PPC ads unless you convert them into customers possibly you’re not going to succeed in your business. In other words, if you can’t focus on conversion rate, you shouldn’t be advertising.
That being said, the conversion rate is not limited to your PPC ads. The success of your entire online business relies on conversion rate optimization.
In this article, I’ll feature three conversion rate optimization case studies.
Do keep in mind that A/B testing case studies are intended to inspire you to conduct A/B tests on your site. Just because someone finds a great result by following a tactic doesn’t guarantee the same result if you replicate it.
Instead, get lessons from these case studies and take them as an inspiration.
1. Email campaign- Changing email subject line increased click through rate from 0.73% to 0.96%
Needless to say, the subject line is a critical element of your marketing emails. If you’re looking to grow your email revenue, aside from growing your email list you’ll also need to boost the email engagement as well.
This is why testing subject line is important for your business.
Undoubtedly, good subject line easily grabs the attention of recipients and hence improves the open rate of emails.
Hubspot always wants to choose the best possible subject lines for their newsletters. So they’ve conducted an A/B test to evaluate winning subject lines.
Test Hypothesis
Instead of including the name of the company on the subject line, they wanted to test whether including sender’s name would grab more recipients’ attention, in turns leading to boosting the click-through rates.
Results
During the test, Hubspot tested two variations in the subject line—by adding a generic Hubspot sender name and by including the personal name of someone from the Hubspot’s marketing team.
- Including the name of the sender in the email subject line increased CTR from 0.73% to 0.96%
- Open rate of the control is 6.57% whereas open rate of the treatment is 7.10%
Personalize the subject line: From the test, they found that emails sent by a real person are more likely to be opened. That means people prefer hearing from a person to a company. If you’re running a newsletter on your website, try including your name in the subject line along with the website name.
2. Copyblogger’s free paywall increases the conversion rate by 400%
When it comes to email marketing, one of the common practices to encourage users to sign up to the email list is by offering an ebook or email course. As more businesses are offering generic opt-in bribes such as ebooks, it became harder to stand out from the competition.
In fact, an average email subscriber receives 416 commercial messages per month. This denotes that apart from acquiring leads, you’ll need to focus on nurturing the leads as well by increasing the engagement rate and trustworthiness of your emails.
While building an email list, how would you stand out from your competition? How would you entice more subscribers to opt-in and nurture the leads throughout your customer lifecycle?
Let’s look at the example of CopyBlogger and how they used ‘free paywall’ to encourage more signups to their list.
Test hypothesis
The team at CopyBlogger wanted to offer something more unique and valuable to their leads in return for an email address. For that purpose, they created a premium content library consists of 15 ebooks and 20-part internet marketing course called MyCopyBlogger.
They assumed that creating a free paywall will likely increase the perceived value of the leads, which eventually bring up the conversion rate.
The result
This library was accessible to registered users only, which helps eventually increasing the signup rate by 400%.
If you’re looking to create a content library for growing your email list exponentially, follow the tips below for great results.
- Repurpose your content: At a first glance, creating a premium library may look like a tedious task. If you already have quality content on your blog, all you need to do is to repurpose your existing published content and offer it in the content library as an ebook.
- Create a membership website: Create a membership site by using any of these plugins if you’re on WordPress. Only allow your members to access the downloadable products and other premium content.
3. E-Commerce- Following e-commerce best practices yield 250% increase in conversion
SustyParty.com is an e-commerce store that sells disposable party tableware.
Despite attracting lots of traffic to their homepage, they found that most of their visitors are leaving the site without making a purchase.
Clearly, the homepage was suffering from a high bounce rate. In order to make more revenue out of their existing traffic, they’ll need to find a way to reduce the bounce rate and direct the visitors to product pages from the homepage.
Test hypothesis
The entire website was built in a developer perspective. They wanted to test whether following the basic e-commerce marketing tactics like including customer testimonials prominent call-to-action buttons on the homepage will boost the conversion rate.
The result
Once the test is completed, they found a hike in conversion rate by 250%. Here are a few elements that helped them skyrocket the conversion rate.
Clear USP: People used to make snap judgments. According to a study, when a visitor lands on your website, it takes less than two-tenth of a second to form a first opinion of your brand. So as a marketer your aim should be to make a good first impression as soon as possible.
In this case, the previous version of the homepage was not self-explanatory. So adding unique selling proposition to the homepage helped visitors understand the benefits of the site.
Recommended practices: They have also implemented a few recommended practices like publishing testimonials on the homepage. This tactic has helped to raise the trust factor. The previous version of the homepage was also lacking a CTA button. So adding a prominent call to action has also encouraged users to visit the product page.
Which one is your favorite AB testing case study? Share your comments with us and let us know your thoughts.
About the author:
Shahzad Saeed is a freelance blogger for hire. He blogs on marketing, WordPress and e-commerce. Connect with him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed.
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