If your key marketing goal for the year is to increase conversions, it can be tempting to use best practices and advice from marketing gurus when it comes to conversion optimization. The question is, how do you know if the changes you are making are going to work for you? If your answer is because you saw it suggested in a marketing blog somewhere, you might be barking up the wrong tree. If there’s no data behind the suggestions, it’s just hearsay. Instead, why not check out these simple A/B tests that other brands have used to seriously boost their conversions?

Asking For a Credit Card Vs. Not Asking For a Credit Card

Free trials are great. After all, who doesn’t enjoy the opportunity to try before they buy. You benefit, because you get your product in somebody’s hands for a period of time. What better way to convince them that they cannot live without it. Your potential customer gets to do a bit of test driving before they make a decision.

In fact, you’ve probably signed up for several free trials yourself. You were probably happy to give up your credit card number to get those free trials as well. Weren’t you? If you balk at the idea of giving your financial information for a free trial you aren’t alone.

According to this study, significantly more people will sign up for a free trial if they don’t have to enter a card number. Then, when the trial is over, they are also more likely to convert to paying customers.

Introducing a Live Chat Feature

If you have a landing page that isn’t converting, there are a few things that you can do to figure out why. You can look at your analytics. You can compare your high converting pages to your low converting pages. You can possibly even survey your visitors as they exit your site. These things might get you into the same building as your problem, but they won’t provide you with concrete answers much of the time.

This is where live chat can help. A customer who is confused or who has questions, might bounce if there only option is to send an email or call a customer service number. However, if they had immediate access to someone that could help them, it’s quite likely they would stick around. It’s a bit like having customer service rep and sales person right their to faciliate the conversion.

And don’t forget about good writing skills of your customer support manager. In the situation, when customer asks for help in an online chat, your support is the face of your company. And here, perfect writing skill is a must. Otherwise you can lower your sales, because lots of people do not trust companies with uneducated personal.

Shortening And Simplifying Forms

Collecting data from customers is a marketer’s dream. After all, the more information you have, the easier targeting becomes. Unfortunately, trying to get that information  using your forms can cost you more conversions than you know. Imagescape significantly reduced the number of fields in a form on one of their landing pages, and saw a 120% increase in conversions.

Of course, as you are testing form changes, it’s important to understand which fields are best eliminated. For example, fields that contain drop down boxes have been proven to have a very negative impact on conversions. It’s also been discovered that the issues with long forms aren’t usually mitigated with the use of mandatory field asterisks.

Free Trial or Purchase Now

GetResponse is an email marketing firm that offers customers both a free trial option and the ability to purchase their product. Initially, the free trial offer was only displayed on a few pages. It was not on the home page. They decided to add the free trial button on the home page next to the ‘buy now’ CTA.

After they did this, A/B testing showed that adding the free trial option to the home page increased trial subscriptions by over 158%. In addition to this, there was no negative impact on the number of visitors who opted to make a purchase without the free trial. The company’s takeaway from all of this is that not only did sales remain the same, they also gained the benefit of having more free subscribers who will likely upgrade in the future.

Displaying Trust Badges

They seem like small things, but displaying a trust badge can have a significant impact on the number of conversions that you get on a particular page. Considering that data security issues have been a constant presence in the news and that data related crimes are on the increase, customers want assurance that their personal and financial data won’t be exploited. In fact, 17% of customers who drop out before they complete a transaction state that it is due to worries about the security of making a payment.

Placing a trust badge on landing pages, your checkout page, and pages where you ask for personal information can help to convert customers who are a bit nervous about giving up that information. There is certainly no harm to be done by testing this out. Although, it is important to know the best trust badges to use. Not all are regarded with the same level of respect and trust.

Support Vs. Sales

When people think of A/B testing, they mostly think of web pages, what appears on them, and where. They often forget that anything that is made available for consumption can and should be subjected to strong A/B testing. This includes marketing emails. ActiveNetwork took this philosophy to heart and decided to test a few different versions of a marketing email.

The first test they did was to compose the email in a way that focused directly on making a sale. The second was worded in a way that focused on customer support. Once the test results were in, it became clear that the supportive email received much better results than the sales oriented email. In fact, lead inquiries went up 349%.

CTA Button Color Text And Placement

For such a small thing, there are many options when it comes to your call to action buttons. As a result, the number of tests that you can perform are nearly limitless. Not only can you test size, color, text, and location, there are tests that you can perform based on various combinations of changes. One thing that is certain is that the right change to your CTA button can have a major impact on your conversion rates.

In some instances, simply changing the color of a button boosted conversions by more than 30%. In another example, WriteWork played around with their CTA button text and earned a 31% increase in conversions.

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