As we announced a couple weeks ago, we’ve been experimenting with our ‘Contact Us’ button on our solutions pages to try and increase clicks (and ultimately, conversions to fill out a contact form). Our first round of testing resulted in a successful 205% lift in clicks, so we were eager to try out more styles and see if we could get that number even higher. After all, we were high on a “mess with success” rush and couldn’t wait to get more clicks. What ended up happening was actually a bit more complicated than that.
This time around we used our new button in the left hand navigation as the control. Feeling confident that the specific messaging of “I’m interested in ” would convert to qualified leads, we decided only to test those button styles to make them more noticeable. Here’s what we tested.
For the right side button, we chose the winning button style from round one but decided to play with the wording. We thought that “find out more” might have gotten such high clicks because the text was misleading. Perhaps visitors were clicking through expecting to get more information or download something, not fill out a form. So we changed the wording to a more concrete step in the sales process, “get started.” Here are the scenarios we ran on the right side of the page.
The winning combination ended up being option B on the left side (13.20% lift) and option F on the right side (96.21% lift). The combination together brought a total overall lift in clicks of 96%. Not bad after our previous 205% lift, but digging deeper into the data told a more discouraging tale. While our overall lift in clicks is up over the first test, our conversion to form fills actually decreased. In the first test we not only got 205% lift, but we had a 34% conversion of those clicks to completed contact forms. In the second test however, we got an additional 96% lift, but our conversions to completed forms decreased to only 22%. Even the numbers of conversions themselves were lower, not just total percentage of conversions. This was discouraging news. On the one hand, we’d achieved our goal. But it had actually hurt our lead numbers.
So what does all of this data tell us? The moral of the story is that you have to find the right mixture of success for your marketing efforts. While our original goal was to increase clicks, that doesn’t get us very far if we are actually losing out on conversions to leads. It’s important to look at the whole picture and decide what metrics are important to you (in our case form fills) and what metrics you’re willing to let go of (we’re taking a hard look at whether clicks is as important as we’d originally thought).
We still aren’t sure exactly what about this combination led to decreased form fills, but we’ll keep testing until we find our right mix. Now that we’ve gotten significant lift in clicks, we’re going to shift focus to this mix for success. We’re currently evaluating the user behavior on our solutions pages to see what other actions are compelling for people who click to contact us. What steps do they take first? What are our top referring pages? How long are the converted visitors on the page before they click? At the same time, we are re-evaluating our form itself, to see if the problem lays somewhere in length or look of the form. As always, we’ll keep you updated about what we find.
Get more info on this test series and check out our other testing topics at Webtrends Backstage Access.
