This article was contributed by Shahzad Saeed.

Everyone wants to create an appealing design for their website. No matter how aesthetically pleasing your website is, unless it turns your visitors into customers, your business will not generate revenue.

When it comes to generating more revenue, marketers often focus heavily on acquiring new customers. Though there is nothing wrong with focusing on customer acquisition, the reality is if you are not converting visitors into customers, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Focusing solely on customer acquisition without conducting AB tests is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole. Just as leaky buckets can’t hold water, your website can’t generate revenue if you aren’t focused on increasing conversion by conducting AB tests.

How would you start conversion optimization in the first place?

Conversion optimization starts with evaluating your website’s sales funnel.

You’ll need to figure out different ways to convert more visitors into customers by analyzing your traffic stats. After your analysis, all you need to do is to come up with hypotheses and test them to check if it helps to bring in more conversion.

In this article, I’ll show you some proven a/b testing tactics that can skyrocket conversion rate.

Please note that A/B testing case studies are meant for making you inspired to conduct further tests and research. Since each testing situation can be different, you should not blindly follow other marketers’ success; instead take it as inspiration.

So let’s get started.

1. Will removing the navigation menu in a landing page increase conversion rates?

CareerPointCollege.edu provides diplomas and degrees in diverse educational disciplines. They run a college offering various educational programs. Their business lies in graduating talented students by enrolling students in their programs.

As they have an email list of potential students, they decided to spend a few bucks on PPC advertising in order to build their e-mail list, so they can turn more of them to join their programs.

Their PPC campaign was converting at 3.12%, which is not too bad. However, they decided to run an A/B test on their landing page in order to increase the conversion rate.

Test hypothesis

If the landing page is further optimized for conversion by removing the navigation menu and improving the design of the form layout, the conversion rate will improve.

The results

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The test ran for 23 days by acquiring traffic using Google AdWords. At the end of the test, the conversion rate increased from 3.12% to 13.64%.

Lesson learned

• Optimize your landing page: If you’re acquiring PPC traffic, make sure you drive traffic to a customized landing page instead of a homepage with lots of external links and navigation menu. Many WordPress users simply create a landing page with their existing theme template, which is probably the easiest way. Maybe they don’t want to hire a designer to create a landing page. If that’s the case for you, try using any landing page plugin, so you can create customized landing page without having to touch a single line of code.
• Optimize the form layout: Optimizing the form is as important as creating a customized landing page. Instead of using the default form on your landing page, which you created from your list building tool, try using a free plugin like Optin Forms to create a beautiful customized form layout.

2. The impact of an explainer video on signup rate

Crazy Egg is a SaaS product that helps users identify where exactly the web visitors click.

Despite being a well established company, it was pretty difficult for them to convey the purpose of their product to new visitors. To explain the purpose, they did use a long sales page as their homepage. However, the problem is not everyone who lands on their homepage is interested in reading the long sales page. They want to figure out a way to explain the purpose without having to read the full long sales copy.

Test hypothesis

Using an explainer video on the homepage can easily convey the purpose of their product, which in turn increases the conversion rate.

The result

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By adding an explainer video to the homepage, they’ve successfully increased the conversion rate by 64%.

Lesson learned

If you’re looking to create an explainer video for your website, below are a few actionable tips you can learn from the CrazyEgg’s case.

• Survey your visitors: Ask your visitors what’s stopping them from buying your product. In this case of Crazy Egg, visitors answered that they thought Crazy Egg was no different from overlay report of Google Analytics.

In their video, they primarily explained the differences between GA and Crazy Egg, and how using the tool will help users’ website to grow further.

• Write an awesome script: Once you conducted a survey, the next step is to create an awesome video script. During scripting process, make sure you answer all the objections of your potential customers and ensure video gets no longer than 2-3 minutes.

3. Why reducing the number of form fields are not always recommended

IronMountain.com is a B2B information software and management company.

While auditing their lead flow, the team at Iron Mountain found that even though the lead quantity is high, lead quality is not up to the mark.

While you could easily encourage the number of form submissions in various ways; for example, by reducing the number of fields in the forms, such practice may sacrifice the quality of the leads.

Generating quality leads require gathering more information about them, which includes phone number, company name and job function, etc.

However, the toughest part is not making the lead fill out the form but validating the information the user submits.

Test hypothesis

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Visitors will submit full information accurately if all fields are validated. In addition, changing the title of contact form from “contact us today” to “get in touch” will drive the right kind of leads, which means sales inquiry leads.

Results

The goal of the test is to increase the number of qualified leads. A form submission is considered as qualified if the lead submits accurate phone number for sales inquiry, not as support or recruiting inquiry.

At the end, variation form improved qualified leads by 140%.

Lessons learned

Here are a few ways how improving the quality of a lead helped them.

• Improved efficiency: Improving quality of the lead increased the efficiency of sales team. This helped them to focus more on selling rather than qualifying and researching the contacts.
• Follow up: Capturing more information like job title and name of the company, etc. helped the sales team to tailor their follow up conversations focusing on the lead’s industry rather than sending them a generic email.

Final takeaway

From the above case studies it is evident that conversion optimization can further grow your business in terms of both leads and revenue.

Here are few additional tips that will help you while conducting a split test.

• Research before the test: Mining your web analytics data will give you proper actionable insight for A/B testing. It helps you understand more about your website visitors and what stop people from converting.
• Nurture the leads: Converting a visitor into a customer is just a beginning. For sustainable business, make sure you nurture the leads throughout your sales funnel by listening to their needs and providing answers.

Have you ever conducted an A/B test on your website? Share your thoughts and comments with us by dropping a line below.

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Shahzad Saeed specializes in content marketing for startups and small businesses. He writes on CRO, ecommerce, marketing and design. You can hire him for your next writing project.