On one of my sites I decided to add some inline video (hosted via YouTube) to demonstrate some important aspects of the product. I made four videos in about 20 minutes and was all set. These are not professionally done at all — simple screencasts of me working through the software and talking.
At any rate, I placed the four videos in their relevant sections of the sales copy and began a splittest:
Original: The user would click on a link, which would open a new browser window and launch a screencast I had made using Camtasia. There was no audio, just popup bubbles explaining things.
New: The user sees the embedded videos right there inline. The videos are about the same content-wise, but have audio of me explaining things as I go — no popup bubbles requiring reading.
The results have been phenomenal:
As you can see it’s holding very strong (98 conversions are enough for a statistically significant result…standing on its own) at 3.34% conversion. Granted, Google’s Website Optimizer says it doesn’t have enough data to declare a high-confidence winner yet, but 97.4% was high enough to merit writing this post.
So what are some key takeaways from this?
- It’s fairly obvious that visitors (at least in my niche) respond well to video.
- 20 minutes of work can boost sales 33%.
For those of you that don’t know, on my lawn care website I sell a kit that helps people start a lawn care business. I sell two versions of the kit, a basic kit for $49.95 and a Premium kit for $99.95.
I just finished running a test through Google’s website optimizer tool where I tested just selling the Premium kit against selling both the basic and the Premium. To my surprise in a side by side AB test the original version where I push the basic and premium together converted 36% better than the version that only pushed the Premium. Ironically, during that time of testing 80% of the sales that came through the original version were for the premium kit.
What I learned from the test:
People like to have options. Even though the vast majority of the customers bought the Premium Kit, they seem to be more at ease knowing there is a cheaper version. At least the conversion rates would suggest so.
I will next be testing adding a third version of the kit. This should get interesting.
Sorry about the lame rhyming title. I couldn’t come up with anything more clever. Lately I have been running a split test on LawnCareDirectory’s sales page to see if I could increase conversions on the page. I have run many tests before testing headlines, page layout testimonials etc.
This time I was testing the header of the page. I have a header on the sales page that has a picture of the business kit I sell and then a button to order the kit and one to sign up for the email list I have. I wanted to know if having those two buttons there was taking away from sales. So I tested taking that header out.
Here is the original header:
And here is the test page where I took out the header:
As you can see the look of the page is significantly different without the header. Personally, I don’t like it as much. It seems less attractive without the header.
The visitors to my website didn’t care either way. I have been running this test for 2 months and sales are almost identical with both versions of the sales page.
Lesson learned: This particular header isn’t a deciding factor when people are making the decision to buy my lawn care business package.
Some people will want to say that this test was a waste of time. Even if the test page would have resulted in much lower sales it still wouldn’t have been a waste of time. No matter what the result of a split test is, I am always more knowledgeable after.
