Landing pages that convert | Hacker News Reader

Landing pages that convert

chancebarnett.com

89 pointschegra15 comments

slaps forehead User counts. I have them on my purchasing page, why not put them on my landing page.

I love little ideas like that where I can have the A/B test literally live within a minute.

With regards to testimonials: I have rotated through a couple. They're all authentic so I can't create perfect tests of every element, but my experience has been that a generic testimonial attributed to someone just like the target customer outperforms a better testimonial attributed to someone who isn't. (In my case, a name suggesting an older woman clocks a generic male name. Which in unsurprising with 95% of my customers being ladies and most of them being older.)

How much difference did no testimonial vs male testimonial vs female testimonial make?

A statistically significant difference and then a statistically significant difference. A/B tests don't guarantee that the observed magnitude of the difference is meaningful.

(To satisfy your curiosity, it was Glenda 25.12% vs Dave 23.38%, significant at 90% confidence, and I don't have numbers handy for the testimonial vs. no testimonial test. That was prior to me tracking the results in a systematic fashion. It doesn't look like it is written anywhere on my blog, either.)

There seems to be a tension between running the test longer and collecting more profits. If you run the test longer you are less likely to pick the bad option, at the expense of trying the bad option for a longer period of time. Have you thought about a mathematical solution to this problem? Perhaps there is a good way to decide when to stop automatically.

What do you use as your p-value cutoff?

I've heard many arguments for .05 being the highest acceptable for research but it seems like you have found an acceptable p-value that is out of that range by quite a bit.

I figure that if the test is at 90% confidence, it usually means we can't really make a really really bad decision going with the favorite. So what if that tiny increase in conversions wasn't really there, I figure its time to move on to another, possibly more lucrative test. Maybe Patrick has a different or more fleshed out opinion on this.

Best part of this is the first point, "Element #1: Lead With “Finished Story” Benefits", which is probably why he led with it.

2/3 is a chicken or the egg thing, where you can't really get to being able to leverage real social proof and credibility until you get success, so you have to leverage "white lies" or other tidbits to get to that point. 4 and 5 are obvious, although they are extrapolated better than you normally see.

I find it hard to believe that people would want a free whitepaper or something like that in exchange for their email address. Why offer them anything - if they are interested in you product they'll sign up for your mailing list - if not, is there really something you can offer them to help.

Freebies work, no denying it. Doesn't matter if its a pen, a keychain, a white paper download.

They're probably interested in your product - they Googled it after all, thats why they ended up there - but they have a dozen similar pages to quickly review. So no, interest doesn't mean they want to give you their email.

What I'm trying to ask is whether offering them something which they don't want is going to help the conversion. My intuition says no.

Agreed. Web tchotchkes are so much less satisfying than physical ones.

That's because you're not your customer. It's a technique that works extremely well, and is extremely profitable. If you can't get out of your own head, and imagine that other people are different from you, you are going to fail in business... so consider this an exercise.

Thank you for the condescending reply.

Actually, I'm trying to get more information here. Its not clear how this would work, or what sort of person would care about some whitepaper.

I guess part of the problem is that the post is very vague about what the product is, who the target customer is, or why they would care about a whitepaper. If you make a consumer product/SaaS, what could they be offered that they care about to make this work?

A short course delivered over email on $PROBLEM_DOMAIN works fairly well. SEOs of my acquaintance frequently use Cosmo headlines, like 7 Mistakes Most People Make When X-ing. Yours now, totally free, if you'll give your mailing address. Deliver one a day, ask for a sale on day 4 and day 7. This works ridiculously well.

And the better the offer, the more a landing page can "get away" asking for. Offering a month of free software? Test and see if you can extract a company name and role from the visitor, or even a phone number. Offering just a short article or low-value offer? Stick to email and name. People are so used to filling our forms with their information online that if an offer is compelling, you can really push the limits and ask for an extra piece or two of important info.

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