Double Your Conversions with these 4 Lead Generation A/B Tests

For Affiliates, traffic conversion is perhaps the most important bottom line. It’s not enough to just attract customers to your service, but to actually optimize your content in a way that facilitates high numbers of conversions.

Surprisingly, a 2016 study by Econsultancy found that marketers often forget to gear their content towards conversion. Their statistics show that out of every $92 dollars spent on getting new customers, only $1 is spent on converting them. That’s shockingly bad!

The difference between acquiring customers and converting customers is striking, and it requires months of fine tuning to perfect. Perhaps the first important rule of split testing is to only apply one change at a time. For example, if you want to test the effectiveness of your CTA (call-to-action) button, leave everything else on the page the same. If there are multiple differences between each test sample, you won’t be able to accurately track the effectiveness of your optimizations.

If you’re ready to dive into A/B testing, here are four awesome ways to refine your content for maximum conversion rates!

Lead Conversion A/B Test #1: The Urgency of Your CTAs (Call-to-Actions)

Not only is this split test doable, it’s also one of the easier ones to conduct and analyze. To effectively test the urgency of your CTAs, start with its color. The more eye-catching your CTA looks, the better your chances of getting high conversion rates. In a split test performed by Hubspot, the marketing hub discovered that their red CTA button got a 21% higher conversion rate than their green CTA button. Keep in mind: the main colors on both pages were black, white, and green. Even though the green button matched the layout and stood out in general, it failed to convey the same sense of urgency as the color red. This might be a type of social conditioning, but red simply makes us want to stop and pay attention to the signage more often than cooler colors, such as green, blue, or purple.

Once you determine the CTA button color that works best for you, the next split test should involve the text that goes inside the button. While making both buttons the same color, try capitalizing your CTA text on one button and leave the other one with standard cases. Remember, you only want to try one change at a time in order to accurate track their results. This might seem long and tedious, but if you truly stick to this strategy, your conversion results will be splendid and you’ll know exactly what works!

Lead Conversion A/B Test #2: The Persuasiveness of Your Photos

We’ve written before on the psychology of design, where images play an integral part in the conversion process. Images need to be relatable and relevant to the emotions you’re trying to portray. People are more able to relate to human expressions, thus, many high-converting landing pages include photos of joyful humans with strong gazes. The gaze of the person matters, because each type of gaze conveys a different message. If the person in the image is looking directly at the user, this conveys a sense of confidence. This might not always be the right image for your layout, so feel free to try images that direct the user towards your CTA. That’s the bottom line, after all. It’s also good to remember that images should not compete with the rest of your content and draw attention away from your CTA. Conduct a split test between two different images to see their individual effectiveness. Then, try implementing a landing page with no images verses a landing page with the winning image. If the page without the image has higher conversions, you’ll know that the image actually distracts from the CTA.

Lead Conversion A/B Test #3: Headline Relevance

The number one characteristic of compelling headlines is the mentioning of benefits. Compelling headlines are necessary for all types of marketing: display advertisements, email campaigns, landing pages, and PPC advertisements. All of these marketing strategies can drive in serious leads if its headlines meet the mark. For this split test, come up with a standard headline that you normally use and test it against a slightly modified headline. The modified headline should include a benefit, such as: “Get a Short Term Loan and Solve Your Car Issue Once and For All!” It’s good to try this split test multiple times to see which benefits catch the most attention. This is one of those tests that don’t truly have an end. Headlines are crucial to your conversion rates, so keep testing out new creative strategies!

Lead Conversion A/B Test #4: Navigation Bar Strategy

Navigation bars are perhaps one of the most overlooked website attributes, although many website heat maps suggest that visitors interact with the navigation bar the most out of all the other functions on the average website. It would be a mistake to take your navigation bar lightly, as it’s so closely tied to directing the visitor towards what you want them to do. Test the order of your navigation bar based on informational hierarchy. Then, test the strength of its copy. For example, rather than naming a page, “Why Use Us,” try, “How It Works.” Optimizely tried this split test and found that the latter gained 47.7% more clicks than the former! You’ll never know which phrases your audience likes the most until you try them out.

If you want to start A/B testing and driving leads with Zero Parallel, apply to become our Affiliate today!