Be careful what you ask for. How 2 words dropped CTR 36%!
Posted: November 16th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Optimization | 26 Comments »Tweet
I found this insanely surprising so I thought you’d be curious what happened.
We send out a few thousand emails every time we launch our new bundles. Our emails look like crap. Here’s what they look like:
I asked a design buddy to sexify it and here’s what turned out:
Notice anything? I didn’t either but our original had a CTR of 22% and our new one only got 14%. That’s massive when a majority of our sales come from our list.
So wtf? Let’s go to the root. Clicks dropped and luckily MailChimp shows you where people clicked. That is where we found some gold.
Eeks. 60% of clicks in our original email happened in the top section. In the new version as you can see the photo the click % of the new top was really low. Clearly we were scaring people away.
Solution = Change wording.
In our recent emails we changed the wording to “See it.” Things are better 
Take away.
- Be aware where in the process your customers are. Buying vs learning are two completely different things.
- Sexy doesn’t always mean more money. Track large changes and see the real impact.
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RED call to action button?!
Woah dude, get a UI designer. Not decorators.
The new version looks more like a typical ad or marketing piece. The original looks more like a message with content.
The former I usually delete on sight. The later I might read more carefully.
very cool – Did the original version also have higher # of purchases?
Good question. Conversion rate on the landing page was the same so the old one sold more.
Interesting. How can we make it better? I was thinking of putting more stories and reasons why we chose the services we did. What do you think?
Haha. Care to help. What color should we change it to?
@King
In a lot of tests I’ve seen done (and tests I’ve done myself), red actually does a really good job converting and getting clicks. The whole “red=stop” thing is BS, in my experience.
“We got a” tells me don’t buy, since the grammar is poor — what else is wrong?
You mean “we’ve got a”.
@JohnH haha. Good catch. No more writing at late night.
Try “Learn More” rather than “See It”.
My wife spent several years in marketing at Intuit where they usability tested everything and she said “Learn More” had an uncanny knack for beating almost any CTA.
Green works very well. We saw an increase in click thrus switching from Red to Green buttons.
Koichi is right, the red=stop thing is crap. Overall, as a best practice, red is the best color for buttons (just like blue is the best color for links). You can & should perform your own tests but I’ve tested across tens of millions of people in every vertical and way more often than not red wins.
btw, ugly usually wins too…
@Koichi:
Test!
Call to action in red never returned better conversion than green for me.
Can vary case-to-case so did you test the two here?
Anyone who tells you that surely one color or another will/not work for your site, without actually doing any testing, is full of it.
Especially with colors, what works on one site has zero correlation to what works on your site, with your customers, in the context of your emails. Principles translate (like, contrast, emphasis, language hints, etc). But absolute values are completely contextual.
Why don’t you run some A/B tests? Mailchimp has solid split testing functionality. How big is your list?
I think it has more to do with the wording versus the design. “buy now” is way too much of a committment. I would try the new design with “learn more” as suggested above. I’d be interested in any changes yo incorporate. Great post, thanks for sharing.
It might be the red in addition per other comments. See how other buy buttons are call to actions that aren’t red (translating to stop/error). Firefox for instance uses bright green, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html Google uses blue. The word changing is definitely useful obviously but the red really gets to me. Almost too powerful of a call to action.
You’ve also changed the flow which may be hurting.
In the original you have benefit list -> commitment. It’s easy to skip the first link (which hurts nothing), read the bullet points, see a price then roll into the learn more link.
In the rev you have commitment -> benefit list. You get hit straight up with a cost with nothing to support why you’d spend it, the italic blurb is visually muted (ie, skipped) then a big “COMMIT!!” button, which at this point, I have no reason to.
I’d put “What’s inside” first, kill the blurb, move the cost closer to the commit action and tone down the button’s wording / visual style a bit.
Multiple studies show that contrast of the CTA to the background is #1. Red converts more than green usually. Wording is key. Need an attention getter, leading summary and CTA (usually “learn more”). Blatant “buy this” scares people off.
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I totally wouldn’t click, because I would think its a shopping cart.
But hey, how did your conversion rates change? That’s all that matters at the EOD. Hard to do a long-term test, but it would be interesting to see your short term results.
http://tech.rawsignal.com
I agree with bb.
Some thoughts:
1) You now place a much larger emphasis on price.
2) You no longer mention the deal expires in a few days.
It feels more like an everyday purchase than a scoop.
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Wow! Great article…and like when making a recipe, I learn much from reading the “reviews” (here noted as comments). It’s so amazing how tiny details can make the difference in many dollars!
You can also show a screen grab image of what you are talking about. some visual elements to show people what they will see if they want to learn more is really useful.
In email marketing test I run through Dot.Mailer, Mailchimp and others, I get higher click throughs on the images themselves than only relying on buttons.
Give it a try and keep split testing. Good luck, thanks for sharing your results!
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