This One Word Got AWeber a 12% Boost in Trial Signups

Tim: Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

What’s up fellow marketer? I’m so stoked for today’s episode. We’re going to be chatting with Hunter Boyle from AWeber about the one single word they use to increase their trial sign-ups by 12%. Before we get into that though, I want to invite you to join me on this week’s fantastic webinar called the three most important pages in your online business. On this webinar, I’ll be showing you how to focus your efforts on only three pages in your business to see massive results in your list building efforts. The webinar is Thursday at 3 p.m. eastern time so don’t wait too long to register. Just text LeadPages all one word to 38470 and you’ll be all set. One more time text LeadPages all one word to 38470 and I’ll see you on the webinar.

With that said, I’m really excited to welcome my good friend Hunter Boyle to the show. Hunter leads business development for AWeber and if you’re not familiar with AWeber, I’ll have to assume this is your first time learning about marketing online. AWeber is one of the original service providers. They’re the first I ever used and are used by tens of thousands of marketers all over the world. One thing that the folks there focus on a lot is testing and improving the results of their pages. So when I heard about this simple change, I had to feature it. There’s some really interesting psychology behind this copy test that I think you’ll be really excited about so be sure to stick around. I’m Tim Page the conversion educator here at LeadPages. This is ConversionCast and here is Hunter Boyle from AWeber.

Hey, what’s up Hunter? How is it going today?

Hunter: It’s going great Tim. Good talking with you. Thanks for having me.

Tim: Yeah, you too buddy. We had a lot of fun at the ascend summit so thanks so much for inviting me to that and really excited because I think you know, that event was all about getting better results from your business and you know, clearly you guys are always kind of trying to do great things to get results over to AWeber. So what I want to talk about today is kind of one case study that you have kind of shared with me that’s gotten you some results. Can you tell us the results you were able to get from that case study?

Hunter: Absolutely and I call this a two-minute case study. It took a lot more to really put it together and launch it and analyze it but the results were pretty impressive. It was over 12% gain in trial signups.

Tim: I love it and you know, keeping in mind somebody listening might be like oh 12% but this is trial signups , which you know, clearly often converts you, you know, paid users and when you’re talking about kind of a large organization like AWeber, that 12% makes a big difference. So for some people who might be thinking 12% is not much, just keep those things in mind because it is you know, I’m assuming that that resulted in a pretty significant revenue increase and increase in user base. Am I right in that assumption?

Hunter: Actually yes and I should clarify when I say trial increase we had a trial offer for the first month of service , which $1. So all of these folks who we’re talking about here who converted and/or [0:03:14] [Indiscernible] just the trial, actually that trial is not a free trial. That is credit cards and just $1 for the first month. So it is actually sale but it is just a trial version of the software.

Tim: That’s great. I love it. All right so before we dive into kind of what you did to get that 12%, tell us a little bit about what you do and what AWeber is all about?

Hunter: Absolutely. I lead business development for AWeber. We are an original provider of the autoresponder. We’ve been serving small mid-sized businesses and entrepreneurs with our email marketing since 1998. A lot of our best clients are in conversion optimization and content marketing space, a lot of folks that you probably know and love. We work very closely with a lot of different partners including LeadPages and some other optimization tools and we truly enjoy helping our business clients grow their email lists, their audiences, their sales and their business. We have 120,000 customers around the world and I’d be happy to help anyone who’s listening to this cast that would love to know some more about how we can help them to.

Tim: That’s great, I love it great. That’s such a great succinct way of talking about such a massive organization so that’s great. AWeber was the first email-marketing platform I had ever heard of way back in the day so love it. Obviously, we’re big fans, lots of LeadPages users use AWeber.

So with that said, let’s talk a little bit about this case study. So tell us kind of what was the control, what was the setup and the hypothesis and you know, what did ended up winning?

Hunter: Absolutely. So we test a lot of different things and in recent times, we just released an updated version of our website. One of the areas that we wanted to test among several was a call to action around the order process. So again, we have several tests running at any given time but one that we really wanted to focus on was very simple. It was trying to increase the urgency and to try and put a little more oomph behind encouraging people to go from interested prospect to trial signup/early customer. The way that we did that was very simple. This is why I called this the too many case study. We added one three-letter words to our call to action button. Want to guess what it was Tim?

[0:05:36]

Tim: Yeah I’m going to guess it was now.

Hunter: That is the one.

Tim: [Laughs]

Hunter: That is the one and again this is for anyone who’ve sort of been in the space for a while, this is not a revolutionary test. This is not what we will consider rocket science by any means but what it was was a very happy result and adding that to the button after it gets started was one that made a very big impact with a very small change.

Tim: And what page was this on?

Hunter: This was one of our pricing landing pages for the site as part of the redesign so it was getting targeted traffic from certain channels and those channels we split. I think I’m pretty sure it was 50/50 and the winner emerged pretty quickly on this one.

Tim: That’s awesome. Do you mind if I ask what channels were you driving traffic to this page from?

Hunter: This was on a main page for our site. So this was one that was absorbing organic traffic.

Tim: Great. Okay. So it was basically somebody just you know, they find AWeber, they see this is one of your pages and it says either get started or get started now, was that right?

Hunter: Get started for just $1 or get started now for just $1 was the test.

Tim: Got it okay and that’s fantastic. Okay. And so we’re talking about just basically organic traffic, a simple test of that one word and so I guess I just have to ask and this might be a really easy answer but why do you think that now worked versus not having the now there?

Hunter: Again, I think it’s like I said it’s not so much that it’s rocket science. It is really just a little bit of urgency and tapping into the psychology of people who are looking for a service. They come to a page and they are interested in making that move, taking that trial signup but that one piece of language that now is a differentiator between get started , which is a lot more passive and get started now , which is active. It’s coaching, it’s more direct and it seems to connect with at least 12.7% of the audience and a way that made them take action a lot sooner.

Tim: Yeah it’s really interesting, this is you know, we talk about how important it is to test all the time on the show and it’s funny because we’ve had all these super counter intuitive tests that people have done. I would say this is not a counter intuitive test. I would think that now would make sense that putting that word, we get people to take action but you know, it’s really funny because that immediacy has worked in so many different places. For example a launching soon page we’ve had several clients but one in particular that I could think of had a launching soon page where the button copy said something like you know, notify me right? So like notify me is like well you know, someday when your website launches tell me.

It’s so unclear, it’s so not immediate it’s very vague. But then they tested that against tell me more , which is kind of right now, right? I’m going to get results immediately. So I feel like that immediacy it’s pretty obvious that that’s something that’s going to get results but you know, again I’ve had a few people that have told me they’ve tried this where it was you know, signup or signup now or send it to me or send it to me now where some folks have not gotten results. So again this kind of just speaks to you know, that folks should always be testing this stuff in our business to see if it gets results for that.

Hunter: That’s exactly right and I mean you couldn’t hit it more on the head. We talk a lot about not relying on something as simple as button color one words with any given test to make a 30%, 40%, 50% gain and the importance of testing as larger strategy but you know, again the reason that we do it is to see how far we can get with the changes that we make. Something that’s a straightforward and simple as this even though it’s not necessarily an 80% gain but 13% almost lift in trial and paid orders, that is very significant. So I don’t look quick wins in the mouth. We certainly love to take them when we can get them and it’s again just underscores the importance of taking time to think about why you’re trying to make this test and beyond just the three-letter word and where it goes and call to action button there’s just a bigger picture when you think about the thought process on the user’s side.

[0:10:20]

So it’s important to take all that into consideration as well when you’re thinking about how minor the changes and how big the result can be.

Tim: Yeah. That’s right it really speaks to the psychology of your audience.

Hunter: Right.

Tim: You know, folks that respond well now might be people that need a little push to take action. May be people that don’t, really don’t respond well. It might may be kind of a softer sale type audience so that’s really interesting.

Hunter: Right.

Tim: So yeah thanks so much for sharing that with us. I really appreciate that and thanks for coming on ConversionCast.

Hunter: My pleasure. Thanks for the invite. It’s great to talk with you Tim.

Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again, that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.