How James Schramko’s Two Landing Pages Both Converted at 76%: Split Test

Tim:Hey fellow marketer. I feel like I should be singing that line. Anyway thanks for joining me today. Now today’s guest is going to share with us a split test between two landing pages, both converting at 76%. We’ve got the screenshots of those exact landing pages along with an image showing unbelievable test results right on our website. Visit ConversionCast.com/SuperfastBusiness and download it right now. Again that’s ConversionCast.com/SuperFastBusiness. Now for some of you just hearing Super Fast Business might have gotten you extremely excited because you know that that means our friend James Schramko is joining us today.

One of the things that we pride ourselves on here at Conversion Cast is only showing you the absolute reality of how things work. In that spirit, today we wanted to show you a split test that yielded almost zero change. That’s right, almost zero change. But why would we do that? Well the reason we’re doing is because I want you to hear how even a zero change split test can result in some powerful takeaways, which James reveals on this episode, and how he’s going to do with those results going forward. It’s pretty awesome. Now since you’ll probably want to see exactly what we’re talking about, if I were you, I’d head to ConversionCast.com/SuperfastBusiness to download the screenshots of the landing pages first just to easily to put things into context. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages. This is Conversion Cast and here’s James Schramko from Superfast Business.

Tim:Awesome James. Thanks so much for coming on Conversion Cast. I’m excited to have you here man.

James:Yeah well it’s great to be talking about this sort of stuff.

Tim:Yeah it’s fun times. So we were just talking. We talked about a really –probably the most interesting split test results that I think I’ve ever seen. Can you tell us what the results were of this test?

James:The results of this test where I was getting a very steady 76.36 conversion somewhere around that from my original. I’ve put a test against it and I’ve got a 1.17 – I was actually very surprised how little it changed.

Tim:That’s amazing and if you head over to ConversionCast.com/superfastbusiness, you get to see the actual images from this split test. You can see how incredibly close this graph is. It’s unbelievable. So that’s what I’m excited to talk about because we always talk about these incredible numbers that people get. We never get to hear about the split tests that are almost for naught. So before we get into the specific test though I think it would be important for anybody listening that doesn’t know who you are just tell a little bit about who you are and what you do at Superfast Business.

James:Sure. SuperfastBusiness.com is the central hub to my business. That’s where I have an internet business coaching community and we also have reviews and recommended products. Of course [0:03:11] [Indiscernible] I’m talking about the tools that I use and aside from that we have a services side to the business which run off their own URLs where we do website development and search engine optimization. But Superfast business is where we talk about that and communicate it and give away a lot of free content.

Tim:Okay. So you did this test, what brought you to want to do this test? I mean was it just you had you know, – you’re just constantly testing or what brought you to want to test these two, this very simple split test?

James:What brought me to do it is just the habit and the discipline of knowing whether or not I put out a new offering to the market. I know that it’s best practice to be running a test because I quite came to get an earlier optimization win and to increase my result from the same effort. So it’s not much effort to start a test and I was hoping for a dramatically different result. But I learned something quite different about it. [Laughs] as an end result from it. Now that we’ve concluded that test we’re running the next test and we’ve got a dramatically different swing, which is what we’re thinking we’d get the first time.

Tim:Awesome. So what – tell us a little bit about the test?

James:So what we did is you know, for the last year or so, I’ve been giving away a course called Own the Race Course. And I’ve tested that fairly extensively and one of the tests I did was to replace the stock image of a lady in the background to remove it and just have a blank background. That test easily won compared to the image in the background. So what I tested this time is we started with our best test from before where we had a standard opt-in and with no background and then we loaded up the test with a background image of me the same as what they’re getting in the training and the same as the thumbnail video that went out in an email and it’s the same as what was on the video that talked about this course that I’m giving away. So it’s very consistent in look and feel.

[0:05:15]

And when we had run this test last time, you know, one of the things I thought worked about our plain page versus the stock image was that it was in the look and feel of our website. So I was hoping that the trust factor would go up, the interest in the page would go up. But we really got such a minimal change. In fact it was slightly worse.

Tim:Yeah and you know, there’s a few things I think at play here. One thing that is so incredible is that the conversion rate is super high even with whether it’s with a background or not. We’re talking you know, 76%, over 76% conversion rate. What do you attribute that to?

James:So I was also surprised by that because I’m used to you know, closer to 30% or so from regular traffic sources coming to the other opt-in that I have. So I attribute that to the traffic source. I think the majority of those people have come off in the email from me from my own list or a social share from someone who the person is visiting the site trust. That might be where the –you know, that might be why it’s not 100%. Maybe we’ve got some Twitter stream, retweets and stuff. One thing that I do that’s worked really well for me is on my thank you confirm page where people have double opted in. They get all the material, I then ask them if they be kind enough to retweet. I’ve just downloaded notification for free.

When I searched in Twitter for my username, I get all these – I just downloaded notification for free so there’s like pages of them. And I’m sure that the Twitter stream of people who are seeing that will come and click on it and they end up back at the opt-in page. So I think that if we’re talking about a high-level trust and a good relationship happening here.

Tim:Okay. In this case I’m just really curious what your thoughts are why you think that maybe these tests are just so darned close?

James:I think because if they already trust me from the traffic source than having an image of me or the brand URL is probably talking past the sale. It’s probably it’s not required and it might be interesting to see if it would change over time or the traffic source. But what we’ve done now is declared the original as a winner even though I can’t really split it either way. Now we’ve put up a video opt-in page against the static page and so far and I won’t give you the stats on it because they’re not statistically valid yet but it’s opting in closer at 50%. So I think it’s going to be a dramatically different result and I think the static page is looking like it’s likely to win. Again, it’s like we’re slowing people down and causing them to have to hit play and find out what this is now. I think the main learning from me is like just give people the least possible resistance to move forward and less elements tend to work quite well for my customers because they’re not – I’m not hippy and I’m not cajoling or pushing or probing at people. I’m just sort laying out here it is. And a lot of people already know me when they come into this page.

Tim:So the video page is what you’re saying is converting closer to 50% and still this original kind of not blank but the blank background page that’s the one that’s still converting around 76%?

James:Yes.

Tim:Wow.

James:So my next test when I declare a winner from the next one, assuming it’s a static one is we’ll tune the colors of the simple page to be more in line with our website, which is the winning test from our own the racecourse giveaway. On that one now where they’re making some fine tuning and getting some results that you know, not that much different but they’re kind of like the refinements and we could talk about that too if you’re interested.

Tim:Yeah I do want to talk about that. And you’re talking about the different button texts?

James:Yeah they just changed the button. Now we’ve eliminated the video, we’ve eliminated the image background. We’re now down to seeing if a button makes a difference and apparently it does.

Tim:Okay. So you’ve got one button that says confirm. Here’s just for anybody that’s listening that can’t obviously look at the copy, the headline says free training reveals and then the text is how to increase traffic, get more sales, own your own asset and the next line is enter your email below to get this free report. In the actual box it says enter a valid email here and then the button text is what’s switched. So we’ve got one that says send my training and the other one that says confirm.

[0:10:05]

And then looking at the graph, I mean if you – if you see this thing, first off, it’s a little bit all over the place but the two graphs are really, really I mean they’re pretty consistent but I think there is a clear winner. It looks like. Would you agree with that?

James:Yeah. Well it says that there’s a 39.86% probably of outperforming the original. So it’s still probably early days. It’s been four and a half thousand visitors and 4921 conversions since we’re running this test. But it does look like confirm is beating send my training.

Tim:And is that what you would have expected or would you expect send my training to perform better?

James:I actually thought confirm would beat send my training and it’s just in line with my less resistance, less things to process philosophy. I wonder you know, sometimes we’ve seen a lot of the test that says submit is not the ideal button to have but confirm is kind of like yeah I’m up for it, hit me.

Tim:And now looking back on either or both of these tests, is there anything – I mean obviously we’re hoping for some pretty significant results but is there anything you would have changed to maybe see if that would really alter the results?

James:Well the things I would have changed I will change so —

Tim:Okay.

James:– I believe on my notification opt-in, I think it’s slightly better in terms of the copy because it says free course instead of report. And I think cost is a more impressive thing and I’d be interested to test changing report on my own racecourse training to course because it really is a ten-part course. So I’ll be changing that. Now that I –I think I can probably declare a winner on that fairly soon. I’d like to get on with testing course versus report. That will be my next test. And on the wealthyfication one, I’m going to test the – a different version of the static opt-in just different color palettes because I think that made quite a difference when we did it on own the racecourse.

Tim:Fantastic. Awesome James. Well thank you so much for sharing these results with us. I really appreciate it.

James:Well that’s all right. I’m sorry they’re so unremarkable. [Laughs] You know, like there’s no 75% game that I think the main takeaways for me as the instigator of this is that the traffic source is very important. If you have a good quality traffic source, you can get away with just about anything. And for me having less elements and making it extremely easy to flow through tend to work better and a contrasting colored button and stuff that that probably helped as well.

Tim:Yeah that’s – those are some pretty good insights and it’s different because you’ll hear a lot of people saying different things, a lot of people say they love the video background, a lot of people don’t like the video background so tests like this are really the only way to know and so it’s good that you’re constantly testing and you know, we’ll keep following along and of course continuing to feature them on the LeadPages.

James:Thanks so much.

Tim:Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversion Cast. 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 Conversion Cast. 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 ConversoinCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.