MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Whether you’re try­ing to get a vis­i­tor from a PPC ad to signup for your free newslet­ter or get a casual browser to reg­is­ter for your new web 2.0 ser­vice, you’ll need to pay atten­tion to your sign up form.

Sim­ple things like word­ing, color and posi­tion can seri­ously impact sign up rates.

We typ­i­cally test 4 — 5 ver­sions of signup form ideas before set­tling on the best.  Here’s we’ll reveal our last 4 sign up form tests and share our findings.

Test 1: Two Very Dif­fer­ent Forms

Here we tested two very dif­fer­ent styles of forms. Each was cre­ated by a dif­fer­ent designer.  (We often hire 2 sep­a­rate design­ers and then test  and com­pare their designs against each other).

Test 1 Results:

Form B out­per­formed A by a tiny amount. (11.64% vs 10.24%) after test­ing this on 2000 vis­i­tors from Google PPC Ads.  The dif­fer­ence was too small to be more than 80% sure that Form B would con­tinue to out­per­form A over the long term.

In this sce­nario we had to go with our gut feel­ing. Con­tin­u­ing to test the form would be a waste a time. We assumed both would do equally well, but Form B just looked more pro­fes­sional and fit in bet­ter with our site so we picked it as the winner.

This lead us to Test 2.

Test 2: Sim­i­lar Forms, Dif­fer­ent Form Headers

In this test we decided to stick to the form body design that won in Test 1.

Test 2 Result

This time we tested the form of 3000 vis­i­tors from Google PPC Ads. This time the results were more dramatic.

Form A has a 8.88% signup rate com­pared to Form B which had a 10.20% signup rate. The results showed a 85% sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance that Form B would con­tinue to out­per­form A in the long run.

We picked Form B and tried one other variation.

Test 3: Adding Our Names to the Form

Test 3 Results:

You may be won­der­ing why we added a pic­ture of our­selves on the form. Noth­ing to do with van­ity. We’re apply­ing a prin­ci­ple called the “Sesame Street Effect” — first coined by the mar­keter Alex Mandossian.

Man­doss­ian based this idea on the some research find­ings from the tele­vi­sion pro­duc­ers of Sesama Street, the hit children’s TV show. The pro­duc­ers found that chil­dren paid more atten­tion to the show when they put live human actors and vir­tual actors (mup­pets — furry con­trolled pup­pets like Ker­mit the Frog) on TV together.

Scenes with just live actors or just mup­pets did not per­form as well as scene that included a mix­ture of live and vir­tual actors.

So Man­doss­ian tested this idea on signup forms and found that the same prin­ci­ple applied. A live per­son sit­ting or hold­ing the form caused more peo­ple to pay atten­tion to it.

This is why we exper­i­mented with a design that had us sit­ting on the form.

But as we saw in Test 2 — this did not work as well as the design in Form B, with a col­or­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our team on the form. One the­ory we had was that new users were notic­ing the form but had no idea who we were.

So we decided to add a minor vari­a­tion to the form. We placed our names over our images.

The results were:

Form A had a 16.59% signup rate with 104 signups. 

Form B had a 11.91% signup rate with 71 signups.

Plug­ging this into our split test­ing soft­ware showed that we could be 99% con­fi­dent that Form A would out­per­form B over the long term. (Sta­tis­ti­cal Sig­nif­i­cance 99%).

We had a winner!

You can apply this same process to your forms. It’s impor­tant to test con­tin­u­ously and inno­vate on the design till you’re happy with the signup rate.

More infor­ma­tion on signup form design is avail­able in our ecom­merce course.

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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