MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Over the past few weeks I have been run­ning lots of split test­ing try­ing to find just the right way to use quotes and tes­ti­mo­ni­als in our squeeze pages.  It turns out that it is a lot more tricky than you might think.

My first hunch was that any tes­ti­mo­nial any­where on the page would work great.  That, how­ever, is not how it goes.  Adding a pic­ture with a tes­ti­mo­nial might actu­ally decrease the con­ver­sion rate of your land­ing page but more to that in another test that I will be writ­ing about later.

I did, how­ever, stum­ble upon one tech­nique that turned out to work incred­i­bly well.  I started to use my sub-title as a place for tes­ti­mo­ni­als.  Not only did I put the sub-title into quotes, I actu­ally used a sen­tence that one of our cus­tomers had emailed us. 

In the test below, we were able to boost the sign-up rate of our page by over 100% with the new sub-headline!  Ok, ok, you might say that the other head­line is very poor but the results are nev­er­the­less so encour­ag­ing that I wanted to share them with you.  This test def­i­nitely shows that adding a short cus­tomer tes­ti­mo­nial into the sub­head­line might work won­ders for your site. 

It is true that the tes­ti­mo­nial is not qual­i­fied (i.e. in this case we don’t show who this tes­ti­mo­nial is from since we don’t have room for that in the sub-headline).  How­ever, it does show that often your cus­tomers have a way of speak­ing and writ­ing about your prod­uct that seems more authen­tic and sin­cere and adding that touch into the sub-headline can have a very big impact on the con­ver­sion rate of your site.

Here are the details of this test:

Win­ning sub-headline:

Los­ing sub-headline:

Detailed Results:

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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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