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

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