Alex Birkett is a former content and growth marketer at CXL. Currently, he is the co-founder at Omniscient Digital and works on user acquisition growth at HubSpot. Follow his writing at alexbirkett.com.
A/B testing splits traffic 50/50 between a control and a variation. A/B split testing is a new term for an old technique—controlled experimentation.
Yet for all the content out there about it, people still test the wrong things and run A/B tests incorrectly.
How you design a survey or a form will affect the answers you get. This includes the language you use, the order of the questions, and, of course, the survey scale: the default values and ranges you use.
Your users will make mistakes. It’s inevitable. That’s what error messages are for—but so many companies fail to follow best practices, and they’re pissing off potential customers in the process.
So, how can we better design error messages to improve the user experience and increase conversions?
There’s a philosophical statistics debate in the A/B testing world: Bayesian vs. Frequentist.
This is not a new debate. Thomas Bayes wrote “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” in 1763, and it’s been an academic argument ever since.
It’s a cultural trope to “want what you can’t have,” but it’s also a principle based in decades of psychological research. That principle, scarcity, is incredibly powerful in marketing, persuasion, and conversion optimization—when done right especially in a free market with limited resources.
If you’re not following form design best practices, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
While forms aren’t the sexiest part of conversion optimization, they tend to be the closest to the money—the macro-conversions. Spending a little time optimizing forms can be some of the most important optimization work you can do.
Of course, best practices don’t work the same on all sites. It’s contextual. But generally, implementing form design tactics that work more often than not is a good way to get started.
As much as we’d like to think that we’re rational, the reality is, we make many of our decisions emotionally.
Clicks, shares, purchases, comments, engagement are all subject to emotional decision making.
So how can you use this fact to your advantage?
At a certain point, the results from your A/B testing will likely slow down. Even after dozens of small iterations, the needle just won’t move.
Reaching diminishing returns, is never fun. But what exactly does that mean? In most cases, you’re probably hit a local maximum.
So the question is, what do you do now?
Most articles will tell you that poor grammar can kill sales. While not as important in blog posts as in sales copy, grammatical errors can dissolve credibility, possibly resulting in fewer sales.
But what does the actual data say?
Perception isn’t always the same thing as reality, even when it comes to something as “objective” as your product’s value.
In fact, the perceived value of your product is fairly malleable. There are countless studies, as well as anecdotes, that support the notion that you can tweak small things to increase your product’s value perception.