How do You Test Your Call-To-Actions?

How do You Test Your Call-To-Actions?

Dennis van der Heijden
September 22, 2014
Headline A/B Testing

To be successful, you have to make sure you’re always testing big. You are never going to make a million dollars by simply testing red button versus green button. You need to have large amounts of traffic to make that kind of change. Test things like images and test things like audio. Also test things like multi-step forms versus single-step forms. The idea here is to do things that have a genuine risk of going bad. And by so doing, you’ll also have a genuine possibility of doing really great.

You can also end your test quickly if you have something that clearly shows a winner. And rather than pondering which one of two similar things does slightly better than the other, you can proceed to simply make things better. Take, for example, when you’re in the business of setting up software. Some of the things people will need to know is whether or not they can get updates. They also need to know how it’s going to be delivered. With regard to products; people will want to know what kind of guarantees you offer, what kind of shipping do you have, and what kind of return policy you have – they need to know all this and it becomes an express value for the viewer.

Implied Values

Headline A/B testingHowever, there are also a lot of things that can be said in terms of implied values. Like what is your brand, or who uses it. Think about what is going to be most emotionally evocative for the person interacting with your website, with your content. To determine which of the multiple ways stands a better chance of how people engage with your content, here’s how you can go about it.

When you test things individually, it’s fine to have three different versions with each testing one major hypothesis. What if you’ve only two versions, and one of them is testing three different things all at once? You’re not really going to know what the net effect is, and you’re not going to know which one of the various test perimeters is making a real difference. So be straight about one major hypothesis and really make a bold move and you’ll continue to not only notice improvements, but you will also be experiencing significant improvement.

A Fresh Perspective

Getting a fresh or new perspective makes it easier to bring someone in to work on it. So, if a junior person steps in and they need to know what it is you’re testing, they can’t just see it. Obviously that was a headline test, obviously that was a button test or image test. It’s going to take a lot more time for you to transfer over it. So you’ll have better time telling what it is you’ve already tested, and what hypothesis works and what doesn’t. If you create distinct differences between pages, you can test one at a time for base to variation. You can view the webinar in its entirety right here.

Originally published September 22, 2014 - Updated April 15, 2019
Dennis van der Heijden
Co-founder and CEO of Convert.com, Dennis is a passionate community builder and out of the box thinker. He spends his time innovating to make Convert Experiences better. Learn about his journey as an entrepreneur and leader on the SaaS Club podcast.
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