One of the things on my list is to try calls to action which are not Sign Up, precisely because folks think that that involves either making a commitment or paying money. (I get at least a half dozen emails a month asking me to cancel a free trial, from folks who grew up in a generation where anyone giving you something free is going to send you a bill 30 days later.)
"There is no reason why 'It’s free' should work better than 'Sign up for free'"<p>Actually I disagree. The phrase "sign up for free" contains some hint of a potential "but", similar to "free to join" or "download trial for free", or other carefully worded phrases that litter anything-but-free internet offers.<p>"it's free" is far more emphatic and open.
hey Spif,<p>Effectiveness of this kind of test should not just be done at the spot where you make the change but end-to-end.<p>It's very well possible that by placing the 'it's free!' there the signups shift to a much larger number of people that will never convert to paying members (for a freemium site).<p>If you only test at the point of making the change it is very well possible to actually increase free sign-ups but to <i>decrease</i> your conversion rate to paying members.<p>So, this test is about an intermediary goal, the real conversion is the rate between new visitors and paying members.<p>I sure hope that your overall conversion rate to paying members shows a similar increase, but make sure that really is the case.
Although the two words weren't revolutionary we were quite surprised by the increase. Mind you we had about 6 other variations as well, including "It's free up to 250 contacts" and an orange version of the "Signup now!" button - both we thought would have higher conversion.
Just wanted to point out that it seems like you guys are following the feedback in this thread:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351460" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351460</a><p>Which is totally rad :)<p>Now if only you could modify the video on your site or post a blog post to explain... how does my site get loaded into your 'visual editor?' Does all my css stay there? etc. The video makes it look like the site has magically been loaded into the editor and everything's intact :P
EDIT: Just confirm, I think I was incorrect in the message below.<p>I'm not completely sure I'm correct (please correct me if I'm not!) here but as I understand it the article does not support the claim in the headline. The headline claims that signups increases by 28% in the changed version and that this was <i>all attributable to the change</i>.<p>It's the second bit that isn't supported, they say that the result was statistical significant but what I understand them as saying was that it was statistically significant that the new variation was better than the control. But it could be better by an amount more or less than 28%, all we know from that is it's almost certainly (95%) at least a little better. We would need to know the number of trails to be able to get a certainty for the amount of improvement.<p>Could someone with a slightly better understanding of statistics chip in maybe? I could use some more information in my own A/B tests, sometimes I know a change is going to be a pain to maintain so I want to know not just if it is better, but by how much.
The results could really benefit from some inferential statistics. The percentages, while interesting aren't particularly meaningful on their own. I realize you may not want to share how large your sample sizes are, but something like a Pearson's chi square test would be very useful here.
I read somewhere saying that "<strike>2.99</strike> Free!" works better that just saying that "Free!" because it's hard for users to understand the real value of the latter.
Maybe <a href="http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/</a> should take a look at the button on their own homepage.<p>Edit: It doesn't work.