The benefit-driven headline that led to a 27% increase in the conversions for an
e-retailer's flagship product.

BestSelf Co., a leading online seller of productivity tools, suffered a high bounce rate on its flagship product’s page. Many of the visitors who landed on its Self Journal page abandoned it too soon. BestSelf Co. spotted this pattern and engaged SplitBase to fix it.

For an eCommerce product page, a high bounce rate results in a direct loss of revenue. SplitBase quickly sprung into action to plug this leak for BestSelf Co. — and to help the seller hook the visitors who landed on the page and get more sales.

Hypothesis:

As BestSelf Co. reported a high bounce rate on its best seller product, SplitBase ran extensive user behavioral analysis (by adding heatmaps to the page) to “see” what was actually happening on it.

SplitBase also ran polls and surveys on the product page to get user feedback.

SplitBase found in its analysis that visitors weren’t scrolling past the fold area and the polls’/surveys’ results showed that people didn’t understand the benefit it offered and also didn’t trust the product to work.

After multiple surveys, polls and usability research, it was clear that visitors were not understanding some of the benefits of the company’s flagship product, the Self Journal. [..] Based on this, we  hypothesized that visitors were leaving after coming to the landing/product page, or simply browsing away to other products, because they weren’t getting “hooked.”

Raphael Paulin-Daigle – SplitBase

Based on the 1) high bounce rate of the product page, 2) findings of the user behavioral analysis showing that the users didn’t scroll past the fold area, 3) and the results of the polls/surveys hinting at trust issues, SplitBase hypothesized that:

Working on the fold area by adding a headline that clarified the benefits and addressed the trust concerns of the visitors would retain more of them, and thereby increase the product sales.

Methodology

Spread:  33.3/33.3/33.3a control, and two challengers.	Visitors: 20,000
Confidence Score: 98%	Time: 4 weeks

Treatment:

Based on its hypothesis (of adding a benefit-driven headline in the fold area), SplitBase worked on the copy for the headline.

To write the headline copy, SplitBase returned to its findings from its qualitative research where it discovered that most of the people who bought the product identified themselves as a “professional.”

SplitBase used this insight to target the ideal buyers with its headline copy by using the word “professional” in it.

In addition to this, SplitBase also added the core benefit of helping professionals “achieve their goals” and social proof (in terms of the number of users who used the product) to the headline copy.

SplitBase came up with two variants of the headline:

Var 1: Join 172,783+ professionals who achieved their goals by using the Self Journal

Var 2: Join 172,783+ professionals who rely on the Self Journal to stay focused daily, weekly, and monthly to achieve their goals

The original version didn’t have any headline:

We could’ve tested large changes to the page structure to re-organize the information, but instead we first tested a headline that would include the missing points we had identified through our research. Things that were holding people back from buying this product: social proof, and the main benefit of buying the product.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle

SplitBase then tested the challengers against the original version over 4 weeks.

Each version saw traffic of about 20,000 visitors. The large sample size and the reasonably long test duration ensured that the results were consistent (and not random false positives), and were actually statistically significant.

The tests included traffic from all sources (such as paid, social media, referral, organic and other channels) and from all devices.

SplitBase used Google Analytics for getting the website analytics data, HotJar for gathering user behavioral insights, and Convert for running the split tests.

Convert.com was our tool of choice for running the tests because out of all the tools out there, its significant reduction in “test flickers”, and ease of use allows us to quickly code, QA and deploy tests with speed and confidence. As an agency, Convert allows us to keep our clients and tests organized, and their team has always been fantastic at assisting our team and our client’s when needed.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle

Results:

SplitBase saw a whopping 27% increase in the conversions of the product with the most notable increase being for the desktop cohort (at 74%). The “Add to cart” rate also increased by 13%.

The first variant beat both the original version as well as the second variant.

The winner also focused on one benefit: that the journal was made to achieve your goals. The losing variant, however, had much more information crammed-in with two benefits in addition to a product feature, making it less precise on what the customer really cared about and main message: to help professionals achieve their goals.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle

While SplitBase was sure that its challengers would beat the control, it didn’t anticipate it to be so huge, especially the lift on the desktop. The successful experiment lead to a big boost in the sales of the brand’s flagship product across all channels.

The Big Takeaways:

1. Treat product pages as landing pages. Always use a targeted, benefit-driven, and trust-inspiring headline on your product pages as you would on a typical landing page.
2. Prioritize what to test. Sometimes, all you need is one change to get that big lift. So, start with testing the items that can have the highest impact.
3. Know your best customers. To get your product messaging right, swipe your ideal buyers’ messages. How they talk about you and your solution is always the best inspiration for winning product copy.