With little doubt, improving conversions on a website is at the forefront of most website owner minds. Sometimes the smallest change can have a very big impact. How?

I’ll tell you how, but it’s more like I’ll show you the way.

The example I am going to use is at the doorway of where the conversion is to take place. In this example, a contact form. In this example, the website I’m describing asks that visitors fill out an inquiry form — that is the conversion sought and that is the conversion we’ll improve.

Getting visitors to funnel through the site and land on the contact form is a discussion for another time, so for the sake of argument let’s assume the contact form is receiving traffic via navigation through the site.

Improving the Contact Form

The website used for this example once had a working contact form that simply had text above that read “Inquiry Form”.

Though the form received inquiries, the experiment therefore was to make simple changes to improve those numbers.

First Things First

First, looking at the text that accompanied the form, I settled on making text changes in order to persuade and/or entice the page visitor to further the process and actually make the changes.

Copywriting

When approaching the copy I set out to make the reader feel pain and almost immediately find the solution. SInce the website is owned and run by a web design/branding company, I came up with a list of pain/solution ‘calls to action’ and ultimately chose the one that best fit the personality of the company, the attitude of the website and all other web assets.

Rather than “Inquiry Form,” I changed it to:

“Let’s Build a Brand that You Can Be Proud Of.”

The Breakdown

The sentence speaks to collaboration (“Let’s”) while giving the reader something to think about and hit the sore spot at the same time (“build a brand that you can be proud of”). Although the company I wrote this for can absolutely back up the claim, it speaks to that little (or big and loud) voice that plagues each business owner – “Am I proud of what I have? Can it be better?” Creating that feeling of doubt, as well as offering up the opportunity of being in the ‘proud’ club, has seemed to entice more website-based inquiries.

Statistical Improvement

When looking at only a two month period, the overall submission stats look like this:

Month 1 – Percentage of inquiries: 14%
Month 2 (change implemented) – Percentage of inquiries: 86%

While letting a little more time go by and comparing to the baseline, I might end up making additional changes. The point being, small changes can have a big impact on conversions.

The Best Advice

Make changes and track, but keep it simple and keep the big picture in mind to start with. In other words, shifting text a few pixels in order to get only slight changes should come after the basics are taken care of and bigger results are reported.