Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client operates one of the largest online travel marketplaces in its region, connecting visitors with tours, activities, flights, hotels, and vacation packages. Millions of travelers use the platform each year to plan trips to one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. The client has asked to remain anonymous.

Research: Bridging the intention‑action gap

When visitors arrived on our client’s website, they were often in a browsing mindset—exploring, dreaming, and gathering ideas. In the travel industry (and many others), this “inspiration phase” is a high‑traffic but low‑conversion zone.

The gap between liking the idea of a trip and actually booking one can be surprisingly wide. The difference is what behavioral scientists call an intention‑action gap (or value‑action gap). These occur when a person has a goal but fails to take the necessary first step.

For companies like our client, these gaps were often caused by:

• Choice paralysis: The sheer volume of travel options creates a “freeze” response.
• Temporal discounting: The brain prioritizes the comfort of the present (browsing) over the effort of real planning.

The desire is there, but without a nudge toward the present, visitors drift into a “later” that never arrives. The question was, how hard would a “nudge” have to be to make a real difference?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the client’s homepage. with the search widget featuring a standard “Search” button.

The tested page (or variation)

We made a single one‑word change to the tested page. Can you see it?

Yes, that’s it. The label on the search button changed from “Search” to “Search Now.”

Nothing else changed.

Result: Bookings increased by 38%

During the test, we observed a 38% increase in bookings.

But why?

If you’ve read our article on the Safe Step Principle, you might wonder: doesn’t adding “Now” risk the same problem we warned about with “Buy Now” buttons?

The Safe Step Principle shows that pushy CTAs backfire when they demand more commitment than the visitor is ready to give—“Buy Now” on a category page asks visitors to leap past their readiness. However, “Search Now” is fundamentally different for three reasons:

• Low friction: Searching is the safest possible step. It costs nothing, commits to nothing, and carries no risk.
• Temporal prompting: Adding “Now” doesn’t increase the commitment; it simply injects a sense of the present tense into an action the visitor already intended to take.
• Directivity: Research suggests that specific, directive language reduces cognitive load. “Search” is a label; “Search Now” is an instruction.

The change worked because it didn’t ask visitors to do anything different; it simply reminded them that the time to act was the present.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one‑on‑one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client operates a large online marketplace for tours, activities, and vacation packages, connecting travelers with curated experiences across one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. As a market leader operating in a highly competitive space, they have asked to remain anonymous.

Research: Readers who never became buyers

The client’s site includes a huge library of detailed travel articles—guides to natural wonders, regional itineraries, and seasonal travel tips. These pages attract enormous organic traffic, but our analytics review revealed that many of these visitors never transferred to the main booking funnel.

In effect, the visitors were treating the website like a high-quality travel magazine. Lots of research, relatively little booking.

As other tests for this client showed, the stunning content and imagery created a genuine emotional response in their visitors. How could we build on those “wow” moments to bring more people into the main booking funnel?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of one of the original article pages. The real site was filled with high quality, engaging content written by genuine experts and led by stunning imagery and video.

The tested page (or variation)

For the test, we added an exit-intent lightbox that appeared automatically when a visitor’s cursor moved toward the browser’s close or back button. (If you want to test something similar on touch devices, you can trigger the lightbox a few seconds before the average visitor leaves the page.)

The content of the lightbox was informed by test wins we’d had on the site’s homepage, allowing us to reuse:

• A proven headline and subhead: The lightbox featured copy that had already won on the homepage, reminding visitors that everything they needed for their trip was in one place and subject to a best-price guarantee.
• Signposts to the most popular activities: We pulled the “Top things to do” image tiles from the homepage, giving visitors a set of ice-breakers—specific, clickable starting points rather than a blank search field.

And finally, the lightbox added:

• A single, inviting call to action: The “Build my dream trip” button provided a safe next step that felt like the beginning of an adventure.

Result: Conversions increased by 82%

During the test, we observed an 82% increase in conversions.

This result proved that many of the “magazine” visitors were interested in booking—they just needed a well-timed nudge before they drifted away. The exit-intent lightbox was an efficient way to deliver that nudge because we didn’t need to change any article content. And we didn’t need to guess what would resonate because we could repurpose copy and content that had already won elsewhere. (If you’ve followed our past Win Reports, you may recognize this as a pattern.)

The previous win had done much of the heavy lifting. This test simply inserted a proven message into a new and valuable context.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

On the face of it, neither state appears well-suited to running an effective CRO program, and yet, the pressure to beat (or even meet) previous sales numbers is uniquely intense. Failure in the peak season is not an option.

When we spoke to one seasonable business, they summed up the challenge well:

“Christmas makes or breaks the whole year for us. I’m always nervous until I see the sales figures.”

The low traffic paradox

When traffic and cash flow fall, seasonal businesses face a subtle psychological trap. On one hand, resources for investment feel scarce. On the other, working on conversion rate can feel impossible when you have little or no traffic. The benefits to the bottom line feel too hard to get and too far away.

Psychologists call this present bias—our tendency to favor actions that produce immediate results over those whose rewards arrive later.

Practically, it means that some seasonal businesses focus on things that feel productive during low season but may deliver little real value (new campaigns, designs, or partnerships), while others enter a hibernation period. Neither helps much when the next peak season arrives, and both paths come at the expense of activity that will bring far more growth later on.

In fact, the low season is the best time to start your CRO program. You have the time and space to think strategically and do the research and testing that will pay off later. That way, when the peak season comes, your improvements can scale across thousands or millions of visitors.

In this article, we show the strategies that successful seasonal businesses use to beat the low traffic paradox—and how you can apply them too. We’ve helped many of these businesses achieve record-breaking growth. One client said it led to their “busiest month in history.”

Let’s look at the strategies that underpin those results.

Your seasonal CRO strategy

For the purposes of this article, we’ll divide the strategies into low season and peak season. Low season is for research and A/B usability testing; peak season delivers the traffic that enables standard A/B testing.

Low season

Low season is characterized by low (or lower) traffic. While this can make it hard to run standard A/B tests, there are plenty of high-value activities you can pursue.

Gather objections and points of persuasion

At a fundamental level, it’s incredibly useful to understand five high-leverage things about your visitors, whatever the season:

1. How they found you.
2. What appeals to them about your brand, products, or services.
3. How they view you in comparison to others.
4. What puts them off your products or services.
5. Their biggest frustration in finding the right product or service.

Use the low season to ask existing customers these questions, and you’ll often learn extraordinarily valuable things. To find out more, see our article: Five golden questions that reveal exactly why your visitors aren’t converting.

During the low season, you can also benefit from the following techniques which can be carried out even if your website gets just a few visitors per day:

• User test your website. Not only do user tests require no website traffic, they are by far the fastest and most effective way of finding the blocked arteries that limit conversion rates and profits. This technique alone has helped us make hundreds of millions for our clients. That’s why we run them constantly.

• Ask customers that bought during peak season what nearly stopped them from buying. This is a great way to come up with ideas to convert more of your prospects.

• Speak to your salespeople (what we call “Voice-Of-Customer Aggregators”): People who sell your products or services “face-to-face” are often a goldmine of questions, objections, and counterobjections that you can use to improve your website. Who was manning the phones during peak season? Who was handling phone support?

• Analyze competitors’ websites. If you don’t have any obvious competitors, look at successful companies in adjacent fields. For example, if you sell snow blowers, you could look at lawnmowers. If you run a beach front hotel, look at ski resorts. Your low season is someone’s peak season. What are they doing?

• Add your phone number to the top of every page (and make it clickable). Even if you have no plans to encourage phone calls on an ongoing basis, speaking to the customers who call in low season can surface questions and objections you can use to improve the website.

Build your experiment list

If you apply some of the techniques above, you’ll inevitably gather numerous insights for potential ways to improve, but how do you choose what to work on first?

In our methodology, we recommend ranking your ideas list as follows:

1. How likely is it to double your conversion rate? Asking this question helps to ensure that we’re prioritizing the big opportunities. Bigger, bolder tests are given a higher priority; meek tweaks are demoted.
2. How easy is it to implement the test? We’re looking for the quick wins with the biggest financial impact, so changes that are easy to implement are given a higher priority.
3. Has this idea worked before? Once you’re testing, you’ll quickly start learning what your visitors respond to. Every test we develop is documented so that we can review and prioritize ideas that are inspired by winning tests.

Ranking this way helps you prioritize the experiments that are most likely to bring the biggest business benefits. The goal is to build a ranked list of experiments with strong hypotheses that you can systematically work through.

Ideally, this is a list that you would maintain all year round, creating a continuous pipeline of experiments to run.

Test in the low season with A/B usability tests

While standard A/B tests require high volumes of traffic, A/B usability tests allow you to test at any time of the year. Instead of using website visitors, you recruit a small panel of customers or potential customers, and ask them for feedback on the two versions of the page—the original and your challenger—to see which they prefer and why.

A/B usability testing is also particularly useful if you want to:

• Test bold ideas that you’d be nervous about putting on the live website.
• Get fast feedback and iterate quickly.
• Validate ideas that you may want to test when the peak season traffic arrives.

The biggest advantage of A/B usability testing is that it shows not only the option that might win, but also the reasons why it might win—something that you don’t get from standard A/B testing. Here’s a case study of A/B usability testing in practice. It’s not a seasonal business, but you can see how we used A/B usability testing to quickly improve a low-traffic website.

Peak season

The work you’ve already done pays dividends as things get busier, providing a streamlined queue of high-leverage tests. As peak season approaches, traffic rises to the point where you can now conduct standard A/B tests to validate or disprove your ideas. The key to doing this effectively is the preparation and test design you’ve already done:

• Execute your queue of experiments, starting with the low-risk, high-reward tests that you created in your low season.

• Iterate quickly and bank your winners while the traffic and conversions are there.

• Test any bold ideas you validated through A/B usability testing.

Peak season is also prime time for data captured through analytics, exit surveys, and email follow-up sequences. To take just one example, it can be especially useful to ask your customers what almost stopped them buying from you. The answer to this question allowed us to raise one seasonal client’s conversion rate by 16% (with just one test).

Gathering data now ensures that you’ll have plenty of fuel for your next low-season cycle of research and idea generation.

A note on testing during peak season

Some teams get nervous about A/B testing during peak periods and choose to pause it. That feels safe—but it’s actually the opposite.

A/B testing is low risk by design. You don’t roll out big changes blindly, you test them. And when you have high-traffic, you can further lower your risk by testing on a smaller proportion of your visitors. Losers are quickly discarded, and winners are scaled. So as long as you’re testing, you’re improving.

Peak season makes this even more powerful. With higher traffic, your tests reach their conclusion faster, so you can find and apply winning ideas more quickly.

The real risk isn’t testing. It’s standing still when the upside is highest.

Are you ready for your peak season?

By now, you’ve seen the truth that successful seasonal businesses already recognize: CRO is a continual process, not a seasonal one.

Between the overwhelm of peak season and the paradox of low traffic, teams rarely give themselves enough time. Without the runway required to do proper research, build strong hypotheses, or get A/B tests ready, they default to the behaviour they should avoid: guessing, rushing, and making changes based on opinion rather than evidence.

There’s an enormous opportunity cost to waiting until things get urgent, but for seasonal businesses that optimize continually, the rewards can be immense.

Seasonal CRO in action

Finally, to demonstrate the practical value of these techniques, here are a few Win Reports we’ve published for seasonal businesses.

+16%

Win Report: How trust signals turned suspicion into 16% more signups

How addressing key customer objections—trust and payment flexibility—helped increase signups by 16%, using targeted research and simple on-page messaging to turn scepticism into action.

+36%

Win Report: How removing content increased conversions by 36%

Removing a poorly performing top section from iFLY’s birthday page revealed more engaging, benefit-led content—leading to a 36% increase in conversions and a 47% boost in revenue per customer.

+26%

Win Report: How becoming the customer helped us increase conversions by 26%

A simple messaging change, inspired by first-hand customer experience, replaced a confusing “free shipping” claim with credible social proof—resulting in a 26% uplift in conversions and a 31% increase in revenue.

+12%

Win Report: How research‑inspired bullets grew conversions by 12%

How customer research reshaped product page bullets to emphasise conservation, social proof, and perceived value—driving a 12% uplift in conversions and a 27% increase in revenue.

+103%

Win Report: How an appeal to emotion doubled conversions

A travel booking platform doubled conversions by replacing a form-heavy homepage with inspiring visuals and a simplified search. The test highlights how engaging visitors emotionally before asking for input can significantly boost results.

+5%

Win Report: Less hero, more party (and 5% more sign-ups)

Small, strategic changes to the top of Party Hard Travel’s pages—reducing the hero image, surfacing trust signals, and improving navigation—helped more visitors see key content, resulting in a 5% increase in signups.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

How do you sell a product that almost everyone considers the “wrong” choice?

In 1992, Apple had roughly 12% of the personal computer market. The other 88% ran MS-DOS or Windows on IBM-compatible hardware. If you were a business traveler shopping for a notebook computer, the safe, expected choice was a PC.

So when Apple’s agency sat down to sell the PowerBook, they faced a challenge that many businesses face today: how do you persuade people to switch from the dominant option to yours, when the dominant option has all the momentum?

Their answer was a four-page print ad that’s a masterclass in persuasion and competitive framing (full-size version here). Let’s look at why it works.

Page 1: The headline frames the entire decision

The first page of the ad contains nothing but a single sentence in enormous type:

If you’re looking for a notebook computer that’s easy to use, there are basically only two ways you can go.

There’s a surprising amount happening here, so let’s break it down. First, that opening clause:

“If you’re looking for a notebook computer that’s easy to use…”

This does the job Gary Bencivenga named calling out a hot audience. It filters for laptop shoppers. But it also slips in an assumption: that ease of use is the criterion you should be shopping on. Not speed, not price, not compatibility with what the rest of your office uses. Ease of use. Before you’ve even turned the page, Apple has defined the criteria it believes it can win on.

“… there are basically only two ways you can go.”

This is an intentionally false dichotomy, albeit delivered with a straight face.

In 1992, there were numerous notebook manufacturers. But the ad collapses the entire market into a binary choice: the hard way, and the easy way. It’s a framing technique sometimes called “the crossroads.” Another influential copywriter, Clayton Makepeace, wrote about how powerful it is to present prospects with exactly two paths and make one of them obviously better.

Feel how the word “basically” is doing quiet work here, too. It makes the claim feel like common sense rather than a marketing assertion. Basically, there are two ways. You almost nod along before you realize you’ve accepted the premise.

How you could use this

If your product competes in a crowded market, consider whether you can reframe the decision as a simple binary. Not “here are 15 options to evaluate,” but “there are really two approaches, and here’s the difference.” This works especially well when you’re the challenger brand, and you want to be compared directly with the dominant category. What two paths could you present to your prospects?

Page 2: “The hard way” uses the competition to sell Apple’s product

Turn the page and you see one of the most effective competitive comparison pages we’ve come across.

The headline is simply “The hard way.” Below it, the page is deliberately cluttered. Accessories, adapters, floppy disks, a bulky clip-on trackball, memory chips, and a thick instruction manual are scattered around a generic beige laptop. Each item has a price tag and a short explanation of why you’ll need it.

This is proof through demonstration—one of the most persuasive forms of evidence. The ad doesn’t just claim that PC notebooks are complicated. It shows you the mess. Every object on the page is another argument, and the visual chaos reinforces the feeling: this is a hassle.

Notice also how the copy handles the price comparison. The base price of the “ordinary notebook” is $2,497. But the real cost is much higher once you add the memory ($210), trackball ($172), programs ($506), modem ($142), and the others. The ad doesn’t add these up for you—it doesn’t need to. Your brain is already doing math. Letting the reader draw their own conclusion is almost always more persuasive than stating it for them.

Then there are the costs that don’t have dollar amounts:

“Your time, name your price.”

“Comfort is something most notebook computer ads never talk about.”

See how the copy expands the comparison beyond money to the things people actually care about when they’re working on a long flight or in a hotel room. (The 1992 laptop market was entirely about business use.)

How you could use this

If your competitor’s product requires extra accessories, add-ons, integration work, or learning time that yours doesn’t, consider making this visible.

Don’t just say “we’re simpler.” Show the full cost—in money, time, and frustration—of the alternative. As we’ve discussed in our ultimate guide to proof, specificity is one of the most powerful forms of credibility. This ad is specific about every dollar and every inconvenience.

Page 3: “The easy way” uses the same structure to opposite effect

Now, let’s turn to page three.

Where “The hard way” was a visual mess, “The easy way” is calm, clean, and spacious.

One laptop. No clutter. Many of the callouts begin with the words “Built-in”—built-in networking, built-in fax/data modem, built-in file sharing, built-in peripheral support. The repetition is deliberate. Each “built-in” is a small hammer blow reinforcing the same message: you don’t need to buy anything else.

The visual contrast between pages two and three is doing most of the persuasion work. You don’t need to read every word of copy to get the point—the feeling of each page tells the story. Page two feels stressful. Page three feels easy. That emotional response is faster and more powerful than any rational argument.

This is the show, don’t tell principle taken to its logical extreme. The ad never says “the PowerBook is simpler.” It doesn’t need to, because the design has already made you experience the simplicity.

There’s a lesson here about how clear value propositions work: the best ones don’t just describe benefits—they make the benefits obvious through structure, layout, and contrast.

How you could use this

Think about how the design of your marketing reinforces (or contradicts) your message. If you’re claiming ease-of-use but your landing page is a mess, the visitor’s emotional experience will read “complicated” no matter what your headline says.

Could you create a visual contrast between the messy “before” and the clean “after” of using your product or service?

Page 4: The comparison tables let the reader prove it to themselves

On its final page, the copywriter is highlighting a different but just as effective aspect of Hard versus Easy… the laptop in use.

Six everyday tasks are presented in side-by-side comparison tables. For each task, “The hard way” lists between 5 and 11 steps. “The easy way” lists between 1 and 3.

The effect is almost comical to modern readers. To add a pointing device the hard way, you need nine steps, including “Attach appropriate clamp arms” and “Adjust tilt angle.” The easy way? “The trackball is built in.”

Apple isn’t making any specific claims here. They don’t need to. The tables simply present the options and let the reader’s own judgment do the rest. By the time the reader has scanned all six tables, they’ve personally verified (again) the ad’s central argument.

This is exactly what we mean when we talk about the importance of demonstrating how something works rather than just claiming it does. A claim can be ignored. A demonstration has to be reckoned with.

How you could use this

Where can you let visitors prove your claims themselves? A side-by-side comparison, an interactive calculator, a “before and after” workflow—anything that invites the prospect to verify rather than just believe. The key is specificity: this ad doesn’t compare in vague terms; it compares step by step.

What specific task could you walk through to show how much easier, faster, or better your approach is?

A closing line that reframes the entire category

The ad ends with a tagline at the bottom of page four:

Macintosh. The more you do, the easier it gets.

This is a quietly ambitious line. It’s not just selling the PowerBook—it’s reframing the entire experience of owning a computer. The implicit contrast is with DOS and Windows, where the more you tried to do, the more complicated things became (anyone who lived through DOS path statements and CONFIG.SYS will feel this in their bones).

But the line also serves a forward-looking purpose: it’s addressing the anxiety of switching platforms. If you’re a PC user considering a Mac for the first time, one of your biggest fears is the learning curve. This tagline says: Don’t worry. It only gets easier from here. That’s objection handling disguised as a tagline, and it works because it feels optimistic rather than defensive.

How you could use this

Your closing line or tagline doesn’t have to be a summary of features. It can reframe the prospect’s relationship with the entire category. What anxiety does your prospect carry about switching to you—and can you address it with a single, confident statement?

If you’re doing it the hard way

This ad was created at a moment when Apple was the underdog. They couldn’t win on market share, software compatibility, or corporate purchasing policies. So instead of competing on those terms, they chose the fight they could win—ease of use—and then made the case so visually and specifically that it was almost impossible to argue with.

If your company is doing it the hard way—competing against bigger or more established alternatives—perhaps the strategy Apple used can work for you. Maybe you don’t have to win every argument. You just have to pick the right argument and put it to work.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

FanTokens.com is the official partner of elite teams like Juventus, AC Milan, FC Barcelona, and Arsenal, and sells tokens for fans to trade. The tokens give fans voting rights and numerous rewards, while also being tradable assets.

The site caters to two distinct audiences: experienced traders and sports fans who are generally new to the digital asset market.

Research: An unsettling journey

Buying a Fan Token isn’t like buying a team jersey or a game ticket. Unlike mainstream e-commerce, clicking the “Buy” button redirects users to an external exchange, where the final transaction takes place.

Our user testing showed that many visitors found this sudden jump to a different website unsettling. When we asked purchasers what almost stopped them from converting, they said:

“When FanTokens.com redirected me to another trading platform, I felt a bit cautious because I wasn’t sure if it was official or safe.”

“The redirect felt a bit unsettling—raised questions about fees and custody.”

As we dug deeper, we found that visitors didn’t object to third-party exchanges per se.

“…the extra step did make me hesitate initially. Once I confirmed it was secure, I understood it was just how the trading works.”

What the visitors disliked was the surprise. The transition violated their expectations at a critical moment, reducing confidence and (very likely) overall conversions.

The original page (or control)

Here’s a section of FanTokens.com’s original homepage. Each token listed has a generic blue “Buy” button that redirects users to an external exchange.

The tested page (or variation)

Typical solutions attempt to bridge the gap between the two experiences using popups or interstitial pages—but these add unnecessary complexity to the funnel. Instead, we focused on a more elegant solution: the “Buy” buttons themselves.

To make the destination as explicit as possible before the click, we:

• Changed the button copy from “Buy” to “Buy on [exchange name]”.
• Added exchange color branding and logos directly to the CTA to foreshadow the site that users were jumping to.
• Made the buttons more visually prominent within the table.

Taken together, these changes ensured that no one who wanted to buy would be surprised by what happened next.

Results: Conversions increased by 57%

During the test, we observed a 57% increase in conversions.

This huge result highlights something we see again and again in our work: the biggest gains don’t always come from complex changes or new features. They often come from identifying moments of doubt in a user journey and resolving them in a clever way.

In this case, our three changes combined to address a moment of doubt, improved trust, and unlock a large increase in conversions.

Here’s what our client had to say

Gilbert Camilleri, CMO, The Chiliz Group.

“We didn't change the product, the price, or the promise. We just made sure users knew exactly what clicking 'Buy' meant before they clicked it. That single shift in transparency drove a 57% increase in conversions—and changed how we think about every CTA on the site.”

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of FanTokens.com and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to FanTokens.com for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fantastic team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

A cautionary tale of a full redesign

If you have ever been tempted to “tear it down and start over” with your website, this BBC article on a catastrophic redesign project is a must-read. It serves as a stark reminder that even with the best intentions, a complete overhaul can backfire if it loses sight of user needs.

This perfectly illustrates the points we made in our own article, How to tell if your expensive new website is useless, where we discuss why big-budget redesigns often fail to improve conversions.

(Sometimes redesigns are necessary, but they should be approached strategically, as we detail in our RealEstateU Redesign Win Report.)

This is a web page (and words matter most)

We love the brutal simplicity of this page. It’s a powerful demonstration that you don’t need complex animations or heavy graphics to be persuasive. In fact, most of the time, your words are doing the heavy lifting.

As the author, Justin Jackson, puts it:

“I wrote these words, and you’re reading them: that’s magical.”

We also got a kick out of the squirrel reference—long-time fans of our work might remember our own “conversion squirrel.”

A never-before-seen 1996 interview with Steve Jobs

The Steve Jobs Archive recently released a fascinating, previously unseen 1996 interview where Jobs discusses the early days of Pixar.

Filmed just after Toy Story became a phenomenon, it offers a rare glimpse into his thinking on storytelling, technology, and the patience required to build something truly revolutionary.

It’s a masterclass in long-term vision—something we often talk about in relation to Genchi Genbutsu style thinking.

From the archive: Why Saul Goodman is a conversion genius

Better call CRO: Why Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman is a conversion rate genius is one of our most popular articles, and for good reason. It turns out that the world’s most morally flexible TV lawyer is also a masterclass in persuasion, social proof, and understanding what your customer really wants to hear.

It’s a fun look at how even “fictional” characters can teach us a lot about the psychology of persuasion and building a brand that people (oddly) trust.

Have you come across something worth sharing?

If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

FanTokens.com is the official partner of elite teams like Juventus, AC Milan, FC Barcelona, and Arsenal, and sells tokens for fans to trade. The tokens give fans voting rights and numerous rewards, while also being tradable assets.

The site caters to two distinct audiences: experienced traders, and sports fans who are generally new to the digital asset market.

Research: A lack of understanding

When experienced traders landed on FanTokens.com, they quickly felt at home. The site spoke their language: prices, charts, market caps, leaderboards. They already understood the mechanics—and the potential upside—so navigating the platform felt familiar.

Sports fans arrived differently.

Many had discovered Fan Tokens through their teams’ official socials. They were excited by the promised benefits, but struggled to understand what Fan Tokens were and why the site should be trusted. Responses to our research included:

“What are Fan Tokens?”

“Is this licensed or not?”

“I don’t understand how it works.”

In fact, when our research team analyzed survey responses from non-converters, a lack of knowledge was the single biggest reason they had abandoned the site.

Before thinking about price movements or market opportunities, they first needed reassurance that they understood the rules of the game.

The original page (or control)

The original homepage led with market data and token listings, but provided little explanation of what Fan Tokens were, or why the site was the official place to track them.

The tested page (or variation)

For our variation, we focused on resolving uncertainty at the very top of the page.

Our changes included:

• Clearly positioning FanTokens.com as the official Fan Tokens™ hub, not an aggregator.
• Adding clear reassurance, for example: Trusted by 80+ global sports brands.
• Explaining in plain language what Fan Tokens are—tradable assets with unique benefits.
• Highlighting holder benefits, including trade, voting rights, VIP rewards, and access.
• Framing Fan Tokens as a sports-related asset, not just another crypto market.

Results: Conversions increased by 29%

During the test, we observed a 29% increase in conversions.

This result reinforces the simple idea that explanation is often persuasion, especially if an audience is new or uncertain.

The conversion rate increase didn’t come from adding expensive new features or profit-reducing incentives; it came from making the existing value easier for a key audience to understand. By addressing uncertainty among newcomers, we increased the number of visitors confident enough to take the next step.

Here’s what our client had to say

Gilbert Camilleri, CMO of The Chiliz Group, the company behind FanTokens.com.

“We didn't add incentives or discounts to get this result—we added understanding. Seeing a 29% increase in conversions just by speaking to our audiences in plain language has fundamentally addressed the Fan Token positioning in their first touchpoint.”

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of FanTokens.com and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to FanTokens.com for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fantastic team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client operates a large online marketplace for tours, activities, and vacation packages, connecting travelers with curated experiences across one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. As a market leader operating in a highly competitive space, they have asked to remain anonymous.

Research: When form obstructs feeling

Previous tests for this client (and others) had shown that video content resonated strongly with visitors. This makes sense. We don’t start dreaming about an exotic holiday because of a search box on a web page. Booking a vacation is an emotional decision. We start with a picture, a story, or a moment of wonder.

And yet, when visitors arrived at the site via mobile, the content was dominated by a search form that asked for location, traveler count, and dates—all before the visitor had been inspired to care.

When our research team tested the client’s homepage against key competitors, user testers described it as “boring,” “basic,” and “unengaging.” The comment below neatly encapsulates a lot of this feedback:

“I did not care for the site, it felt basic and boring with no images to pull me in.”

The irony was that the client had truly stunning destination imagery. What if we tested its persuasive power at the start of the funnel?

The original page (or control)

Here’s an illustration of the original page showing the first step of the booking process.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we wanted to highlight some of the video content that had won before. To do that, we redesigned the search form, reducing the first step to one field.

Because the search form was now less prominent, we also added an animated text cursor inside the field to draw attention and invite interaction. Finally, we included a helpful prompt beneath the “Search Now” button for visitors who weren’t sure where to start.

Result: Bookings increased by 103%

During the test, we observed a 103% increase in bookings.

By giving the destination the spotlight, the variation turned twice as many browsers into bookers.

The principle extends beyond travel. Any time a form or configurator dominates the first screen—whether it’s a property site, a SaaS product, or an e-commerce store, you may be asking visitors to work before you’ve given them a reason to care.

For more on creating engaging funnels, see our article on the Safe Step Principle.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how connecting lead times to American craftsmanship increased conversions by 22% for DiamondBack Covers, a US manufacturer of ultra-durable truck bed covers.

Research: What the sales team already knew

When we work with a client, we always spend time with their sales team. People at the sharp end of selling a product or service often have untapped insights into the things that customers care about—we call them “VOC Aggregators". They hear common objections repeatedly—and, just as importantly, they know which counter-objections resolve them.

For DiamondBack Covers, one objection came up again and again in sales conversations:

“Why does it take so long to receive a cover?”

This wasn’t just a complaint about speed. Unexplained delays can often feel arbitrary, triggering hesitation and risk aversion. When buyers didn’t understand why there was a lead time, uncertainty crept in—and uncertainty is a powerful conversion killer.

Crucially, the sales team already had an effective counter-objection:

You’re paying for quality and American craftsmanship. Every cover is built to order. If you need it faster, we offer FastTrack.

The success of this counter-objection aligned with a well-established psychological pattern: people tolerate waiting far better when it’s explained and purposeful. Explained delays—especially those tied to effort, craftsmanship, or care—are processed very differently. The lead time isn’t inefficient—it’s evidence of work being done.

Behavioral research consistently shows that effort increases perceived value and that waiting feels shorter when people believe something meaningful is happening during that time.

In our article, Why DiPS (Diagnose → Problem → Solution) thrashes meek tweaking, we say:

“The best marketers don’t guess. They find out exactly why their visitors aren’t converting, then create funnels that counter each objection at the exact moment that the visitors think about it.”

How could we surface the sales team’s counter-objection at the moment the objection formed, anchoring the delivery timeline to craftsmanship rather than logistics?

The original page (or control)

The product page displayed shipping timelines, but didn’t explain why the lead time existed.

Although there was information about a FastTrack option, the tooltip trigger (highlighted below) included a prominent $ sign that may have discouraged some visitors.

The copy for the tooltip read:

The FastTrack Fee gets your order produced and ready to ship in 3 Business Days. Does not include transit time.

*Add in the cart, non-refundable

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we added a prominent new message next to the price: “Built to order in the USA.”

By surfacing the fact that every cover is built to order in the USA, we sought to present the counter-objection at the optimal moment.

We also updated the tooltip trigger to “Need it faster,” made it more obviously a link, removed the $ sign, and rewrote the copy in the tooltip itself.

Removing the early ‘$’ sign avoided framing FastTrack as a cost before visitors understood the benefit. The revised tooltip copy also connected the cover with the “work” that the company would do to deliver it.

Taken together, we believed that these changes would connect the lead time to the craftsmanship and heritage that visitors already valued, and help them feel confident about progressing on through the sales funnel.

Results: Conversions increased by 22%

During the test, we observed an increase in conversions of 22%.

The improvement came from aligning what visitors already valued with the one thing they didn’t yet understand: the lead time.

What’s next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of DiamondBack Covers’ business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to DiamondBack Covers for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

A short video interview with the client

Having previously worked with DiamondBack Covers, we were extra delighted to welcome them back for a second engagement. Here’s what they said about their first experience of working with us.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next 3 minutes, we’ll show you how adding a sticky header to Mobbin’s paywall page increased paid subscriptions by 13%. Like our previous Win Report, Ask for less, get (28%) more, this test demonstrates a basic but effective strategy that many businesses can use.

Trusted by Airbnb, Pinterest, and Headspace, Mobbin enables subscribers to take inspiration from over 595,000 real screens and 24,000 real navigation flows.

Research: Friction at the moment of decision

When subscribers to the free plan visited a particular area of the site (e.g., app screens) they would see a limited number of free assets followed by a paywall banner encouraging them to Get Pro. Assets below this banner were blurred out, demonstrating the value of the Pro account.

During our user testing, we noticed that free subscribers often scrolled way down the page to assess the volume of assets on offer, leaving the paywall banner far behind.

If you’ve read our previous “sticky” Win Report, you’ll know that long sales pages, while effective, can add friction if a visitor struggles to find the CTA when they are ready to subscribe.

How could we ensure that Mobbin’s Get Pro CTA was available at the point that the free subscriber was ready to commit?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a section of the original page showing the paywall banner. The number in the headline refers to the number of screens within the category.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we tested a “sticky” banner design. Once users scrolled past the paywall divider, the banner stayed on screen keeping the Get Pro CTA visible.

In addition, we:

• Updated the headline number to include all the assets that were available to Pro users, and better communicate the value of a full subscription.
• Added a social proof element (Supporting over 1M designers worldwide) that had tested well elsewhere. (Whenever you get a win, you should always look for opportunities to reuse it.)

Here’s a quick video of the sticky header in action:

Result: Paid subscriptions increased by 13%

During the test, we observed a 13% increase in conversions to paid plans.

Taken together, these changes increased the perceived value of the Pro account and reduced friction for free subscribers who became more convinced as they scrolled down the page.

“Contextual CTAs” like this often do well, because they make the sales page as short as possible—but as long as necessary.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Mobbin’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to Mobbin for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Focus.

You can see it in the best start-ups and the nimblest giants. Companies like Google use it to out‑think, out‑test, and out‑innovate their competition. (We know because we’ve worked with them.)

But is focus a goal to pursue or a side‑effect of something else?

Are you 8,760 times slower than your competition?

One business we worked with took 30 minutes to implement A/B testing software; another took six months. That’s 8,760 times slower.

Which company is more likely to double, triple, or quadruple its profits?

Many companies are filled with bright, ambitious teams using modern productivity tools, yet still struggle to make progress. In most cases, it is not the people who are the problem but the workflows they follow that lead to confusion, bottlenecks, and blockages. They are like good drivers stuck in gridlocked traffic.

How do you know if you have this problem? Two signs are:

• Everyone’s productive—but everything takes ages to happen.
• Some projects never finish.

The good news is that productivity problems are almost always improved by focus. One of our clients took 119 days to turn an idea into a statistically significant result. We helped them reduce that time by more than 75%–and increased their sales by $29 million per year!

Of course, the importance of focus feels like a mundane truth. We’re all busy. We’re all juggling multiple projects and priorities. We understand the value of focus. That’s why we spend so much time tending to our to-do lists and investing in systems to manage the load.

And yet, much of this investment fails. We often work harder and get less done.

So why is real focus so hard?

One common reason—to borrow from Indiana Jones—is that we are digging in the wrong place.

To understand why, we’re returning to the aircraft manufacturing facility where Martin, our CEO and former Aerospace Engineer, learned about process engineering and lean manufacturing. (It’s also where he learned the most powerful technique we know–Genchi Genbutsu.)

How most companies work—and the biggest reason they stall

Martin learned that any business is the interplay of work units, resources, and value.

• Work units are the output of a business (a project, a product, or a service).
• Resources add value to the work unit (a worker, a process, or a robot).
• Value is any activity that moves the work unit closer to completion. (The point where a customer will pay for it.)

Let’s pretend we are an (ahem) CRO consultancy. Our work units could be a series of landing pages, and our resources are our team members (we don’t use hydraulic presses or kilns to create our landing pages yet).

Each landing page will flow through various team members as it moves from an idea to a live web page. The process looks something like the following:

In an ideal world, neither the landing pages nor the team members waste time waiting for the other. The moment someone completes their work, the next landing page takes its place. Like a production line, the process flows smoothly from one stage to the next.

But for most of us, the world is far from ideal. Imagine that our landing pages are quick to write but hard to design. What happens?

This variation in timing creates a bottleneck. Work piles up in front of the designer, and the perfect process stalls. Suddenly, we have landing pages (work units) waiting for team members (resources) and team members waiting for landing pages.

Variation is the single biggest reason that processes break down.

The value of perspective

Variation isn’t just a challenge; it often feels inevitable. Conflicts and trade‑offs are ever‑present for many businesses. One way or another, our landing pages or team members will spend time waiting.

But let’s look at these delays from two perspectives.

Many companies think it’s best to keep the resources busy…

Imagine if we asked the designer to map out their working week. When were they adding value? When were they waiting with nothing to do?

We can visualize productivity using a time value map.

Most companies would welcome this scenario. The designer is adding lots of value. But utilization is not the whole story. Looking deeper, we often discover that team members are split between many projects. (This is especially common in companies that work for numerous clients.)

On the surface, fractured work may not seem like a problem. The designer was working hard. But let’s examine the week from a different perspective.

…and if you keep the resources busy, the work units have to sit around waiting

Imagine asking a landing page to describe the same week. What might we learn from the resulting timeline? (Green above the line shows the hours that the landing page was worked on. The red below the line signifies time spent waiting.)

The landing page’s week looks a lot less impressive. If the landing page could talk, it might tell us—between sobs—about being lost on a to‑do list or left on someone’s desk. And this is just one week. If the landing page is large, it might be weeks before the work is completed (and the company reap the rewards).

So, which is better? Keeping the resources busy and the work units sitting around? Or vice versa?

For most of us, maximizing team member (resource) efficiency makes intuitive sense. If variation is inevitable—and something has to wait—we’d rather it be the landing page than our limited (and well paid) team members. Surely?

(This forthcoming twist is so telegraphed.)

Before we see how the world’s most focused companies think about this, let’s look at two contrasting processes.

Maximizing resource efficiency (the airport)

In most businesses, resources are royalty, and the work units have no choice but to wait. We can see this clearly in airports because we, the passengers, are the work units. To fly, we must wait for the resources; the airport shuttle driver, the check-in team, security, and the flight crew.

The airport is designed to maximize worker (resource) efficiency. Each worker must have an uninterrupted supply of travelers to keep them busy. The queues of passengers act as a buffer of work units waiting to be processed, with the inevitable cost to the passengers’ efficiency (and sanity).

Maximizing work unit efficiency (the King’s arm)

In some processes—far fewer—the work units are prioritized, and the resources must wait.

Imagine that the King has broken his arm and needs to fly home for surgery. The King is now the work unit, but will he have to wait his turn as the rest of us would? No way. The treatment team (the resources) will be alerted, prepped, and waiting for him to arrive.

As before, optimizing one side lowers the efficiency of the other. The King’s need reduces the ability of the treatment team to add value to anyone else. The pilots and doctors must clear their schedules to be ready the very moment the King arrives.

At first glance, the difference between maximization of work unit efficiency (the King) and resource efficiency (the airport and hospital staff) feels inevitable. But that’s not true. The decision to follow one path or another is a choice that any company can make.

The counterintuitive choice of highly focused companies

For most of us, keeping resources busy makes intuitive sense. They are expensive. We don’t want people (or machines) sitting around doing nothing.

But our intuition is wrong.

The most successful companies optimize for work units rather than resources.

They choose to focus on the projects, accepting that this approach will lower the efficiency of their workers.

Why? Because they understand the true cost of stalled work is huge.

When a production plant stalls, the issue is typically visible within seconds. Engineers work fast to address the problem because the stall affects the entire line. But for many businesses, the signals are not so clear. Despite the prodding of to‑do lists (or colleagues), projects rarely complain that they’ve been stuck in someone’s inbox for three weeks, despite the mounting cost of the delay.

Let’s return to our team creating landing pages. The designer has finally finished their part on one of the work units. Ideally, they would hand it down the line, but this isn’t possible. The ‘unoptimized’ developer has been temporarily assigned a different task. This substitution is typical of the company’s worker‑first approach, and the landing page project stalls again.

The developer hopefully will become available at some point, but these compounding delays make variation insidious. Everyone in the team is working hard, so the true cost of stalled work is hidden. The consequences lurk in the darkness, leaching our speed, profit, and focus.

Let’s drag them out into the light.

Five hidden costs of stalled projects

Worker optimization causes stalled projects, which is much more harmful than it sounds because it creates secondary work.

Secondary work has no value for your customer but costs you time, money, and focus. Consider the activities you have done over the past week, then ask whether your customers would willingly have paid you to do it. If the answer is ’no’, it’s secondary work.

For example:

1. Stalled projects must be stored while they wait. Storage often starts with inboxes and to‑do lists but soon gives way to complex solutions that require time, money, and attention. (We end up managing the stuff that manages our stuff—a project in itself.)
2. Stored projects decay. The half‑finished landing page is no longer relevant. The draft web page contains outdated offers. Either way, the project requires extra time and money to complete.
3. While the project waits, the opportunity passes. Elements of the demand and the supply may disappear. Perhaps a key contributor has left the business. The client may decide to go in another direction. A sales opportunity may go cold. In any case, our investment is lost.
4. Restarting projects has a cost. We’ve all been in meetings where no one knows what’s happening. We dive into old emails or struggle to find the notes we wrote last month. Sometimes, it takes longer to work out where we got up to than it took to do the work in the first place. Resurrecting the project can be the business equivalent of debugging legacy code.
5. A project is complete but under-leveraged. We know someone who spent a month filming and editing a charity video. The finished piece was brilliant, but two years later, barely anyone had seen it. The charity team uploaded it to their YouTube channel and marked the job as done. They could have leveraged that work through many other channels, but the team had been assigned to other projects when it came to launching it.

Stalled projects don’t just create secondary work; they tie up the time and money already invested. It can help to imagine that every unfinished project has a real dollar value attached—calculated in terms of the amount of work that has gone into it. When we add these together, the result can often be upsetting because the investments can only pay out when projects are completed.

Of course, this isn’t a thought experiment. It’s real.

The huge upside of putting projects first

Remember the poor little neglected work unit we followed earlier on?

What would happen if we ignored everything else and focused solely on completing it?

First, we finish much sooner. Second, we reap our reward much sooner than we would have. The reward may be a payment from a happy client; or an insight from a landing page test. Either way, it illustrates a powerful truth.

Highly focused businesses may do less, but they get more done.

They aren’t buried by secondary work; they get projects finished. They are reaping the rewards of focused attention. Again and again and again.

Naturally, this kind of focus is easier for some companies than others. Process engineers tend to work on production lines that create consistent products. In contrast, many businesses (including CRE) create value through highly bespoke work units tailored to each customer. And yet, the principle of maximizing work unit efficiency remains our constant goal.

The question is this—how do we go about putting projects first?

(Don’t worry. We aren’t about to suggest you hire staff to sit around and wait for something to do. We have something simpler and far more powerful in mind.)

The simple rule that improves focus (and almost everything else)

At CRE, we routinely manage overwhelming volumes of work because we put projects first and know how to focus.

At the start of this article, we suggested that focus might be a side effect of something else, and here it is, the simple rule that flows from everything Martin learned during his aerospace days.

Keep your work-in-progress low.

Remember the companies that took six months to implement A/B testing software? They were smart, driven teams struggling with a thousand things to do. For most of them, the rate of projects started exceeded the rate of projects completed. So it was inevitable that only a small percentage of their projects would reach completion.

They didn’t focus because they couldn’t focus.

At CRE, we keep our task lists short (and track them in Google Docs) by following a simple principle:

Finish what’s in front of you before starting something new.

It’s that easy and that hard. You will stumble sometimes—we do too. But bear down. Try it for a day, then a week, then a month. Watch what happens to your productivity and profit.

Pick your highest-priority, doable project. Make it royalty. Give it all the resources it needs. No distractions. No diversions. Just a single flow from idea to execution to value.

And let us know how you get on!

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Trusted by Airbnb, Pinterest, and Headspace, Mobbin enables UX designers and product owners to take inspiration from over 300,000 real screens and 24,000 real navigation flows.

Research: Finding hidden objections

If you’ve read our article on the Safe Step Principle, you’ll know that every step in a funnel represents a moment of commitment for your potential customers. Even small steps trigger a quiet internal calculation: What could go wrong if I do this?

That’s why some of the easiest tests to run are those that address and neutralise potential objections… even when an “offer” already looks persuasive.

For example, Mobbin provides a free account that lets visitors explore a subset of its library before deciding whether to upgrade. This sign-up is a crucial step in the funnel, creating a pool of qualified leads while giving designers a low-risk way to see whether Mobbin fits their needs.

When we spoke to customers, many described the free account as an important part of their decision to join:

“…it’s great that I can explore for free first.”

But “free” doesn’t necessarily mean risk-free, especially for experienced users. When we searched for similar situations in our Wins Database, two proxy objections emerged:

1. A fear that “free” accounts were temporary and would require “registering” a credit card.
2. A concern that subscribers would be “trapped” in a relationship that was hard to cancel.

Would Mobbin’s conversion rate rise if we addressed and neutralized these concerns?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the original sign-up screen, offering a quick registration via Google or an email-based account:

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s the variation that we tested:

The test included two changes:

1. A six-word risk reversal immediately before the call to action: “No credit card required. Cancel anytime.”
2. A new proof element: “Supporting 870,000+ designers worldwide” in place of the client logos at the bottom of the page.

Both changes aimed to reduce the perceived risk for new visitors.

Result: +7% sign-ups

During the test, we observed a 7% increase in sign-ups for Mobbin’s free plan.

This test is also an almost textbook example of one of the fundamentals of our methodology: Objection / Counter-Objection (O/CO). (Learn more in this Copywriting Friday article.)

We identified two latent objections that weren’t being voiced explicitly—and then neutralised them directly, in plain language, at the exact moment of commitment.

It’s the kind of experiment almost any team can run. And as this result shows, it often pays to test it even when the offer already looks strong.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Mobbin’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to Mobbin for letting us share these insights (and for being such an awesome team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

In the early years of conversion rate optimization (CRO), there was a long-running joke that testing was simply about “turning a button green” and hoping for miracles. We still smile politely when it comes up, but that’s because we know the twist.

Buttons do matter. Hugely. Our Wins Database has hundreds of tests that prove it… just not in the way that the joke implies. What matters isn’t just the color, of course, it’s the message.

Buttons (and other types of call to action) represent a moment of commitment. A button’s wording tells users what will happen when they press it, and how big the commitment feels. And in that moment, your visitor is using those two elements to answer an unconscious question:

“Do I feel ready for this?”

If the answer is no, they don’t click, and the funnel fails.

We’ve seen (and solved) this problem across numerous clients and industries, and we’ve coined an informal term to describe our solution—the Safe Step Principle.

In this article, we’ll explain the problem, the principle, and how you can apply what we’ve learned to improve your conversion rate.

The commitment ladder: A simple way to understand readiness

Visitors move through decisions gradually. A useful way to understand this progression is to imagine a ladder, with low-commitment actions at the bottom and high-commitment ones at the top. Here’s a simplified example:

See how it works → View pricing → Start free trial → Buy now

Can you feel how your sense of commitment rises at each step? Marketers and sales teams love the end of the funnel, of course, because it’s closest to what they want. In fact, they love it so much that they often skip any low-commitment steps and jump right to the end.

And in doing so, they break their funnels.

Trouble arises when a page asks for a bigger commitment than the visitor feels ready to make. A “Buy now” button placed early in the journey is asking the visitor to jump straight to the top of the ladder.

The Safe Step Principle expresses a simple truth: visitors are more likely to continue when the next step feels safe, appropriate, and proportionate to what they already know.

Across hundreds of client tests, we’ve found that aligning each CTA with a visitor’s state of readiness consistently increases both movement through the funnel and final conversion.

The Safe Step Principle feels obvious when you lay it out, and there’s no shortage of behavioral and psychological research to back up our real-world results:

• The foot-in-the-door technique shows that people who take a small initial action are far more likely to take a larger one later.
• Loss aversion explains why high-commitment CTAs appear disproportionately risky to visitors who are still uncertain.
• Self-Determination Theory shows that people are more willing to act when they feel in control of the size of the step they’re taking.

For all these reasons, moving commitment deeper into the funnel provides more opportunities to present content that overcomes objections, offers social proof, clarifies benefits, and builds trust.

When the next step towards a goal feels small, safe, and reversible, your visitors are far more likely to continue moving forward.

Choosing the right CTA for the right stage

To be clear, we aren’t saying that funnels should always use low-commitment CTAs.

The goal is to match the commitment level to the step. When you do, users feel the experience is intuitive and friction-free, which increases both movement and sales.

To illustrate the right way to do this, let’s look at effective CTAs for a standard four-step ecommerce funnel.

Step 1: Category page (orienting and exploring)

Visitors on category pages are browsing and learning how the site is organised. They are not ready to buy.

For category pages, the Safe Step Principle suggests low-commitment CTAs such as:

• “View products.”
• “Explore programs.”
• “Browse categories.”

These keep visitors moving without demanding a decision.

Step 2: Product page (evaluating fit)

Once visitors reach a product page, they assess suitability and value, considering factors such as size, features, benefits, and price. They are more engaged but not yet ready for a final decision. CTAs that reflect this stage include:

• “Add to cart.”
• “Select size and continue.”
• “Choose your plan.”

These support forward motion while preserving a sense of reversibility.

Step 3: Cart page (checking and confirming)

In the cart, visitors review their choices and ensure everything looks correct. They want clarity, reassurance, and predictability. CTAs framed as the next step, rather than the final leap, perform well here:

• “Proceed to checkout.”
• “Continue to secure checkout.”

These reinforce the visitor’s sense of control.

Step 4: Checkout page (completing the decision)

By the time visitors reach checkout, they expect to make a final commitment. At this stage, clear, decisive CTAs are appropriate:

• “Complete purchase.”
• “Place order securely.”

These match the visitor’s readiness and bring the journey to a natural conclusion.

A quick word on button color and design

Despite what we said earlier, buttons are visual elements, and color can matter… especially when it affects visibility, consistency, or usability.

Many of the sites we work with have buttons that:

• Lack contrast and are hard to see.
• Clash with the website branding.
• Are inconsistent across the funnel and break the user’s sense of continuity.

If your website suffers from any of these issues, a site-wide button consistency test may be one of the highest ROI “housekeeping” experiments you can run.

To state the obvious, if users can’t see or quickly recognize your buttons, it may not matter what they say… and consistent button styling throughout the funnel helps users recognize the next logical action.

Why you should be testing your funnel CTAs

Because it’s easy and effective.

CTA changes are generally inexpensive, quick to deploy, and easy to reverse, making them an ideal choice for early-stage CRO experiments. They also produce valuable insight into visitor motivation. Standardising button styles, ensuring consistent language, and aligning CTAs with the visitor’s readiness often produce immediate and measurable gains.

CTA copy—whether on a button or otherwise—is part of your persuasion architecture. It guides, reassures, and nudges users along the journey.

We’ve successfully applied the principle to numerous businesses and industries, and now consider it a foundational pattern of effective funnel design.

If you’d like help creating high-impact CTA tests, explore what our free strategy sessions have to offer.

Win Reports that leverage the Safe Step Principle

You can see the principle clearly in many of our Win Reports, including:

Win Report: Ask for less, get (28%) more

Read the full Win Report

Win Report: How a “sticky” call to action increased sales by 25%

Read the full Win Report

Win Report: How four bullets increased subscriptions by 39%

In the final Win Report, you can also see how the principle can apply to content around the CTA.

Read the full Win Report

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next four minutes, we’ll show you how matching calls to action (CTAs) to the visitor’s state of mind increased transactions by 28% for All About Learning Press—and why almost every website should run a similar test.

All About Learning Press helps children master reading, spelling, and math using multisensory, Orton‑Gillingham-based programs. Its bite‑sized lessons (around 20 minutes a day) are loved around the world by homeschoolers, busy parents, and teachers.

Research: Buttons, commitment, and the learning journey

Although customers adored using the products, our research showed that buying them wasn’t nearly so enjoyable.

In fact, visitors to the site were often under stress. When we spoke to parents (and customers), a high proportion had children who were struggling, and many had been disappointed by other products that hadn’t worked. They said things like:

“I’m confused about what to order.”

“I have found that 90% (at least) of everything I am being sold is of little use to me and my daughter… I am hesitant to buy anything ever.”

“I’m figuring out the right program fit and working with a specific budget.”

Like the children, the parents were on a learning journey. They were often early in their research, struggling to weigh long‑term decisions for their children. And yet, the website often asked for more commitment than visitors were ready to give.

For example, button copy included:

• Start the Program Today!
• Buy Now
• Checkout

High‑commitment CTAs like these often act like psychological brakes: they demand a decision before visitors feel ready, suppressing clicks and sales.

How could we better match All About Learning Press’s CTAs to their visitors’ state of mind?

The original funnel (or control)

Here’s a selection of CTAs from one of the site’s funnels.

Because the primary CTAs (buttons) had been developed at different times, site visitors saw:

• High-commitment CTAs: On early pages, buttons nudged visitors straight into product selection and cart, even when heatmaps and user tests suggested they were still trying to answer questions like “What level is right?”
• Inconsistent styling: Buttons on different pages didn’t look the same. Some were higher‑contrast than others. Some competed with secondary actions.

It’s worth noting that the site wasn’t “broken.” It was already performing well, but these micro‑frictions made the journey feel heavier than necessary.

The tested funnel (or variation)

Here’s our variation for the same CTAs:

For the variation, our goal was to:

1. Make the primary CTAs visually consistent and unmistakable.
   Across the key templates in the funnel we:
   1. Unified the primary button style (color, shape, and size).
   2. Ensured high contrast against the background so the “next step” was always obvious.
   3. Used a single, consistent visual style for primary actions to build recognition and reduce decision fatigue.
2. Lower the perceived commitment at each step—and match it to the page’s purpose.
   Rather than treating every click as if it were the final purchase decision, we asked: “What’s the natural next step here?” and wrote the CTAs accordingly. In practice, that meant:
   1. On top-of-funnel pages, the buttons focused on exploration rather than purchase—nudging visitors to view programs and learn how the courses work.
   2. On mid‑funnel pages, CTAs encouraged visitors to continue through the process one step at a time rather than “jumping off a cliff” into an all‑or‑nothing commitment.
   3. Only at checkout did the CTAs ask for a full commitment, when visitors already had the information and reassurance they needed.

The goal wasn’t to hide the sale or delay it unnecessarily. It was to move the moment of commitment to the right place in the journey, where it felt natural rather than premature.

Result: A 28% increase in transactions

During the test, we observed a 28% increase in transactions. We also saw a 9.7% increase in visits to the product page, confirming that more people were moving deeper into the funnel rather than dropping off early.

In other words, softening commitment didn’t “weaken” the funnel—quite the opposite. More people clicked on the earlier CTAs, more people reached the persuasive product pages, and more people ultimately bought.

The pattern: Match CTA commitment to the step

Buttons are often the most visible and explicit trigger for the next step in a funnel. The design helps users notice them; the copy tells users what will happen next, how much commitment is required, and how “risky” the click feels.

A simple “commitment ladder” helps illustrate the slope:

As we can see, each step up the ladder increases a visitor’s perceived risk.

Principles that prove themselves time and time again

• Copy matters more than color
  Button color only becomes conversion‑critical when it’s hard to see or clashes with the brand. The bigger lever is what the button promises will happen next.
• Every page has a purpose
  Category pages should invite exploration. Product pages should help visitors evaluate fit. Cart pages should feel like a review step, not an instant purchase. Checkout is where a high‑commitment CTA finally makes sense.
• Lowering commitment doesn’t remove friction—it moves it
  Changing a CTA from “Buy now” to “See how it works” doesn’t delete the buying decision. It moves that decision to a later page where you have more time and space to educate, reassure, and provide proof.
• Micro‑commitments feel safer
  Visitors want to feel in control, not pressured. Smaller, clearly labelled steps make the experience feel more intuitive and less risky—especially for high‑consideration products like education.

The All About Learning Press win is another datapoint confirming a universal CRO pattern:

When button copy and design reflect the visitor’s true readiness—and invite just one sensible next step—movement and sales tend to rise together.

Examples from previous Win Reports

• Win Report: A year’s worth of PPC leads in just three weeks
  On a PPC landing page, visitors were searching “What is SFG20?”—high‑level intent, not “book a demo” intent. By adding a lower‑commitment CTA (a bundled resource pack download) alongside the demo request, we created a gentler first step. The result? A year’s worth of demo requests in just three weeks, plus a new nurture funnel of resource‑pack leads.
• Win Report: How four bullets increased subscriptions by 39%
  Customers liked the idea of subscriptions but worried about being “locked in.” By clarifying (and then simplifying) subscription benefit bullets—customers could pause, skip, or cancel anytime—we reduced perceived commitment and increased subscription uptake. A later test improved the result even further, compounding the overall improvement to roughly 70% more subscriptions.

What next?

As usual, we added this test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of All About Learning Press’s business and to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one‑on‑one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to All About Learning Press for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Why can some advertisers afford to outbid everyone else while still making money, and grow to dominate their competitors? In this article, we’ll follow InflataFish, our (fictional) online boat seller, as it grapples with competition from bitter rivals, PunctureCraft and BarelyAfloatBoat.

Our examples may sound light-hearted, but the strategies below are deadly serious. There is math involved, but if math isn’t your bag, don’t worry—we’ll work through it together.

And by the end you’ll see why mastering a simple equation is the key to dominating your market.

How much bang are you getting for your advertising buck?

Before we get to our examples, let’s look at the basic math.

If your business buys traffic, it’s likely you’ll be familiar with return on ad spend (ROAS). In fact, you may well be obsessed by it.

ROAS is the total revenue you’re generating for every dollar you spend on advertising. In effect, it’s a measure of the efficiency and profitability of your campaigns, making it a crucial metric to gauge the success of your advertising (and the trajectory of your business).

Let’s first define how to calculate ROAS.

This standard definition gives us two options to increase ROAS:

• Increase the revenue without increasing ad spend; or
• Reduce ad spend without reducing the revenue from ads.

You’ve probably already spotted the limitations of these approaches. Unless we change something else, the two components of the equation are linked and proportionate. If we increase one, the other increases, and vice versa. So we’re stuck.

We can unstick ourselves by breaking down the components of ROAS as follows:

Your ad spend is based on the number of clicks at an average cost per click (CPC)…

…and if your conversion rate (CR) tells you what percentage of clicks become customers, and each customer is worth your lifetime value (LTV), then…

Substituting our new definitions back into the original equation for ROAS gives us…

…and by cancelling clicks we get the following, new (and much more useful) definition for ROAS:

This new definition gives us three exciting new options to increase our ROAS:

• Increase our conversion rate.
• Increase our lifetime value.
• Reduce our cost per click.

Chasing the honey (trap)

Despite the three clear paths available to improve ROAS, many companies we speak to are focusing on just one—reducing cost per click. That’s because:

• It’s visible and immediate. Platforms like Google Ads and Meta make cost per click a headline metric in dashboards. Marketers see it daily and feel rewarded when it goes down.
• It’s the only one of the three levers that can be pulled. Often, responsibility for ROAS sits with the ad teams or PPC agency, meaning the conversion rate and lifetime value are ignored (or given token attention).
• It feels controllable. Adjusting bids, targeting, or ad creative can quickly affect CPC. That immediacy creates the illusion that lowering CPC is the best lever to profitability.

But beware—focusing on CPC can actually reduce your ROAS.

That’s because cheap clicks are worthless if they don’t convert. Chasing lower CPC often means broadening targeting to less-qualified audiences, which reduces conversion rates and drags down ROAS.

Don’t make that mistake.

Why you should focus on conversion rate and LTV

Let’s return to our equation to calculate ROAS, and look at the other two paths:

We can see the ROAS is directly proportional to both conversion rate (CR) and lifetime value (LTV), that is:

• If you double your conversion rate, you double your ROAS; and
• If you double your LTV, you (also) double your ROAS.

And this time there are no traps—the relationships hold true, no matter how you achieve the increases.

What’s more, when you focus on these paths there are powerful secondary effects at play:

• They improve ROAS without increasing ad spend or changing the traffic source.
• Every improvement multiplies the value of all of your traffic—not just your PPC.
• The higher your customer value, the more you can profitably bid for clicks. That means CR and LTV can neutralize high CPC: if conversion rate doubles, you can afford to pay double the CPC and still maintain the same ROAS.

The little-understood extra benefit of working on your conversion rate

This is the exciting part, but it also comes with a warning. We’re going a little deeper into the math, here, as well as the mechanics of ad auctions. Don’t be put off—as long as you grasp the concepts, you’ll be fine.

Let’s return once again to the ROAS formula…

…and take a closer look at cost per click. (We fell out with cost per click earlier, calling it a “trap”, but we love it really.)

Your cost per click is determined by two things:

• Your competitors’ bids (or their Ad Rank).
• Your Quality Score.

We can express this mathematically by saying cost per click is a function of these variables (we can’t express the formula exactly because Google doesn’t reveal their algorithms), like this:

Let’s simplify things by assuming that your competitor Ad Rank is constant, so the equation becomes:

In other words, your cost per click is inversely proportional to your Quality Score. (When your Quality Score increases, your cost per click goes down.)

So what affects your Quality Score? Again, we can express that mathematically because Google tells us that it is a function of your click-through rate (CTR), your Ad Relevance, and your Landing Page Experience. In other words:

On smaller screens, you may need to horizontally scroll to see the whole formula.

And since we’re looking at the impact of working on conversion rate, we can assume that click-through rate and Ad Relevance are constant, in which case we can simplify to:

We know that Landing Page Experience is closely related to your conversion rate because studies show that it exhibits the highest correlation when assessed against other factors. So the equation becomes…

We don’t know exactly how the function works—because Google doesn’t reveal the specific weighting of its algorithms—but we can model the relationship conceptually, like this…

…where a and b are factors associated with other effects like click-through rate, Ad Relevance etc.

In other words, your Quality Score rises non-linearly with your conversion rate.

Substituting back into the equation for CPC (and introducing another variable, k, to represent Ad Ranks and auction conditions), we get…

If the math feels like too much at this point, focus on the takeaway: As your conversion rate rises (bringing your Quality Score with it), your cost per click falls—disproportionately.

Bringing it all together

Let’s return one last time to the equation for ROAS that we derived earlier…

…and substitute in our new model for CPC…

And that’s it! This equation explains why some campaigns scale effortlessly while others can’t escape gravity, because:

• The direct effect of conversion rate (highlighted in green in the formula above) immediately multiplies every click’s value.
• The indirect effect of conversion rate (highlighted in orange)—higher CR improves QS → lower CPC—further boosts ROAS.

In other words, ROAS grows super-linearly (faster than linear) with conversion rate. That’s because conversion rate is the only lever that both increases the revenue you earn from each click and reduces your effective cost per click. No other change improves two parts of the equation at once.

Putting theory into practice

That’s it for the theory—phew—but how does it translate to InflataFish and their competitors?

As luck would have it, InflataFish has recently launched a new initiative to increase their ROAS. Meanwhile, their bitter rivals, PunctureCraft and BarelyAfloatBoat, have embarked on similar initiatives—but with different approaches.

(In another almost unbelievable coincidence, all three companies spent the same on ads and had the same cost per click, lifetime value and conversion rate at the start of their initiatives.)

To see what happened, let’s look at the strategies each company adopted:

• BarelyAfloatBoat tasked their PPC agency with reducing cost per click. The agency optimized towards cheaper, lower-intent, lower-quality clicks. Cost per click reduced by 44% but—due to lower quality traffic—conversion rate also reduced by 33%.
• PunctureCraft worked on lifetime value, adding an upsell with an exclusive repair kit priced at $50. The result? After strong promotions and exclusive offers half of new customers now add the kit when they buy a boat—and lifetime value has increased from $150 to $175.
• InflataFish focused on their conversion rate, gathering voice-of-customer research and testing improvements to their funnel. Conversion rate increased from 1% to 1.5% and—as a result of an increased Quality Score—cost per click reduced by 40%.

When we look at the impact on the ROAS of each company—remembering that they each started with the same value—we can see the stark effect of the equations we derived earlier:

Focusing on conversion rate has enabled InflataFish to leverage the compounding effect of increased sales and lower cost per click.

They are now in a position to dominate their market because their higher conversion rate has created headroom—the ability to tolerate higher cost per clicks, outbid competitors and leverage other channels without sacrificing profitability.

Your mental model to grow ROAS and dominate your competitors

You don’t need to remember how to derive each equation in this article. But developing a mental model of how the relationships work is key if you’re going to use math to gain a competitive advantage.

Here are some summary notes to help you:

• You have to increase your ROAS to survive and beat your competitors. To win, you need to outsmart them.
• Focusing solely on cost per click is a trap, which can reduce conversion rates and drag down ROAS.
• The advertisers who win aren’t those who achieve the lowest cost per click—they’re the ones who turn every click into more revenue and extract the most lifetime value from each customer.
• Conversion rate increases ROAS directly and through reducing cost per click—you can use this disproportionate relationship to rapidly increase your ROAS.
• Improving your conversion rate is a shelter from the storm:
  • Cost per click is largely market-driven—competitors and auction dynamics push it around.
  • Conversion rate is business-controlled—your website, your funnel, your offer.
• Increasing your conversion rate creates headroom: it lets you tolerate higher costs for each click, outbidding competitors who have weaker websites or funnels.

In a volatile market, this is your advantage. When costs rise and margins tighten, the companies that thrive aren’t those who flinch and cut bids—they’re the ones who’ve mastered the math to make every click work harder.

A short video interview with a client

You can see the power of this strategy in the conversation we had with our client, Unbiased, the UK’s leading financial advice platform. Here’s Marco Fernandes, Head of Performance Marketing at Unbiased.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Take a trip through 70 years of Swedish design

Ever wondered what your grandparents’ IKEA catalog looked like? (Spoiler: it was mostly mail-order furniture, and the meatballs hadn’t arrived yet.)

The IKEA Museum has digitized every catalog from 1951 to 2021, creating a fascinating time machine through consumer culture. The 1951 edition shows simple wooden furniture sold by mail. By the 1970s, the flat-pack revolution had begun. And by 2021, the catalog had become a lifestyle magazine with a bigger circulation than the Bible.

What struck us most? The gradual shift from selling products to selling dreams. Early catalogs showed furniture. Modern ones showed lives. It’s a masterclass in how positioning evolves, and why even furniture stores need to think about the stories they’re telling.

Henry Ford probably never said that thing about horses

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

You might have heard this quote before. There’s just one problem: There’s no evidence that Henry Ford ever said it.

Anton Sten’s article brilliantly unpacks why this fake quote became business gospel, and why the real story is more interesting. Ford’s actual innovation wasn’t ignoring customers. It was understanding them better than they understood themselves. He saw that people didn’t want cars OR horses. They wanted affordable, reliable transportation.

The lesson for conversion optimizers? Remember to dig deeper than surface-level customer feedback. The gold is in understanding the underlying need.

How to rebuild a 63-year-old business (one process at a time)

This video about Ryan Tierney buying and rebuilding a decades-old company had us glued to our screens.

Tierney, who wrote Lean Made Simple, recently purchased a traditional manufacturing business that has been operating since 1961. Watching him walk through the factory floor, you can practically see the opportunities jumping out - outdated processes, paper everywhere, workers with decades of knowledge trapped in their heads.

His approach? Start with the smallest possible improvement. Get one win. Then another. It’s textbook Genchi Genbutsu: go to the source, observe, and understand. (Though unlike Aldi’s legendary floor, this one definitely needs resurfacing.)

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s really like to transform a business from the ground up, this is your backstage pass.

Why AI hallucinates (and why you should care)

We’ve all had that moment: AI confidently tells you something that sounds right but is completely made up. The Nature of Hallucinations dives deep into why language models make stuff up. The fascinating part? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature of how they work. These models are prediction machines, not truth machines. They’re optimizing for what sounds plausible, not what’s actually true.

For anyone using AI in their business, understanding this distinction is crucial. It’s the difference between using AI as a creative partner versus treating it as an oracle.

And finally… testing products from 1975 vs 2025. Which wins?

What happens when you test the same products from 50 years apart? The results might surprise you.

This comparison video pits 1975 products against their 2025 equivalents—blenders, toasters, and can openers. The twist? When you adjust for inflation and spend the same amount, modern products blow the old ones away. That $20 blender from 1975? It’s $120 in today’s money. And for $120 today, you get something that would seem like alien technology to someone from the ’70s.

It’s a reminder that despite all our nostalgia for “when things were built to last,” we’re actually living in a golden age of consumer value. Though we suspect those 1975 products still have one advantage—you could probably fix them with a screwdriver instead of throwing them away when they break.

Have you come across something worth sharing?

If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Unbiased is the UK’s leading financial advice platform, empowering people to make confident financial decisions by connecting them with vetted financial advisors. They have helped over ten million people make big life choices, whether buying a house, planning for retirement, or protecting their families. They are rated Excellent on Trustpilot.

A short video interview with the client

A transcript of the video

“The best aspects of working with Conversion Rate Experts include willingness to understand your business, drive the results that you wanna drive, and the speed of the tests that we were able to get out the door.

“CRE’s methodology was very scientific and very much backed by data, which we love here in the business. They really are an expansion of your team.”

“…the uplift in conversions was able to pay itself off within two months.”

“Working with any agency, there are always concerns on when you’ll see your ROI and any uplift in your revenue. We forecasted we would have seen that in month six working with CRE, but the uplift in conversions was able to pay itself off within two months. From a financial perspective, that’s great, and I think that gave confidence that we were investing in the right partner with CRE. Seeing all the green numbers coming through, it’s exciting. Then we’ve been able to really grow our revenues.

“I’m Marco Fernandes, Head of Performance Marketing here at Unbiased. We help millions of people connect to financial advice. We have over twenty-seven thousand financial advisors on our platform, and we empower people to make confident financial decisions.

“Before CRE, we had an A/B testing tool, and all of the tests were done in-house, which was quite draining on our resources. We needed additional help to get more tests out the door, but also just make the process easier for us to do those tests in bulk.

“We’re a very numbers-driven company, so we did a bit of market research to see what other agencies there were. When we were looking at CRE’s testimonials, I think the key thing was their experience in testing and their methodology in testing, but also the great results and revenue uplift that they brought to their clients. It was proof that they could deliver what we were trying to achieve.

“Our experience working with Conversion Rate Experts has been great. They came into the business wanting to really understand our problems and our opportunities. It allowed us to understand our customers a lot more, and I think that helped us understand the tests that they were putting forward. By doing that, they were able to give ideas that we were able to action quickly, essentially find the lower-hanging fruit.

We’d be discussing a test one week on a call, and by the following week, we’d have it ready to go live.

“We’d be discussing a test one week on a call, and by the following week, we’d have it ready to go live. They got information from our customers, the advisors, and all the consumers. Speaking to someone about your finances can be scary. With the research phase, we were able to understand what emotional triggers there are and figure out how we could best address them.

“There’s a lot of really good tests that we’ve run with CRE, homepage testing, imagery, messaging within the type of questions we ask consumers. CRE were able to look at those questions from a different angle. They really make you think outside the box, and that drove some really great results. The amount of ideas that they came back with made us hungry to test those ideas and get those tests out the door.

“The ones where we’ve seen the greatest impact are the ones we’ve had to take bigger risks on. It helped us realize that we can take more risks in the tests that they were suggesting, and I think that’s even surprised our brand team as well. The impact working with CRE has had, it’s made our marketing more efficient. Because we’re able to convert more people, we don’t need to spend as much to convert them, but also the quality of those conversions have been really strong as well.

“We can actually reinvest some of that budget into new channels, more creative testing, experiment with different audiences as well, which has been really positive.

“We can actually reinvest some of that budget into new channels, more creative testing, experiment with different audiences as well, which has been really positive.

“I would definitely recommend Conversion Rate Experts. Their experience in research and testing and willingness to learn and help your business is much better than that of any other agency I’ve worked with.”

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

Whatever business you’re in, we’re sure you have competitors. Quite possibly, fierce ones. Even so, it’s likely that you don’t have quite as many competitors as sock manufacturers do.

If you head over to Walmart.com and type in “socks”, they’ll show you over 1,000 results. Here are a few of the lower-price offerings we found.

By contrast, the subject of this article is a company called Darn Tough Socks. A pair of their socks won’t set you back 9 cents or even 9 dollars, but 18 dollars (and that’s Darn Tough’s cheapest pair). That’s 200 times as much as the cheapest Walmart socks.

Here’s their homepage.

Are Darn Tough socks worth it? The answer lies in copywriting, branding, and storytelling… and we’re going to find out by asking four questions.

As you read them, think about how you would answer these questions for your own business.

Four questions to assess your competitive dominance

1. Do you hide from your guarantee… or lean into it?

It’s common for businesses to say ‌something is “guaranteed” but just as common for them to stop there. They make visitors hunt for the details of the guarantee, and if they find them, visitors may well feel let down. That’s because the guarantee is larded up with fine print about pre-authorizations, restocking fees, time limits, packaging requirements (“…in new, unused, unopened condition in original packaging with all tags intact….”), and so on.

Here’s the hidden good news: We all expect this sort of bait and switch; so when we come across a company that truly does guarantee its products and is proud of it, that company stands out.

Guaranteed for Life
With seven pairs of Darn Tough socks, you’ll be set for life. Not only is that one pair for each day of the week, but since they’re Guaranteed for Life, you’ll never need to buy another. If they ever rip, tear, or lose their fit, simply send them back and we’ll replace them for FREE.

Not much wiggle room, is there? Simple, straightforward, and impossible to lawyer out of.

Here’s an excellent video about Darn Tough, which includes the guarantee. Note the title, “We Don’t Have a Great Story, We Are a Great Story.”

Notice how they not only guarantee their socks, they’re proud of the big bags of returned socks!

We can imagine that another company might panic and say:

“You can’t show that! It’s implying that our socks are rubbish because so many are being returned! This will bankrupt us! We need to water down our guarantee!”

But that’s not the impression viewers or visitors get. Instead, they hear about how people are sending in their well-worn socks with testimonials that come across more like love letters about their sock adventures. Talk about standing apart from the crowd, and above it. Part of that is because of the guarantee isn’t qualified in a dozen different ways.

By the way, it would be a mistake to think: Well that’s easy for low-ticket products like socks. We sell high-ticket items, and a strong guarantee could bankrupt us. We recommend you read an excellent book called 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall. In it, you’ll learn that a company did very well by standing behind its very-high-end specialized valves for the pharmaceutical industry to the tune of $40,000 per installation. Guaranteed. Here’s how they describe their guarantee:

ASEPCO’s Unique Tank Valve Guarantees
• Lifetime Free Replacement Of Any Broken Valve—No Matter Who Broke It!
• Top-Quality Product, Or It’s Free!
• On-Time Delivery, Or It’s Free!
• Performance As Promised, Or We Pay You!

They have an average of four claims a year, so they’re out about $160,000. They also have a 90% market share.

2. Do you handle your visitors’ concerns before you think of your own?

We all need to make sales, but are you putting visitors’ minds at ease first?

After all, socks get worn out pretty much before any other garment. If you’re laying down $18 or more for a single pair, you may wonder if that’s a good trade.

In emails from Darn Tough, we first can’t miss two references to their guarantee at the top:

By getting customer concerns out of the way first, the company is free to focus on other things they may be interested in, like “limited edition knits.”

What is the “top of mind” concern for your customers, similar to the durability of socks? And how do you address that concern right at the beginning of your messaging?

We eat our own dog food at Conversion Rate Experts. Even though we have a ridiculous number of testimonials, we know that your business is not exactly like any other. You may justifiably wonder if our methodology will work right now, in your particular situation. That’s why our guarantee is straightforward:

We offer a six-week money-back guarantee. You must think we’re a good fit, or we’ll give you a full, prompt refund.

Our goal is to put your mind at ease, allowing you to focus on the fun part—the ROI upside.

3. To what degree are you likely to be “the one,” and they can stop searching?

You’ve probably gone through your share of doctors, auto mechanics, accountants, and other specialists over your lifetime. If you’re lucky, you’ve found someone who’s a real “find”—someone who does the job well and on whom you can now implicitly rely. For this one specialty, you can stop looking, and hope they don’t retire soon.

That’s the feeling you get from Darn Tough. You buy a pair of their socks and will have them basically forever, given the guarantee.

To what degree do you think your own customers feel like they’re done looking? How many of them renew again and again? How many refer their friends to you? How many testimonials have you collected, and what do they say? You can never do too much in making the case that you deserve the title of “The One.”

4. Does your brand resonate with the values of your customers?

We’ve talked about Patagonia, which is famous not only for durable products but also for its environmental advocacy. Even if you’re just buying a jacket, some of that caring for the earth feels like it rubs off on you.

Darn Tough has done the same thing. It recently marked a milestone for giving away its millionth meal to Vermont families in need.

Another example: H-E-B is a grocery chain that operates only in Texas and Mexico and is in an industry with razor-thin profit margins. Even so, it found a way to create a fleet of disaster-relief vehicles and has facilitated more than one billion pounds (in weight) of food bank donations.

None of these examples came about because the companies were hugely successful and then acted on their corporate values—it’s the other way around.

Darn Tough is a great example of doing well while doing good.

Have you shared your values with your customers?

Maybe you have a great story that’s buried on your site, or not there at all, because you thought it wasn’t relevant to whatever product or service you sell. The legendary copywriter Gary Halbert said that people seek two things—content and contact.

Your values may very well provide some of the contact that not only resonates with your visitors, but that they can remember you by. It’s easy to imagine Darn Tough customers telling their friends: “It’s cool that they let their employees design their own socks, plus they’ve given away a million meals.”

Four questions, one blueprint

When you rate well on these four questions, imagine the word-of-mouth advertising, good will—and market share—you will generate. And if you’re not there yet, you now have a blueprint for what you need to work on.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

A short interview with the client

“The results speak for themselves. Although there are still tests running, we estimate the overall uplift so far to be around 15%. That equates to roughly £1 million a year in additional revenue.

“Before working with Conversion Rate Experts, we hadn’t done any significant CRO work. Although we knew that conversion optimization was important, we didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on it properly.

“While we had made changes to the website, they were mostly based on gut feel or what we liked on other sites… but it was tough to know whether anything was working because we weren’t testing variations or basing our decisions on data. It was frustrating to feel that we might be losing hard-won prospects, so we decided to look for someone to help us.

“We were obviously looking for deep expertise, but in the end, it was CRE’s fully managed, hands-off service that I found appealing. They handled everything—strategy, design, development, and testing. It was genuinely one of the best services I’ve ever seen.

“The process was clear from the very start. Although the testing started immediately, we also saw the deep research that was going on in the background to inform the A/B experiments. All we had to do was approve the tests and wait for the results to come in.

“The results speak for themselves. Although there are still tests running, we’re already seeing a significant uplift—equating to roughly £1 million a year in additional revenue.

“If you have the sales volume and the traffic, it just makes sense to work with CRE. Most agencies don’t offer a complete hands-off service like this. If your business is above a certain size, and you don’t have the bandwidth to run real CRO in-house, just hire them. You won’t regret it.”

—Mert Yashar, Founder, House of Worktops

How we did it

If you want to learn about the type of tests we did for House of Worktops, take a look at the following Win Reports:

Win Report: 13% increase in sales with a simple change to a product page

Read the Win Report

Win Report: Less clutter, 17% more transactions

Read the Win Report

Win Report: How simplifying a modal increased transactions by 13%

Read the Win Report

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

SFG20 is the UK industry standard for building maintenance specification. Its comprehensive library of schedules helps building owners and managers keep track of changes in legislation, regulation, and codes of practice. SFG20 sells cutting-edge software that helps customers ensure that buildings are safe and legally compliant.

Research: What’s on the menu?

Website navigation is often overlooked as a testing target, but it can be a huge opportunity for conversion rate optimization. Very few CRO levers appear on (almost) every web page—let alone right at the top. And for SFG20, whose B2B traffic skews over 80% desktop, the menu warranted particular attention.

What’s the first thing you notice? Most obviously, user intent is highly concentrated on just two items:

• What is SFG20? (The first menu item next to the logo.)
• Careers (middle of the top menu).

Our early research had shown that visitors were hungry to understand what SFG20 was, so that result makes sense. This is a menu item that was meeting the audience where they were on the journey.

The second hotspot, “Careers”, was more of a surprise. Although recruitment is a critical activity for high-performing businesses, should it be the second most popular link on a SaaS site like SFG20? For us, this was a signal that the rest of the menu wasn’t working hard enough.

And if you look at the actual menu, you’ll get some sense of why:

Including the logo, there are twelve targets on this menu. Although the first menu item is on point, others require pre-existing knowledge. (If you don’t know what “Facilities-iQ” is, can you guess?) Our user testers couldn’t, and they also found the two-layer menu overwhelming. Some worked to understand the dropdowns with nested sub-menus and hover-dependent content. Others just skipped it.

This combination—concentrated hotspots and user friction—convinced us that the menu was worth testing.

The original page (or control)

To illustrate the context properly, here’s the homepage without the menu expanded.

We considered adding highlights to this image so you’d find it easier to see the dropdown, but decided against it so that you could experience the menu more as SFG20’s visitors did. In this case, the activated “Facilities-iQ“ menu has dropped down to reveal a sub-menu with three options.

Here’s that menu in action.

Hovering over an option triggers additional explanatory content to appear on the right-hand side of the screen. Clicking on the buttons takes you through to a specific page.

The dropdown isn’t impossible to understand, but taken with the complexity of the menu above, it represented a huge opportunity for improvement and redesign.

The tested page (or variation)

Given that we were completely reworking the site’s navigation, we aimed to “tell the story” of the SFG20 proposition through the menu. The test was an opportunity to create a guided customer journey without fully overhauling the site.

We started by mapping out that “journey,” incorporating links to high-value pages and anchor points.

What’s not obvious (from the small image above) is how much this process simplified the number of targets in the menu—from twelve to eight.

• Logo.
• What is SFG20.
• Maintenance Schedules.
• Pricing.
• Resources.
• Search.
• Login.
• Book a Demo.

And when you see the top-menu design in Figma, it feels even simpler.

As part of the process, we designed each of the dropdown menus inside Figma. Here they are:

To test our thinking, we conducted a usability study to test the new design against the control. The testers, who were all pre-screened for relevance to SFG20’s market, overwhelmingly preferred the new variation.

The reasons that testers cited for preferring the variation included:

• Cleaner and more modern design: Users found it visually appealing and professional.
• Better organization and structure: Navigation felt intuitive and well-sectioned.
• Easier to understand SFG20’s offering: Content was clearer and more digestible.
• More exploration encouraged: Users found browsing and finding relevant pages easier.
• More engaging user experience: Improved layout and hover effects made it smoother to use.
• Improved readability: Better color contrast and text clarity compared to the control.

Once the usability study results came in, we worked directly with SFG20’s developer to ensure the new menu was implemented quickly and accurately, supporting them throughout the process.

Here’s the final variation page (menu closed)…

And here’s the page with the “What is SFG20” menu activated.

To summarize the final changes:

• We completely redesigned SFG20’s primary navigation.
• We simplified the menu, making it easier to use while resolving numerous usability issues.
• We aimed to “tell the story” of the SFG20 proposition through the menu, incorporating links to various pages and anchor points.
• We introduced supporting resources to help users better understand the proposition.

What difference would these changes make in a real-world test?

Result: SaaS demo requests increased by 38%

During the test, we observed a 38% increase in SaaS demo requests for SFG20. In addition, the new navigation delivered:

• 35% increase in clicks on the menu links (including the dropdowns).
• 12% increase in visits to key pages, including:
  • 18% increase to “What is SFG20.”
  • 52% increase to “Facilities-iQ” pages.
• 20% increase to industry-specific maintenance schedule pages.
• A decrease in the sitewide bounce rate (an improvement).

Here’s what our client had to say

Lisa Hamilton, Director of Marketing, SFG20, the UK industry standard for building maintenance specification.

“The navigation redesign turned a series of complex messages into a simple, guided journey. By simplifying the menu and focusing on intent, users found what they needed faster—delivering a 38% increase in demo requests, stronger engagement with ‘What is SFG20’ and product pages, and a noticeable drop in bounce.

“It’s been a high-impact win and a fascinating project to work on!”

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of SFG20’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

A few words from Jessica and Lisa at SFG20

Watch the full testimonial below, or read a transcript.

Thanks to SFG20 for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

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