![Advanced A/B Testing Panel with Top Experts [Video]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/panel-320x160.jpg)
At CXL Live 2015 we had an amazing a/b split testing panel featuring statistics and testing gurus Lukas Vermeer from Booking.com, Matt Gershoff from Conductrics and Yuan Wright from Electronic Arts. And the audience asked some of the toughest testing questions ever. All of them got answered.
Free trials are to SaaS applications as keys are to locks. The right one gets you in right away, but sometimes you have to try a few before you find the one that works.
For many SaaS and cloud service providers, 100% of customers sign up for a free trial as part of the sales process — yet one study suggested that even the best-in-class of SaaS marketers were losing a staggering 75% of those who signed up for a free trial before they entered their credit card details.
![Your Test is Only as Good as Your Hypothesis [Video]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/maagaard-1024x4771-320x160.jpg)
CXL Live 2016 is coming up next March (get on the list to get tickets at pre-release prices). We’re going to publish video recordings of the previous event, and here’s the first one.
You run A/B tests – some win, some don’t. The likelihood of the tests actually having a positive impact largely depends whether you’re testing the right stuff. Testing stupid stuff that makes no difference is by far the biggest reason for tests that end in “no difference”.
While testing is a critical part of conversion optimization to make sure we actually made things better and by how much, it’s also the tip of the iceberg of the full CRO picture. Testing tools are affordable (even free), and increasingly easier to use – so pretty much any idiot can set up and run A/B tests. This is not where the difficulty lies. The hard part is testing the right things, and having the right treatment.
The success of your testing program is a sum of these two: number of tests run (volume) and percentage of tests that provide a win. Those two add up to indicate execution velocity. Add average sample size and impact per successful experiment, and you get an idea of total business impact.
So in a nutshell, this is how you succeed:
Executing point #1 obvious, but how to do well for points #2 and #3? This comes down to the most important thing about conversion optimization – the discovery of what matters.
What is an irresistible offer?
Simply put … an irresistible offer is one that your audience cannot help but respond to. It’s compelling, it’s powerful, and it drives action.
So, how do you craft an irresistible offer?
While mediocre people are dime a dozen, good people are always in demand. But good optimizers are in very high demand, everyone and their mother is trying to hire one. Alas they can be hard to find. If you’re looking to hire one, what should you look for? What makes an optimizer a great optimizer?
AB testing is supposed to be straightforward and extremely transparent. It should be so easy to see the ROI – especially when compared to opaque stuff like SEO. But is it really so transparent as we’d like to think?
If you’ve looked at enough SaaS websites, you’ve probably noticed a bit of a theme: home pages designed to act as landing pages.
83% of clients were comfortable providing a referral, yet only 29% of clients actually gave one.
That’s was what Advisor Impact found in 2010 when they surveyed more than 1,000 financial service clients to understand how customer satisfaction & loyalty was translating into new client referrals.
What’s shocking about the relatively low 29% referral rate is that 93% of the people surveyed said they were somewhat or extremely likely to continue working with their advisor & nearly 80% gave a satisfaction rating of 8/10 or higher.
Here’s something scary, according to MECLabs & Magento’s 2014 eCommerce Benchmark, only 13% of those studied base their testing on extensive historical data.