Education: 22% Lift in Course Browses for Social Media Marketing University
Business: Education
Sector: Social Media Marketing
Optimized Conversion: Course Browses
Test: A/B Test
Website: socialmediamarketinguniversity.com
With over 114,000 students, Social Media Marketing University is the largest educator online when it comes to social media marketing. Seeing as their ultimate vision is to educate as many people as possible in about how to market through social media, we partnered up so that we can help them accomplish that goal and maximize the amount of students enrolled.
If there is one rule that I’ve found to be true almost 100% of the time in conversion rate optimization, it’s that quantitative statements are almost always more effective than qualitative statements.
A qualitative statement is any statement that describes the quality of something. Examples are “best”, “good”, “tasty”, “big”, etc.
A quantitative statement is any statement that describes an attribute of something absolutely. In most cases this means a number. Examples include “78miles long”, “123% ROI”,”1.7 times stronger”, “123lbs heavier”, etc.
Qualitative statements generally ineffective because they make statements that almost anyone else can, and reduce your exclusivity factor. I cannot tell you how many dry cleaners I’ve encountered that literally have a sign that says “Best carpet cleaners”, or restaurants that say they have “the best [insert type of food here]”. Unlike qualitative statements, quantitative statements have a barrier to entry.
Here are 2 examples of qualitative statements along with their counter-parts. Notice how obviously better the quantitative ones are:
- “My friend is strong” (qualitative)
1a._ “My friend can bench press 300 pounds 12 times”_ (quantitative)
- “My car is very fast!” (qualitative)
2a. “My car tops out at 245 miles per hour!” (quantitative)
Can you see now why quantitative statements perform better? This is what we did with SMMU’s new homepage, and we were able able to achieve a 22% lift in course browses.
The Variations
Control: 23.6% Conversion Rate
Treatment: 28.8% Conversion Rate (+22%)
Conclusion
I think we’ve made it clear how you should be crafting your value propositions. As a general rule, use numbers whenever possible - they speak louder than words.
Hope this helps, get back to testing!
