Education: 24.8% Lift in Course Browses by Increasing Credibility
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. We recently ran a test for SMMU that resulted in a 22% lift in course browses and our goal with this test was to lift it even more.
If you want good tests, intuition usually not the best place to look for ideas. That’s why we use data… but you probably know that already.
A great source for test ideas, and also the most overlooked, is a competitive analysis.
When you decide you need to purchase something - wether it’s a product or a service - you never just look at one provider and buy from that one. 99.9% of the time, you will compare. You take a look at a few different options before making a decision, that way you get the best bang for your buck.
When you do a competitive analysis of your industry, it’s almost as if you get to be in the shoes of your customer - something that businesses pay tons of money to achieve through user tests, surveys, and studies.
Here’s a quick glance of what our competitive analysis template looks like:
Once we did this, we gained a perspective on how SMMU compares to the rest, what it does better, and what it lacks. More importantly, we get answers to the question: “What does the market look for in a social media training company?”
Through the analysis we found that the businesses who use a certain training company give that company lots of credibility. For example, if Google is a client of yours, then you probably know what you’re doing.
We decided to test this by digging in and finding reputable companies who have hired SMMU for training, and use that credibility to increase interest in their courses.
The Variations
Control: 18.4% Conversion Rate
Treatment: 23.0% Conversion Rate (+24.8%)
Conclusion
If you’ve worked with reputable names, make sure your visitors know. Trust is huge online, and having clients that your visitors trust will help you earn their visitors’ trust as well. You just need to tell them somehow.
Hope this helps, get back to testing!
