The power of nudges

~ brendanmc

I recently upgraded my Balsamiq subscription and I thought this was quite a good example of what I mean by a nudge:

  • a consistent always on reminder of the payment option and the benefit that you’ll receive.

Screenshot 2020-03-05 at 11.42.52

I think it works best with industries like SAAS where you are on the site fairly frequently, but paying isn’t always obvious, and as the site owner you want to keep it top of mind,

I’ve written previously about when we started testing nudges on Now Novel, and since then we’ve broadened out the complement so that they drive over half of our sales.

We’ve tested a number of different areas where it is possible to reinforce benefits at different junctures :

  • modals that cover the screen
  • text links near your profile/sign-in
  • inline boxes and
  • top of the page persistent strips

I wanted to share some of the results that we had with a test that we were running. This was at the end of the freemium section where you have created your character. You have seen the value of the product at this stage, have some momentum and increased motivation,  therefore it’s a good point to encourage purchase.

This is the control/default option we had been showing:

Screenshot 2020-03-21 at 16.31.06

and we tested two variants, one with a focus on a testimonial:

Screenshot 2020-03-21 at 16.30.16

and the other with a focus on the benefits that people said they received from the service (so reflecting benefits back at them that we learned from surveys)

Screenshot 2020-03-21 at 16.31.45

We measured the impact of this by visits to the payment page (a useful proxy metric for progress to sales) and sales conversion. We had over 90% significance on both variants for sales conversion, but a higher uplift on the testimonial version. This is the one that we’re rolling out as our new winner.

Some next testing opportunities:

  • make the review more obvious (star ratings, who powers reviews to add more 3rd party accreditation, “What our customers say” to label it effectively)
  • combine some more of the benefit messaging into the testimonial version
  • can we make it shorter, easier to scan and punchier?
  • Is “Upgrade” a good call-to-action or could we use something like “Get access” (upgrade sounds like you’re spending a lot of money)

Published by brendanmc