Can minor changes on the website bring great results in conversion rate optimization? For example, +199% conversion rate increase with a single test

How to improve a website conversion rate fast?

Websites are constantly evolving and growing. As businesses strive to improve their online presence, they often overlook the small details that can produce a big difference in conversion rates.

You may not realize it, but even the basic improvements to your website can have a significant impact on your conversion rate, and even triple it.

That was exactly the case we had with one of our clients who operates in the US, Canadian, and Australian markets and sells digital embroidery products. Key goals were to optimize the funnels and, of course, increase the conversion rate for each product.

A/B/n testing the CTA with 3x results

One of the products in the line were ready made designs for digital embroidery — they were not the first priority to our client as the AOV here is 5-10 times smaller compared to other products (embroidery courses and equipment). So we had had a great deal of experiments with other funnels before we got down to this one.

The major gamechanger became the fact that despite the small AOV, there are thousands of these embroidery designs on the website, all with similar product pages – so if we made an improvement to their layout, it would have a cumulative effect. 

We noticed that product cards in the catalog pages had very inconspicuous add-to-cart buttons: 

Catalog page with product cards
Where’s Waldo Add-to-Cart?

And on mobile the situation was even worse, because the ATC button could be hardly distinguished from the “Details” button: 

"Add-to-cart" and "Details" buttons side by side
The “Add to cart” is out there

We came up with several variations of the “Add to cart” button — including both those compliant with the website’s color scheme (Var 1 and Var 3) and the “aggressive” orange one (Var 2) — and ran an A/B/n test:

Three variants of the catalog pages (mobile layout) with differetn CTA colors
On mobile variations we placed the “Add to cart” button and the “Details” button one below the other for better UX

In as short as 7 days all 3 variations showed an uplift over the control in terms of purchases, but Variation 2 demonstrated a statistically significant uplift of almost 200%:

Conversion rate calculator showing the uplift of the variations
Orange CTAs winning big time

Revenue impact of the experiment

In terms of revenue per session, the uplift of Variation 2 was even bigger than 200%. 

For our client, this means +$14,000 of additional projected revenue per month: $20,800 after implementing the winner vs. $6,800 of the original. 

What we learned from this test is that one should never underestimate the power of basic UX principles, especially when it comes to ecommerce. The button should stand out and draw maximum attention.

At one point running experiments with the CTA color has become so common that marketers went further testing more complex changes, leaving the CTAs out of their focus. This is a mistake, as you should always go for the basic fixes first.

Besides, we’ve learned that a small change applied to a big number of product pages with small AOV can beat in revenue the tests that run on just one expensive product’s page — keep that in mind when prioritizing the tests.