We’ve been testing design concepts at highrisehq.com since this past May. I want to share with you the different designs and their impact on Highrise paid signups (“conversions” for the jargon inclined).

We have assumptions about why some designs perform better than others. However we don’t know exactly why. Is it the color of the background? Is it the headline? We hope more iterative testing of the winners will help us get that information. If you have any theories please add them in the comments.

Note that designs that win for us may not necessarily win for you. I encourage you to do your own A/B testing. There are many tools online that make it easy to do.

The original page
The original design had served us well for the past year. Signups were going well, but we were worried that customers still couldn’t get the gist of what Highrise did and why they needed the product.

This page would be our baseline for the first round of A/B tests.

Long form sales letter
Ryan Singer posted a link to Visual Website Optimizer’s “Anatomy of long sales letter” blog post in our Campfire chat room one day. We were fascinated by this technique. If I remember correctly there was a heated debate about whether it would work for us.

We decided that in the amount of time we took to debate the technique we could have made an A/B test to prove it right or wrong. The original page had some long form sales letter techniques, but the copywriting wasn’t as strong as it could be.

Ryan and I worked together on the long form approach. Here’s what we came up with.

The results
Over 42,000 visitors were presented either the original page or the long form page. The results were completely surprising. The long form page had a 37.5% increase in net signups compared to the original. Amazing right?

Ongoing tests
You may notice that the Highrise homepage looks different again. We’re always testing to move conversions up. In a few weeks I’ll be sharing the results of those tests. Thanks for taking the time to read this article. Keep designing, keep testing!